Singular ROI Index Analyzes $6.3B in Ad Spend for 2.2B App Installs Across 550 Networks to Identify the World’s Top Ad Networks for ROI in Mobile User Acquisition.

TikTok has emerged from nowhere as one of the top platforms for advertising ROI, joining perennial leaders Google and Facebook. And Apple Search Ads shows its own emerging power: hitting all 12 top regional and vertical lists.

TikTok almost literally exploded, with ad spend jumping 75X from May to November.

Growing 614 million users in a single year can do that.

Google and Facebook, of course, still lead in volume and adoption and ROI. In fact, they both appear on 10 of the 12 winning lists. But it’s gratifying to see the power of focus: smaller companies can still outperform the giants in specific niches. For example, Vungle, which raised only about $25 million before being acquired by Blackstone, a private equity group, shows up on eight. IronSource is on nine leaderboards. And Tapjoy is on seven.

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REPORT HIGHLIGHTS

The growth of TikTok

TikTok only shows up on two of the 12 top charts for this year’s Singular ROI Index, but that’s because it’s just getting started. In fact, we barely saw any ad spend on the platform at all until August, at which point TikTok simply took off.

Unity is flexing its muscles

Unity powers 50% of mobile games on the planet. It uses that distribution to serve over 10 billion ads a month, and they’re working. Unity shows up on nine of the leader lists (up two from last year) including top ad networks (global) for retention and top ad networks (global) for ROI.

No Amazon? Not yet …

Amazon doesn’t hit the top lists for one simple reason: right now, Amazon’s ad division is more focused on retail sales than mobile app installs. So even though Amazon’s advertising division has tripled its size over the last few years, it’s not hitting the leaderboard yet. Stay tuned!

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Core social is critical

Core social platforms like Twitter and Snap are critical for mobile marketers. Twitter is on nine of the 12 leaderboards and Snap made it on every single one, improving on last year’s already impressive results.

Apple Search Ads is, simply, required

Facebook and Google are required platforms for mobile marketers seeking scale. Now, on iOS, we can safely say that Apple Search Ads has attained that level. While it doesn’t have comparable volume, the quality of the mobile users Apple Search Ads delivers is extremely high, lifting the company to the leaderboard in every single iOS category.

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