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How mobile UA changed (2015 → 2026) — the remaining levers, team structure and channel mix by budget

From 100-person manual media-buying teams (Machine Zone era) to algorithmic buying on 4–5 consolidated networks — what's left to control (bid, campaign type, budget, creative, signal), how a modern UA team is structured, and how channels and process change from six- to eight-figure monthly budgets (gaming lens).

Updated 2026-10-24·2 sources·user-acquisitionmobile-gamingteam-structurechannel-mixcreativeautomationhistory

How mobile UA changed — levers, team and channel mix

TL;DR

  • 2015. Advantage came from people and data. Machine Zone ran 100+ media buyers, 5–10 per Facebook/Google, custom publisher- and placement-level reports, and supply-path optimisation on programmatic buys.
  • 2026. Buying is algorithmic: Google App Campaigns (UAC), Advantage+, AppLovin. After consolidation, 4–5 networks cover ~95% of reach. You control four levers: bid/target, campaign type (optimisation event), budget, creative, plus the signal you feed.
  • Execution is easier, winning is harder. Competition is global (Asian studios scale in the West via AppLovin), so UA amplifies great products rather than finding arbitrage. Nebo’s rule of thumb for games: “if your product is not working on AppLovin, don’t launch it.”
  • Team structure. Three pillars: media buying (a few senior, AI-fluent “super ICs”), creative (strategist as bridge to production) and analytics (incl. creative analytics and predictive LTV).
  • Gaming channel mix by monthly spend:
    • $100–300K: Google on Android plus AppLovin on iOS only
    • $0.5–2M: add Unity and Meta
    • $1–5M: add geos and localisation
    • 8 figures: audience segmentation, brand/IP partnerships, and incrementality + MMM

Details

The manual era (Nebojsa Radovic, ex-Machine Zone). Daily spend reports were pulled and stitched by hand. Better reporting, especially creative- and publisher-level, was the competitive edge.1 Nebo ran DSP buying at a level of granularity “we don’t really get… even today”: which network and which impression in a given app’s waterfall was cheapest. This is supply-path optimisation, plus direct publisher deals.23 A marketing-technology team automated anything taking more than 60 minutes.4 In 2015 Facebook and Google took ~60% of spend (Google ~20%), programmatic and video networks 20–25%, with incentivised traffic and preloads (~5%) making up the rest.5

Automation and consolidation. Nobody thought UAC would work, and it underperformed for about two years. Then it, and later Advantage+, democratised sophisticated buying.6 Network mergers (ironSource+Unity, Liftoff+Vungle, AppLovin’s acquisitions of MAX and MoPub) left a handful of channels with ~95% coverage.7 What remains is bid, campaign type (CPI, retained user, D1/D7 ROAS), budget and creative. Creative is “the only one kind of high touchpoint item”.8 With global competition, profitable UA is hard.9 Test new games on AppLovin early in development: if they can’t run there at scale, they’re unlikely to succeed.10 Today the top spenders are simply the best products (Royal Match, Monopoly Go).11

Creative operations. Refresh monthly for games spending a few hundred thousand dollars a month; almost daily at millions per month. Top AppLovin spenders launch thousands of ads a month with creative teams of 300–500.12 The success metric is hit rate or “hero rate”: the share of new creatives that win a meaningful slice of spend (10–30%) at goal.13 Licensed IP adds about a week of approvals on top of 3–4 days of production.14 Thomas Petit warns that volume is often fake: “you’ve launched a thousand ads… no, you’ve launched 18”. Count distinct concepts, not variants.15

Team structure (Zynga today).1617

  • Media buying. T-shaped, AI-fluent UA leads who can run a game alone; changes every other day, not hourly.
  • Creative. Strategists sit between UA and production. They read IPM, CPI and retention data and write weekly briefs.
  • Analytics. Marketing analytics (opportunities, predictive LTV) plus creative analytics at the centre of all three pillars.

