Mobile advertisers are facing a more fragmented creative economy, where the format that delivers efficient installs on Android may perform very differently on iOS. Liftoff’s sixth annual Mobile Ad Creative Index highlights those differences across gaming, e-commerce, finance and entertainment, drawing on more than 602 billion impressions and 144 million installs to examine how ad formats influence acquisition costs and downstream performance.
The report, based on Liftoff’s analysis between January 1, 2023, and January 1, 2024, examined 602 billion-plus impressions, 49.4 million clicks and 144 million installs. It compares the performance of banners, native ads, interstitials, video and playable formats across major mobile app categories.
The findings point to a familiar challenge for mobile marketers: there is no single creative format that consistently wins across every platform, vertical or stage of the user-acquisition funnel.
For advertisers, that makes creative optimization increasingly important. Media buying can determine where an ad appears, but creative format can have a major influence on whether a consumer installs an application—and whether that user eventually becomes a paying customer.
Gaming illustrates the creative trade-off
Gaming advertisers face one of the clearest divides between install efficiency and longer-term return.
On iOS, native advertising recorded the lowest CPI among the gaming formats analyzed, at $3.09. On Android, meanwhile, playable ads were the most cost-efficient at $0.60, substantially below native advertising at $1.22.
Playables also stood out for their ability to generate installs. Liftoff found that gaming ads containing video or playable components were 20 times more likely to drive an install than banner advertising.
But acquisition volume does not necessarily translate directly into downstream value.
Seven days after installation, native and banner formats produced stronger reported ROI, at 20.26% and 18.20%, respectively. That distinction matters because mobile-game advertisers increasingly need to optimize toward player quality and revenue rather than simply maximizing installs.
Genre can further complicate the picture. A creative strategy that works for a casual puzzle game may not produce the same economics for a strategy title, role-playing game or casino-style application.
The implication for gaming marketers is that creative testing needs to account for both install efficiency and post-install monetization.
E-commerce exposes the Android-iOS price gap
The e-commerce category showed another pronounced difference between operating systems.
On Android, native ads delivered the strongest CPI efficiency at $0.65. On iOS, banner advertising was the lowest-cost format at $1.37.
Video also demonstrated a substantial platform pricing difference, with average CPI of $1.15 on Android compared with $2.83 on iOS.
Yet video showed an important advantage further up the acquisition funnel. Liftoff reported that video advertising could drive app installs at rates as much as 1,400% higher than banners.
Once the user had installed the app, however, the performance equation changed. Native and banner formats produced install-to-purchase conversion rates above 30%, while video and interstitial formats were closer to 16%.
This illustrates why mobile advertisers increasingly need to distinguish between cost per install and customer acquisition value. A cheaper install is not necessarily the better outcome if the resulting user is less likely to purchase.
Finance advertisers face an even sharper format divide
Financial applications showed significant differences in both pricing and conversion.
Average Android install costs remained below $1 across the analyzed formats, while three of the four iOS formats exceeded $5. Interstitial advertising was particularly expensive on iOS, costing more than five times its Android equivalent.
At the same time, banners had the lowest likelihood of driving installs for finance apps. Video and interstitial formats delivered substantially stronger conversion performance, with Liftoff reporting conversion rates more than 15 and 18 times higher than banners, respectively.
For financial marketers, this creates a more complicated optimization problem. A format can be expensive on a CPI basis while still generating better acquisition performance.
That makes return on ad spend, lifetime value and downstream conversion increasingly important measures alongside CPI.
UGC emerges as a performance lever
One of the report’s broader creative findings centers on user-generated content (UGC).
Liftoff said UGC advertisements created through its Influence team delivered a CPI 20% lower than other video creatives. Influencer UGC also produced four times stronger ROAS than brand content in testing, alongside a reported 152% average increase in impression-to-install conversion rates.
The result reflects a broader change in mobile advertising creative. Consumers are increasingly exposed to polished brand campaigns across social platforms, making creator-led formats a way for advertisers to make acquisition creative appear more native to the environments where audiences already spend time.
For performance marketers, UGC can also offer a faster testing model. Multiple creators, narratives and product demonstrations can be developed and evaluated without relying on a single large-scale brand campaign.
Generative AI is changing the creative workflow
Liftoff also points to generative AI as a growing component of advertising production and optimization.
The company cites Deloitte research showing that 91% of organizations expect productivity improvements from implementing generative AI. The technology is already being applied to ideation, content production, image generation and operational automation.
For mobile advertisers, the more immediate opportunity may be creative iteration. Generative AI can help teams produce variations of concepts, copy, imagery and video more rapidly, allowing performance teams to test more creative combinations across platforms.
But automation does not remove the need for measurement. If anything, producing more creative increases the importance of structured experimentation.
The challenge for enterprise UA teams is therefore becoming less about producing an ad and more about building a system capable of continuously identifying which creative, format, platform and audience combination produces the strongest commercial result.
The next stage of mobile advertising is multi-variable optimization
Liftoff’s data reinforces a shift already underway across AdTech. Mobile advertising is becoming less dependent on universal creative benchmarks and more focused on context.
The same advertiser may need different creative strategies for Android and iOS, different formats for acquisition and retargeting, and different approaches depending on whether the objective is an install, purchase or long-term customer value.
That creates opportunities for mobile DSPs, measurement platforms and creative optimization technologies to move beyond basic campaign automation.
For enterprise advertisers, the practical takeaway is clear: creative should be treated as a performance variable, not simply an asset delivered into a media plan.
As privacy changes reduce the availability of some user-level signals and acquisition costs remain under pressure, advertisers have a stronger incentive to extract more performance from the impression itself.
Liftoff’s latest Creative Index suggests the winners will not necessarily be those spending the most. They will be the teams capable of matching creative format, platform, audience and business objective—and then rapidly testing what works.
Market Landscape
Mobile advertising is evolving toward a more sophisticated creative-performance feedback loop.
Liftoff’s data shows why platform-level optimization matters: Android and iOS can produce dramatically different economics for identical ad formats. The same applies across verticals, where gaming, e-commerce and finance users respond differently to interactive, video, native and banner experiences.
This creates opportunities for DSPs, mobile measurement partners, creative optimization platforms and AI-powered AdTech.
Companies across the advertising ecosystem—including Google, Amazon, Microsoft and Adobe—are investing heavily in automation, measurement and AI-assisted marketing workflows. The competitive advantage is increasingly moving toward platforms that can connect media buying with creative intelligence and downstream business outcomes.
Generative AI adds another layer by reducing the cost and time required to produce creative variants. That could allow advertisers to run more experiments, but it also raises the importance of reliable attribution and testing frameworks.
The broader direction is toward full-funnel creative optimization, where advertisers evaluate impressions not only by CPI but also by purchase conversion, ROAS, retention and lifetime value.
Top Insights
- Liftoff analyzed 602 billion impressions and 144 million installs, revealing major differences in mobile ad performance across platforms, formats and application categories.
- Playable gaming ads were 20 times more likely to drive installs than banners, while native and banner formats delivered stronger seven-day ROI.
- E-commerce advertisers saw Android native ads deliver a $0.65 CPI, while iOS banners provided the lowest-cost acquisition at $1.37.
- UGC creatives delivered substantially stronger reported acquisition economics, demonstrating why creator-led advertising is becoming central to mobile user acquisition.
- Generative AI is accelerating creative production, enabling advertisers to generate more variants and test campaigns at greater scale.
Get in touch with our Adtech experts
