Top 10 Hyper-casual Game Ad Networks in 2022 (Q2)

Editor’s note: This article was written and published by Tenjin. You can find their original version here. 

Let’s explore how the hyper-casual market has changed compared to 2021 Q3 and go through the top 10 ad networks and countries for 2022. This time, we partnered with our friends from GameAnalytics to bring you day one and day seven retention benchmarks in this report edition. The complete information is available at the bottom of the post. 

Hyper-casual ad spend by platform.

In 2021 Q3, hyper-casual ad spend by the platform was a bit higher on Android (55%) than iOS (45%), marking a decrease of nearly eight percentage points in ad spend on iOS compared to 2020. In 2022 Q1, advertising spends on iOS  and Android now shows a 50% / 50% split, suggesting that advertisers are becoming more and more comfortable with mobile marketing in the iOS privacy-first ecosystem.

Top 10 ad networks to advertise hyper-casual Games in 2022

8 (Applovin, Mintegral, ironSouce, Unity Ads, Facebook, TikTok, Google Ads, Snapchat) out of 10 of the top ad networks by ad spend are familiar to iOS and Android. With Vungle and Apple Search Ads remaining specific to iOS and TapJoy and AdColony remaining particular to Android. Below we summarize the ranking comparison between Q3 2021 and Q1 2022.

Note: The naming convention for Facebook has been updated to Meta Ads on the above table and the infographic below.

Top 10 countries to advertise hyper-casual Games in 2022

Although the US and Japan are featured at #1 and #2 on both platforms, we can observe critical differences in hyper-casual ad spend by the forum on a country level. For instance, Android advertisers are paying more in Germany (#3) when compared to iOS (#6).

Additionally, Brazil (#5), Indonesia (#9), and India (#10) are included in the top 10 rankings for Android but not for iOS so far in 2022.

What’s changed on a country level since 2021? Compared to our Q3 benchmark report, India and Indonesia seem to have replaced Russia and Australia in the top 10 rankings for Android, while Sweden replaced Russia on iOS.

Hyper-casual retention benchmark by platform

The retention benchmark report at the end divides hyper-casual apps that use GameAnalytics, on Android and iOS, into the following categories of retention performance: median (top 50%), top 25%, and top 2%.

What exactly do these categories represent? The games retaining their users most successfully, or better than 98% of all the other hyper-casual apps, are described in the top 2%. The games keeping their users better than 75% of all others are represented in the top 25%. In other words, we can describe the top 2% of games as “great games,” the top 25% as “good games,” and the top 50% (median) as “average games.”

The statistics for “Day 1” and “Day 7” retention for each category show a significant gap in retention rate between a great game, a good game, and an average game on both iOS and Android.

In terms of comparison by platform, the retention rate is better for hyper-casual games on iOS than on Android across all categories.

Maximize the performance of crucial ad networks

Are you interested in optimizing the performance of your ad networks?

We believe that automated tools, such as Growth FullStack, have empowered marketers to take control of their data and allowed them to make more confident decisions in the post-IDFA era.

Book a demo with Growth FullStack to learn how.