September 2025 Ad Growth Analysis

Organic app discoverability is the myth that the ad monopolies on the Apple and Google use to juice their store ad campaigns. Few people search for new apps.

Meanwhile, in-app ads are a direct way for apps to reach new audiences (you're still not getting away from the ad monopolies). The Ad Impact section shows the correlations between apps that were seen running ad campaigns and their increased installs during the following week.

These are the September 2025 ad mobile app ad campaigns (US) that drove the highest increases in week on week (W/W) install growth.

These mobile app ad video creatives achieved the widest distribution among mobile publishers in September 2025. The top performer was showing across 106 publishers demonstrating it's popularity and success as a mobile app ad creative.

TikTok was the leading advertiser and its creatives were preloaded the most. Interestingly there were several ecommerce product apps that were also seeing wide distribution. And of course at least one AI app, Microsoft's Copilot also saw one of the highest ad reach.

The mobile advertising Android ecosystem is monopolized by Google due to it's control of the Android OS. However, there are several other ad networks that provide valuable reach and targeting options for app advertisers. Overall we saw 2310 publishers, delivering 2344 unique creatives across the top ad networks in September 2025.

The other ad networks fighting for the leftover market share are split into two overlapping groups: SDK direct ad networks and programmatic networks.

When looking at this data its important to keep the context of how it was collected. The data is aggregated from API calls made by opening apps and watching the ad network connections. As such, this does not include App Store advertising (Apple/Google) or social media ads (TikTok/Facebook/Instagram). Facebook Audience Network (FAN) is included, but as it is quite small it didn't make the top 10.

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