65.5% of IAP Revenue Comes From Purchase-Driven Games But Most UA Impressions Go Elsewhere

Every network knows who paid on the advertiser side. None builds its inventory around who pays on the publisher side. Three years of data from both sides of the IAP / IAA divide.

First, let’s kill a shortcut

You often hear and I said it myself not long ago that Unity knows who paid and AppLovin doesn’t. That’s wrong, and it’s better to say so yourself.

AppLovin knows exactly who paid. Advertisers pass it their in-app purchase revenue through their MMP, with explicit event mapping. Axon runs IAP ROAS, IAA ROAS and Blended ROAS campaigns depending on the app’s monetization mix. Through the MAX integration, the platform sees user-level ad revenue in real time.

The real difference sits elsewhere, and it’s more interesting. Unity operates the engine. Turning on Unity IAP also turns on Unity Analytics: the payment signal flows up by default, from the layer where the game is built. Unity states outright that its Vector model exploits the correlations between purchase behaviour and ad behaviour, and that every new Unity-built game makes the model better. There, the signal is structural and first-party.

At AppLovin it is elective and second-hand: it depends on what each advertiser…