Cross-platform UA: mobile CPI is up, other channels aren't

Mobile CPI has climbed for three straight years. Most growth teams respond by tuning the same three or four mobile networks harder — a new creative angle, a tighter lookalike, a different bidding strategy on the same inventory everyone else is already bidding on. Meanwhile connected TV, PC storefronts, and plain web pages are sitting there as acquisition surfaces most mobile studios have never touched, because "mobile UA" got mentally filed as "mobile ad networks" years ago and nobody revisited the assumption.

The channel assumption that's costing you

If your game only exists on a phone, it doesn't follow that your acquisition has to live only inside phone apps. A player who sees your game on their television, tries a playable demo on a website, or reads about it from a PC gaming community can still end the journey with an install on their phone. The device where someone discovers your game and the device where they play it don't have to be the same device, and increasingly they aren't.

The mobile industry has treated this as obvious for years when it comes to cross-promotion between your own titles — you already know your existing players are a cheap source of new installs for your next game. The same logic extends outward: a non-mobile surface that reaches the right audience can feed your mobile install funnel just as well as a network built specifically for phones, often at a lower cost per attention because fewer studios are bidding there.

What CTV actually buys you now

Connected TV stopped being a brand-awareness-only channel. Platforms built for performance advertising — the kind that reports installs, not just impressions — now run on premium streaming inventory with cross-device attribution built in. A household watching a show on a smart TV sees your ad, and the platform links that impression to an install that happens later on a phone in the same household. That link is the part that used to be missing and is the reason CTV stayed a brand channel for so long.

The audience math has shifted too. Streaming ad inventory has grown into a market on the same scale as a meaningful slice of total mobile ad spend, which means there's real volume behind it, not a curiosity. For a studio running a live-service title with a broad audience, that's a pool of attention competing on different terms than the auction you're used to on mobile networks — often cheaper per install for the same target audience, because the buyer pool skews toward console and PC advertisers who haven't fully discovered it as a mobile acquisition surface yet.

PC and web aren't just for PC games

The instinct to write off PC and web acquisition because your game is mobile-only misses how those surfaces actually convert. A playable demo hosted on a web page, a free trial link shared in a newsletter, or a presence on a PC gaming community doesn't need to lead to a PC install — it needs to lead to interest, and interest converts to a mobile install with a QR code or a deep link.

What's different about this audience is how they decide. PC-first communities research more before committing, and word of mouth from other players carries more weight in the decision than it typically does on mobile, where the decision is often made in the three seconds after an ad interrupts a scroll. That means the creative and copy that works on a mobile feed usually doesn't transfer directly — a PC-community audience responds to gameplay depth, systems, and community chatter, not a five-second hook. If you're bringing a mobile creative asset unmodified to a PC forum or a web landing page, you're testing the wrong thing and will conclude the channel doesn't work when the creative was the problem.

Where this actually fits your UA mix

None of this replaces your mobile networks, and it shouldn't be sized like they are. Treat CTV, PC, and web as a supplementary layer with its own budget, its own creative, and its own measurement — not a subset of your existing mobile campaigns reallocated because a line item looked slow. The players you're reaching are genuinely different from the ones your lookalike audiences already find, which is exactly why the channel has room to add incremental installs instead of just cannibalizing ones you'd have gotten anyway.

The measurement discipline matters more here than anywhere else in your UA stack, because cross-device attribution is inherently less certain than a same-device click-to-install. Before you scale budget into a new non-mobile channel, you need a way to tell whether the installs it's credited with are actually incremental — the same holdout-based thinking that separates real uplift from a self-reported number applies just as much to a new acquisition channel as it does to an in-game offer. A channel that looks cheap on a dashboard and isn't actually adding installs beyond what you'd have gotten anyway is not a bargain, it's a reporting artifact.

Start small, on one non-mobile surface, with creative built for that audience instead of recycled from your mobile campaigns, and hold out a comparison group before you commit real budget. The channel is genuinely underused right now. That won't last once every studio facing the same CPI pressure notices the same thing you just did.