Game advertising on Meta: which mobile games buy installs and how to read their ads

This guide reads game advertising on Facebook and Instagram from our own pulls in Spytrend (Pro plan). Counts cover Meta ads the tool's AI labels as gaming: a labeled subset, not the whole market. Gambling and casino are a separate category and are excluded. Window: ads launched 3 October to 1 November 2026, status checked on 2 November 2026. "Inactive" means stopped; "vanished" means gone from the library.

Meta is the only game advertising network measured, so this is about Facebook ads for games, not a game ad network comparison: if your game ads network is TikTok, AppLovin, Pangle or Unity Ads for games, these counts do not apply. There is no spend or CPI here, only how many ads a game launches and how long they run.

Set the category to gaming and the launch dates to your window, then read the status split. Our 30 days held 1,394,580 ads, about 46,486 a day. On 2 November, 275,109 of them (19.7%) were still active; 416,453 had been stopped and 703,018 had vanished from the library.

So four in five game ads launched in the month were not running at its end. A source that shows only live ads, such as the Meta Ad Library, shows you the survivors.

Country counts overlap, because one ad can run in several, so do not add them up. Out of 191 countries, the top five were the US (190,039 ads), India (164,945), Brazil (129,231), the UK (71,038) and Vietnam (68,772).

Do not measure run length on the whole 30 days. Ads launched after 19 October could not reach 14 days by 2 November, so the share comes out low: across the full window, 119,690 ads (8.6%) ran 14 days or more. Use an early cohort instead, here ads launched 3–12 October, each with at least 21 days of possible life. Every ad in it is counted, including those later stopped or vanished, by the days it ran before that.

1. Cohort size: 430,905 ads.
2. Ran under 7 days: 304,117 (70.6%), so the median game ad ran less than a week.
3. Ran 7+ days: 126,788 (29.4%).
4. Ran 14+ days: 65,720 (15.3%).
5. Ran 21+ days: 40,523 (9.4%), about 1 in 11. Of these, 29,679 (6.9% of the cohort) were still active on 2 November; the rest ran at least three weeks and then stopped.

Attrition slows after the first week: 51.8% of the ads that reached 7 days also reached 14, and 61.7% of those reached 21. When you pick ads to study, one that has run for two weeks has already outlasted most of its cohort.

Rank advertiser pages by ads launched in the window. These are Facebook page names as Meta lists them, not app titles: names like "Mahjong game Other" are generic pages, and Step 4 ties ads to the apps themselves. The list, top down:

1. Meowdoku: 11,038
2. Aliens vs Zombies: Invasion: 10,171
3. Mahjong game Other: 8,300
4. Meowdoku (second page): 7,703
5. Rise of Kingdoms: 7,695
6. MindCare Game Mahjong Other: 7,435
7. Block Blast: 6,795
8. Polygun Arena IN: 6,387
9. Classic Game Mahjong Other: 5,899
10. Train Track Game Free: 5,762

Together the ten pages launched 77,185 ads, 5.5% of the window, so at page level buying is spread thin. Grouped by game it concentrates, because one game often buys through several pages: Meowdoku's two pages add up to 18,741 ads, and the three "Mahjong ... Other" pages to 21,634.

Page age says little about volume. The first Meowdoku page was created on 30 April 2026; Rise of Kingdoms has had its page since 21 March 2018 and has 1,896,862 likes, yet launched fewer ads in the window.

Open the advertiser cards to see how much of each page's full archive is live. The card counts all ads since the page started, a larger base than the window counts above. Among the top five the live share ranged from 0.9% (Aliens vs Zombies: 297 active of 34,187 ads in its archive, against 10,171 launched in the window) to 16.7% (the second Meowdoku page). The AI labels part of the Meowdoku and Mahjong ads as e-commerce or e-readers; the window counts include only the gaming-labeled ones.

Then switch from pages to apps. This counts something different from Step 3: ads still running on 2 November, grouped by store listing across all of an app's pages, not ads launched per page. Of 8,288 matching apps, the top ten listings were:

1. Vita Mahjong (Vita Studio): 7,371
2. Meowdoku: Brain Puzzle Games (Oakever Games): 5,152
3. Royal Match (Dream Games): 1,925
4. Block Crush! (Wonderful Studio): 1,396
5. Critical Strike CS: Online FPS, iOS (Vertigo Games): 1,307
6. Royal Kingdom (Dream Games): 1,215
7. Critical Strike CS: Online FPS, Android: 1,213
8. Save The Pets (Bravestars Games): 1,166
9. WePlay - Game and Party (WEJOY): 1,072
10. Yumtopia: Merge & Cook (Playchamp Games): 1,046

Eight of the ten listings are free-to-play casual and puzzle games; the other two are the iOS and Android listings of one shooter, Critical Strike.

The number of pages behind an app varies widely. Counting all ads in the archive, not just active ones, Vita Mahjong's came from 130 advertisers, Meowdoku's from 9, and Royal Match's 10,664 ads from just 2 pages. Yumtopia is the outlier: its store listing showed 453 installs while it ran 2,170 active ads, the profile of a fresh launch.

All five top advertiser cards land on Google Play, the App Store (apps.apple.com or itunes.apple.com) or AppsFlyer links (app.appsflyer.com). These are landings, not advertisers, so do not count them as buyers.

The window's raw domain list is noisier. We dropped six of its top ten: pagostorer.com (a top-up storefront), page.joyreadland.com (a web-novel funnel), fb.h5short.com, z1.tnkdt.com and lycqkr.kodaduck.com (redirects) and ffdrop.store (a scam-pattern item store). What stayed: koflegend.joymaker.com, a publisher site (4,966 ads), store.steampowered.com for PC games on Steam (4,875), and the AppsFlyer OneLink links of Block Crush (1,993) and Block Blast (1,905).

Take a page or app name from Steps 3–4 and search it in the Meta Ad Library. We searched "Royal Match" among active ads in the UK (GB) on 2 November 2026: about 4,700 results, of which we read the first 8 cards. Three were not games (a strap shop, a Trip.com hotel deal, a Secret Escapes travel offer), so filter by page before counting. The five Royal Match ads were all video, all started 13 October 2026 and all linked to the Google Play listing, with Install Now or Play Game buttons.

Video is the norm beyond this one app: in a sample of 4 creatives for each of the ten apps in Step 4, 40 of 40 were video. Within one advertiser, compare hooks: most Royal Match cards led with "Think you can solve it?", while two opened on "No ADS" and "NO ADS. NO WIFI. PURE FUN.", launched the same day. Four of the five carry the library's "multiple versions" label, so open the variants before judging an angle.