Once Meta and Google campaigns are stable, the ceiling you hit is price: you are bidding against everyone else in the same auctions. The app-focused networks — Pangle (TikTok's network for in-app inventory), InMobi (huge reach across Indian and SEA inventory), Unity Ads and similar third-party platforms — offer meaningfully cheaper installs, especially for games and mass-market utilities.
What each network is actually good at
- Pangle: rewarded and interstitial placements inside apps; excellent for games; creatives that feel like content outperform polished brand ads.
- InMobi: scale in India and Southeast Asia; strong for utilities and commerce apps targeting those markets.
- Unity Ads: gamer inventory by definition — playable ads and gameplay-capture videos convert best.
- Others (AppLovin, ironSource, Mintegral): worth testing once your creative library is deep enough to feed them.
The traps
Cheap installs mean nothing without post-install data: without proper attribution and retention events you will happily buy bot-flavoured or one-session traffic. We gate every network launch behind attribution, day-1/day-7 retention tracking, and placement-level blocklists that get pruned weekly. The networks are legitimate; unmeasured spending on them is not.
Creative specs cheat-sheet
- Pangle: 9:16 vertical video 15–30s, UGC/gameplay style, captions burned in (sound-off viewing dominates); playables convert best for games.
- InMobi: bundle 9:16 and 16:9 video plus static interstitials; lightweight files matter on the mid-range devices that dominate its inventory.
- Unity: 15–30s gameplay capture with a fake-difficulty hook plus an end-card; test a playable once video finds a winning angle.
- Everywhere: first 3 seconds decide everything — lead with the payoff, not your logo.
Starting budgets and expectations
These networks reward patience over size: we open each at a modest daily budget (enough for ~30–50 installs a day so the data means something), let it run 5–7 days without touching it, then prune placements with sub-par day-1 retention. Expect CPIs meaningfully below Meta/Google for games and utilities — sometimes half — with the trade-off of noisier quality that the retention gate filters out.
Attribution reality check: iOS reporting is aggregated and delayed under Apple's privacy rules, so judge iOS campaigns on cohort trends over weeks, not day-to-day dashboards. Android remains more granular — start network experiments there, then port the winners to iOS.
How we run it
Creative-first: each network gets formats native to it (playables for Unity, vertical UGC-style video for Pangle) rather than resized Meta ads. Budgets start small, retention is the kill-switch metric, and winners scale weekly. For ad-monetized apps this second wave is frequently where blended cost per install finally drops below lifetime value — which is the whole game.