Signal engineering is everyone’s job, not a dedicated role.18

Scaling stages (games). $100–300K/month: Google Android and AppLovin iOS, “and do it well”; Google on Android is “truly incremental”.19 $0.5–2M: add Unity and Meta; Meta isn’t a top-3 game channel now. One UA lead with shared creative and analytics resources.20 $1–5M: more geos, localisation and culturalisation. 7→8 figures: a dedicated pod, audience segmentation beyond the “golden cohorts”, brand (TV, IP licences, ambassadors), and measurement complex enough to need incrementality and MMM.2122

AI and the job. Platform automation (Advantage+, PMax, Axon) already acts as the agent. The human job is handling the steady stream of edge cases and broken data pipelines (“I’m a plumber”) and finding non-obvious patterns that off-the-shelf setups miss.2324

Disagreements / caveats

Footnotes

  1. S07, E33: An oral history of mobile user acquisition (with Nebojsa Radovic) @ 03:16 — Nebojsa Radovic ↩

  2. S07, E33: An oral history of mobile user acquisition (with Nebojsa Radovic) @ 06:45 — Nebojsa Radovic ↩

  3. S07, E33: An oral history of mobile user acquisition (with Nebojsa Radovic) @ 09:31 — Nebojsa Radovic ↩

  4. S07, E33: An oral history of mobile user acquisition (with Nebojsa Radovic) @ 10:18 — Nebojsa Radovic ↩

  5. S07, E33: An oral history of mobile user acquisition (with Nebojsa Radovic) @ 11:53 — Nebojsa Radovic ↩

  6. S07, E33: An oral history of mobile user acquisition (with Nebojsa Radovic) @ 15:04 — Nebojsa Radovic ↩

  7. S07, E33: An oral history of mobile user acquisition (with Nebojsa Radovic) @ 16:39 — Nebojsa Radovic ↩

  8. S07, E33: An oral history of mobile user acquisition (with Nebojsa Radovic) @ 18:12 — Nebojsa Radovic ↩

  9. S07, E33: An oral history of mobile user acquisition (with Nebojsa Radovic) @ 19:05 — Nebojsa Radovic ↩

  10. S07, E33: An oral history of mobile user acquisition (with Nebojsa Radovic) @ 20:45 — Nebojsa Radovic ↩

  11. S07, E33: An oral history of mobile user acquisition (with Nebojsa Radovic) @ 21:43 — Nebojsa Radovic ↩

  12. S07, E33: An oral history of mobile user acquisition (with Nebojsa Radovic) @ 29:43 — Nebojsa Radovic ↩

  13. S07, E33: An oral history of mobile user acquisition (with Nebojsa Radovic) @ 30:35 — Nebojsa Radovic ↩

  14. S07, E33: An oral history of mobile user acquisition (with Nebojsa Radovic) @ 31:24 — Nebojsa Radovic ↩

  15. S07, E30: MDM Mailbag #8 (with Thomas Petit) @ 14:33 — Thomas Petit ↩

  16. S07, E33: An oral history of mobile user acquisition (with Nebojsa Radovic) @ 35:24 — Nebojsa Radovic ↩

  17. S07, E33: An oral history of mobile user acquisition (with Nebojsa Radovic) @ 37:17 — Nebojsa Radovic ↩

  18. S07, E33: An oral history of mobile user acquisition (with Nebojsa Radovic) @ 38:08 — Nebojsa Radovic ↩

  19. S07, E33: An oral history of mobile user acquisition (with Nebojsa Radovic) @ 42:10 — Nebojsa Radovic ↩

  20. S07, E33: An oral history of mobile user acquisition (with Nebojsa Radovic) @ 42:58 — Nebojsa Radovic ↩

  21. S07, E33: An oral history of mobile user acquisition (with Nebojsa Radovic) @ 43:43 — Nebojsa Radovic ↩

  22. S07, E33: An oral history of mobile user acquisition (with Nebojsa Radovic) @ 44:32 — Nebojsa Radovic ↩

  23. S07, E33: An oral history of mobile user acquisition (with Nebojsa Radovic) @ 46:54 — Eric Seufert ↩

  24. S07, E33: An oral history of mobile user acquisition (with Nebojsa Radovic) @ 47:41 — Nebojsa Radovic ↩