Using competitor intel to optimize your game ad creatives

Ad Insights, the competitive intelligence tool inside MarketIQ Pro, helps bridge this gap by offering clear insights into what's working across formats, platforms, networks, and audiences. UA managers get the metrics they need for data-backed decisions, and game marketers get insights on trends and creative strategies to keep campaigns fresh and engaging.

As competition is fierce, marketers are hyper-focused on ROAS and want metrics that deliver high-performing campaigns without wasting spend. Ad Insights makes this easier by allowing you to efficiently compare ad performance, analyze top creatives, and spot trends across networks, cutting down on time spent while keeping results high. The need for creative inspiration and access to data that shows how different creatives capture attention has been inaccessible to most teams. With Ad Insights, you can dive into leading creative examples and understand what users respond to, shaping ads that are both targeted and impactful.

There isn't just one correct way to use Ad Insights. Through exploring the tool, you'll find numerous ways to leverage the insights this platform provides. But if you're just getting started and looking for guidance, consider this your ultimate guide to exploring what works and what doesn't in the mobile game advertising realm.

Developing and operating a game is no different from running a business. As such, you naturally have competitors, whether you know of them or not. Using Ad Insights will help you look under the cover of your competition's advertising strategies and outsmart them in the best possible way. With this in mind, the two use case scenarios we're exploring today are:

• I know my competition and want to perform better than them
• I need help understanding the competitive landscape for my game

Let's jump right in. Here is your 101 guide to optimizing your creatives.

Know your competition like the back of your hand

To understand how your competitors behave in the advertising space, replicate the following steps:

1. Search for the game. Navigate to the search bar and type the game name you're looking for. Depending on the platform, you'll see an option for iOS and/or Android (you can switch platforms as you continue exploring). Click the one you want to examine and add it to your Favorites (❤️) so you can revisit it easily.
2. Open Creative Insights. After selecting your game, you're automatically directed to Creative Insights, which shows you all creatives across all ad networks and regions. In this overview, you can see the total number of ads that your competitor is running across all regions, their types (playable, video, or image), as well as a high-level overview of ad platforms and KPIs.
3. Filter to the segment that matters to you. There are many ways to use the filtering and sorting options to find exactly what you need. Let's say you want to distribute your game to Canada, your preferred creative type is video, and you want to target the English-speaking Canadian population. Simply input these values into the filters and hit OK. The results show how your competitor advertises their game in this region, using video to appeal to their English-speaking audience. You can then sort the results by discovery time, ad duration, impression estimate, or a specific engagement metric, whichever metric you're expecting to improve. Note: if you don't see any results, it's possible your competitor wasn't advertising in the selected period. Try adjusting the period to further past. If you still don't see any results, it's likely that your competitor doesn't cover this region. While you might see this as an opportunity, we suggest exploring other competitor and genre performances in the region first, as the audience may simply not be there.
4. Study individual ads in detail. Once you've found the results you're looking for, let's see what valuable data each ad snippet includes. To open the card, click on the Detail button represented by a paper icon (📃). You're now looking at insights from one particular advertisement. Here you can learn about the ad's lifecycle, the platforms on which it's running, format specifications related to playable ads, copy, and more. This information allows you to gauge the ad's effectiveness. For example, ads with extended lifecycles can indicate strong performance, so similar tactics may be worth exploring. By analyzing format specs, you can get a clear sense of how competitors engage users, whether through interactive elements, specific calls to action, or targeted visuals. Understanding platform usage provides a roadmap for budget allocation across networks like TikTok or Meta, helping you decide where to invest based on observed engagement. Copy and format choices are invaluable for creative inspiration and trend alignment.

Note: You can achieve similar results by searching for an entire publisher rather than individual games, giving you access to the full portfolio of your competitor for a comprehensive view of their strategies and creative approaches.

This analysis lets you improve your ad creatives by leveraging competitor insights. For example, as a UA manager launching a playable ad campaign for an upcoming game, you can use Ad Insights to analyze a competitor's top-performing playable ads and see which interactive elements, visual styles, and calls to action drive the most engagement. If the competitor's ad uses bright visuals and quick onboarding steps to hook users early, this insight can guide you to adopt similar tactics in your campaign.

Ad Insights' regional filtering also allows you to view ad performance by country, helping you shape creatives to fit local preferences and cultural understandings. For instance, if data shows that video ads with localized language perform well in certain markets, you can create region-specific videos with messaging and visuals that resonate more deeply with that audience. This approach goes beyond guesswork, allowing you to craft engaging ads that appeal to the audience you actually want.

Go one step further. Once you've mapped a competitor's creative output, use Ad Insights' DAU and retention data on the same competitor to separate the studios that acquire users from the ones that keep them. The best creative inspiration comes from studios doing both well.

Explore who you're competing against and be better

In the previous section, we explored conducting an ad analysis of your competitors. But what if you don't know who your competitors are yet, or want to find out about more players in the competitive space? Ad Insights offers an easy way to do so:

1. Open the Creative Gallery. Navigate to the Image & Video tab, located in the Creative Gallery sub-menu.
2. Filter by your game's attributes. Using filters, narrow down your search. Let's say you developed an animal-themed puzzle game that you want to advertise in Canada. Your basic filters should be set as follows: Industry > Game > Puzzle; Game Theme > Animals; Country/Region > Canada.
3. Browse the results. You can now browse a gallery of creatives that companies use to advertise similar games. Sort these ads by discovery time, ad duration, impression estimate, campaign goal, or specific engagement metrics. At the bottom of each snippet you'll find the game's title and the publisher that developed the game.

This methodology is a smart way to discover competitors you may not yet know, providing you with a broader view of the competitive landscape. By setting filters tailored to your game's theme, region, and genre, you can quickly identify studios advertising similar games and gain a clear sense of who your direct competitors are. Ad Insights then lets you explore these competitors' ad strategies in-depth, helping you refine and optimize your own ad creatives.

Then take it wider still. Once you've built your competitor set, use Ad Insights' Similar Audience Apps view to uncover the games and apps your target audience is also engaging with, including titles that don't show up in your usual competitor tracking. This is often where the sharpest creative and monetization inspiration comes from.

With Ad Insights, optimizing your ad creatives becomes straightforward and effective. By using competitor intelligence, you can analyze top-performing creatives, spot successful strategies, and adapt proven tactics for your campaigns. Whether you know your competitors or are discovering new ones, Ad Insights provides the tools to explore ad lifecycles, engagement metrics, and format choices across regions. This information uplifts UA managers and game marketers to create ads that resonate with target audiences, maximizing engagement and delivering a competitive edge.

Take it further

Three follow-up guides worth reading:

• How to spot winning creative trends with Ad Insights covers what to look for in the creatives themselves, feature by feature, with concrete signals for each Ad Insights capability.
• How to research the mobile games market in 5 steps with Ad Insights walks through the full market research workflow, from top charts to competitor breakdown to audience overlap.
• Best ad intelligence tools for mobile gaming 2026 benchmarks Ad Insights against the wider category.

Ad Insights is part of MarketIQ Pro. Start a free trial to walk through these workflows yourself.

‍