AppLovin is a mobile advertising optimization platform from the company of the same name headquartered in California.
N/A
Yahoo Native
Score 6.6 out of 10
N/A
Yahoo Native (formerly Yahoo Gemini) is Yahoo's offering for mobile, native and search engine marketing and advertising (formerly Yahoo! Advertising and Yahoo! Search Marketing), for placing ads where visitors are, with an emphasis on mobile. The marketplace offers search and native advertising in one advertising platform, offering brand-safe premium content, and advanced technologies to deliver engaging advertising campaigns.
AppLovin is a great app if you are trying to grow your business and want to expand into mobile gaming or the mobile industry in general. It is less appropriate for a business that wants to set up a traditional store and not grow into the mobile gaming industry. This app is very popular in the gaming industry as it boasts over 300 million users as of June 2022.
As I've alluded to before, Yahoo Gemini! is particularly well-suited for that extra bit of marketing spend and those last few needed leads and MQLs to get you over the hump. We definitely find that the ROI is well worth it, but it's also not the type of channel that we're gonna drop half of our budget on. The scalability is limited to an extent.
More robust and sophisticated reporting capacity: front end metrics are available with different granularities, but lacking in insight to guide optimization strategy
No display/programmatic buying options as yet.
Audience targeting could be improved and audience / lookalike modeling could be improved. That said, geotargeting capabilities are very good.
AppLovin has been a great partner for us. We have used them through our DSP and gotten great results with them. Their focus is on monetizing publishers' inventory and they could put more resources into their standalone service as an SSP to make sure DSPs can consider them strategic partners for the long term.
One of my main pain points with yahoo gemini is that the product is very difficult to use and the UI seems like they took a skeleton of a similar product and made it bare bones functional for the purpose of generating ad spend. It is a huge barrier for new customers and I feel one of the main reasons they have new customers at all is all the free trial dollars they offer.
AppLovin's support team is their weakest point. They are not very responsive and they tend to provide solutions that do not fix the problem. It seems like they will only be proactive if you are a very big client and by doing that they are preventing the rest of the client base from increasing spend on their platform and growing their accounts
They were always super helpful during training and demoing and would answer any questions we had. We didn't have a direct account manager, which would have been nice, but I just don't think their size accommodates for that type of set up. They are very knowledgeable and help guide you through a set up for each particular client.
Of all of the competitors above, AppLovin is the one that is more focused on gaming and that has a better pool of users in terms of conversion rate. While PubMatic and Magnate offer better solutions for CTV, AppLovin is better than InMobi and MoPub regarding in-app formats and inventory.
Yahoo Gemini is a more robust version of Outbrain and Taboola. It does offer mobile search, which they do not, and you have more control over your targeting, ad formats, and platform preference. Difficulty of campaign setup is pretty minimal on any Native platform, but Gemini does seem to have the least strict approval process, which is nice with both Facebook and Twitter making it difficult to target and run ads for certain products/topics.
