2018 Global Advertising Platform Effectiveness Ranking! Toutiao, Tencent, and Kuaishou Enter the Top 17 Chinese iOS Advertising Platforms

For current mobile game manufacturers, buying traffic is an indispensable means of promotion . However, the current mobile advertising market is a mixed bag, advertising fraud is becoming increasingly rampant, and how to measure ROI and increase revenue is also a matter of great concern to game manufacturers.

Recently, AppsFlyer, an overseas buying volume data monitoring platform, released its first comprehensive advertising platform performance report in 2018 based on the buying volume data in the second half of 2017. The comprehensive ranking results were obtained after standardization based on the non-cheating installation volume and weighted retention rate scores of each platform, which has certain reference value. The following is the relevant interpretation made by Mobile Game Matters based on the report.

iOS game rankings in Greater China: Toutiao > Tencent social advertising > Kuaishou

In the gaming strength ranking in Greater China (including mainland China, Taiwan, China, and Hong Kong, China), Toutiao, Tencent Social Advertising, and Kuaishou are the only purely local platforms on the list. Judging from the strength ranking, Toutiao is better than Tencent Social Advertising and Kuaishou.

Toutiao currently has a total number of 700 million users, and its core competitiveness has always been to provide users with personalized recommendation algorithms. This type of content-oriented information flow platform has accumulated a huge user base, and information flow advertising has become its mainstream advertising form. It has a wide user coverage and good retention performance, making it a popular choice for game manufacturers to buy traffic. According to the "Analysis of Game Advertising Industry Buying Volume in January 2018" released by App Growing , in the competition among the top channels , 58% of advertisers who placed ads in January placed ads on Toutiao, ranking first.

Tencent Social Advertising, formerly known as Tencent Guangdiantong , has the main advantage of relying on the huge number of users accumulated by Tencent's social applications such as QQ, WeChat , and QQ Space. Currently, there are about 800 million daily users. Through Tencent's social advertising platform, advertisers can place advertisements on many platforms such as QQ Space, QQ Client, Mobile QQ Space, Mobile QQ, WeChat, QQ Music Client, Tencent News Client, etc. to promote their products. The main advertising forms are information flow ads and native ads .

However, the most surprising thing is that Kuaishou has topped the iOS game rankings in Greater China. For most people, Kuaishou is a short video content sharing platform full of "curiosity" and has little to do with games. In fact, game live streaming is also an important part of Kuaishou. On February 5, 2018, Kuaishou added a dedicated game live streaming platform entrance. Currently, Kuaishou has more than 400 million users. The "2018 Spring Festival Entertainment Insight Report" released by QuestMobile shows that during the Spring Festival, Kuaishou's daily active users reached more than 112 million, far higher than other short video platforms such as Douyin . Kuaishou users mainly come from third- and fourth-tier cities and rural areas. This makes it a very suitable platform for buying traffic for game manufacturers who want to conquer the markets in third- and fourth-tier cities and below.

In addition, although Google servers are still blocked in mainland China, its advertising platform Google Adwords still has considerable traffic in China, topping the iOS gaming rankings in Greater China.

Android Game Rankings in Greater China: Facebook tops the list, QooAp focuses on the two-dimensional game field

Since the mainstream source of Android traffic in mainland China is third-party app stores , the traffic is scattered and cannot be tracked programmatically. Therefore, the results of the Android strength ranking are more focused on advertising platforms in the Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan markets. However, this can also provide some reference value for game manufacturers entering the Android markets in Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan.

Facebook topped the Android strength ranking based on its traffic advantage in Hong Kong and Taiwan. In addition, large advertising platforms such as Google AdWords, AppLovin, Vungle, UnityAds, and Inmobi are still frequent visitors to the top of the list.

For game manufacturers who want to enter the two-dimensional game market in Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan, QooAp is a good choice for buying game traffic . QooAp is a mobile game platform focusing on the two-dimensional field, similar to the segmented TapTap, and is mainly aimed at the Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan markets. In 2016, QooAp added content and services in English, Korean and Japanese, covering dozens of countries in Asia and around the world. Its total number of users worldwide has now exceeded one million.

Global gaming advertising platform strength ranking: the rankings after the top 10 fluctuate greatly, and 6 new advertising platforms are added

Comparing with the ranking of the best media channels in the mobile advertising field released by AppsFlyer in October last year, we can see that in the global ranking of gaming advertising platforms, the TOP10 advertising platforms are still those large platforms, but the rankings have changed slightly. Facebook and Google AdWords still rank first and second respectively. It is worth noting that AppLovin has entered the top three from the original fifth place. AppLovin was founded in 2012 and the platform currently covers more than 2 billion users. AppLovin is known for its product-first orientation, focusing on improving product efficiency and quality through technology, providing advertisers with intelligent optimization analysis, and being able to continuously optimize and modify marketing decisions through real-time data feedback.

In contrast to the TOP10, the rankings after the TOP10 fluctuate greatly. In this global ranking of gaming advertising platforms, advertising platforms such as Cheetah Mobile and Inmobi fell out of the top 28, while six new advertising platforms entered the list.

Among these six new advertising platforms, Snapchat is a photo-sharing app that disappears after reading and has strong social attributes. According to foreign media reports, the Pew Research Center recently conducted a survey on American social media . The results showed that among young people aged 18 to 24, 78% visit Snapchat, and 71% of these people visit the Snapchat platform multiple times a day. The young users covered by Snapchat have great paying potential, which is also attractive to game advertisers.

In addition to the global and regional power rankings for advertising platforms, for the first time, AppsFlyer has added long-term retention to the power ranking formula for the performance report, which monitors app launches 12 weeks after user installation. In the 12-week retention rate ranking of gaming advertising platforms, AppLovin has the highest retention rate. By comparing the strength rankings of other platforms in the report, we can find that for most of the top-ranked game advertising platforms, the ranking mainly depends on the retention rate. For game manufacturers, retention time is directly related to player consumption. Therefore, when choosing an advertising platform for purchasing traffic cooperation, retention rate is an important indicator to measure the ability and effectiveness of the advertising platform, and game manufacturers should pay attention to it.

The author of this article @虹彤 is compiled and published by (Qinggua Media). Please indicate the author information and source when reprinting!

Product promotion services: APP promotion services, advertising platform, Longyou Games