GLOSSARY

the mobile game UA glossary.

plain-english definitions for the acronyms and jargon of mobile-game user acquisition — the terms you'll hear in every UA conversation, defined without the fluff.

metrics

CPI — cost per install: what you pay on average for one install (total spend ÷ installs). the headline number most teams optimize — but cheap installs that don't retain are an expensive illusion.
CPM — cost per mille: the price of 1,000 ad impressions. it's what the auction charges to show your ad; the creative's job is to turn those impressions into cheap installs.
IPM — installs per mille: installs per 1,000 impressions — how well a creative converts attention into installs. the fastest read on whether an ad is actually working.
CTR — click-through rate: the share of people who click after seeing the ad. a useful early signal, but clicks that don't install are just curiosity.
hook rate / thumbstop: the share of viewers still watching after the first ~3 seconds. on sound-on, fast-scroll feeds it decides everything — if the hook misses, nothing downstream matters.
ROAS — return on ad spend: revenue per dollar of spend, usually at a cutoff like D7 ROAS. the number that says whether UA is profitable, not just cheap.
LTV — lifetime value: the total revenue you expect from an average user over their lifetime. your CPI only makes sense against your LTV — a better-monetizing game can pay more per install.
D1 / D7 retention: the share of players who return on day 1 and day 7. the leading indicator of a healthy game — low retention is a core-loop problem no UA budget can outspend.
cohort: a group of users bucketed by when they installed (e.g. 'the july-3 US cohort'), so you can track how one batch retains and monetizes over time.
blended CPI: your average CPI across all campaigns, geos, and creatives combined — the portfolio number, not any single ad set's.
frequency: the average number of times a person has seen your ad. rising frequency is a lagging sign of creative fatigue — by the time it alarms you, the CPI damage is usually booked.
payback period: how long a cohort's revenue takes to earn back what you paid to acquire it. shorter payback means you can reinvest and scale faster.

creative

creative fatigue: the decline in a creative's performance as an audience sees it too often — falling hook rate, rising CPI. catching it early, before frequency spikes, beats most bid tricks.
playable ad: an interactive HTML5 ad that lets someone play a slice of your game before installing. for the right genre it out-converts video, because the player has fun before they commit.
UGC ad: an ad built to look like organic content — phone-in-hand gameplay, a creator reaction, a 'you have to try this.' it reads as native, so it earns the watch instead of getting scrolled past.
end card: the final frame of a video or playable with the install CTA. it should land like a reward, not an interruption.
creative refresh: swapping a fatigued creative for a fresh variant before performance craters. a tired concept often has one more winner in it — refresh before you kill.

measurement & privacy

MMP — mobile measurement partner: a third-party tool (singular, adjust, appsflyer) that attributes installs and in-app events back to the ads that drove them. it's how you know which campaign earned a user.
attribution: crediting an install or purchase to the ad, campaign, or channel that caused it. harder than it sounds since apple's privacy changes broke much of the old signal.
SKAdNetwork (SKAN): apple's privacy-preserving attribution framework for iOS. it reports conversions with delay and aggregation instead of user-level detail — which makes iOS UA noisier and slower to read.
ATT — App Tracking Transparency: apple's prompt asking users to opt in to cross-app tracking. most decline, which is why iOS measurement now leans on SKAN and modeled data.

platforms & bidding

Advantage+: meta's automated campaign type that decides placement, audience, and delivery for you. broader automated reach in exchange for less control and noisier ad-set signal.
Google App Campaigns (UAC): google's automated app-install format. you supply assets and targets; google handles targeting and bidding across search, youtube, play, and display.
bid cap / cost cap: controls that tell the platform the most you'll pay per result. too tight starves delivery, too loose overspends — set it against real LTV, not vibes.
soft launch: releasing a game in a few small markets before global launch to test retention, monetization, and UA economics on cheap installs before you scale spend.

AI & automation

agentic advertising: advertising run by autonomous ai agents that plan, launch, and optimize whole campaigns end to end, with little or no human input. powerful — but only trustworthy to a serious operator when the agent explains its decisions and stays inside set guardrails.
AI marketing agent: an autonomous system that executes marketing work — creative, targeting, bidding, budget — across ad networks on its own. the useful ones show their reasoning, so a human can direct the strategy instead of micromanaging the tasks.
critic layer: a quality-and-brand gate that scores each ai-generated creative against real historical winners and re-prompts the weak ones before anything ships — the thing that keeps ai creative volume from turning into ai slop.