Sometimes increasing your marketing budget doesn’t mean you’re going to scale up

“Gaming is becoming more competitive than ever – that’s a fact,” says Adjust head of sales, central Europe Cansu Agaoglu.

“With the explosion of new titles, platforms and genres, the market itself is getting crowded. As a result of that we are seeing rising user acquisition costs. Effective CPI for gaming nearly doubled in 2023 and we will continue seeing this increasing trend.”

Agaoglu began her talk on stage at PGC London 2025 by highlighting this context of the modern mobile games landscape. She also leveraged her six years of experience with games industry clients and background as a user acquisition manager to discuss predictive analytics, cannibalisation and the “science of success”.

Campaigns and competition

“Predictive analytics is shaping the way we understand the future outcome of a specific campaign, and there are lots of advantages to starting working with predictive metrics,” explained Agaoglu. “These will give us this ultimate competitive advantage since we can start optimising campaigns from day one.”

She proceeded to discuss incrementality analysis’ role in growth and marketing, suggesting that it can be used to demonstrate the effectiveness of a marketing strategy by considering how sales would have changed over a given period with a shorter campaign, or whether the same results would have been reached either way.

However, inevitably this means comparing actual data with predictive data. Agaoglu noted the importance of considering all external factors, therefore, such as holidays, seasonality, competitive behaviour, channel saturation and more.

“Sometimes increasing your marketing budget doesn’t mean you’re going to scale up,” she said. “Aggregated, anonymised and delayed data is becoming the norm. It demands a changed approach.”

Agaoglu also suggested that organic cannibalisation between titles through a marketing campaign may be a risk, but it’s a risk developers can take to “save and secure” their audiences to keep them from moving to competitors.

This was one of many insighftul talks during PGC London 2025, which included conversations around UA’s renaissance, the Digital Fairness Act and more.