Unity Ads cost is set by an auction, so there is no fixed price per install or per thousand impressions. What you pay depends on your bidding model (CPI, ROAS or retention goals), the countries you target, the quality of your creatives and current competition. A small studio can start testing with a daily budget in the low hundreds of dollars, but a credible test needs enough volume to reach the learning thresholds of the optimization goal you pick.
How does Unity Ads pricing actually work?
Unity Ads runs inside the Unity Grow Solutions dashboard (formerly the Unity Ads user acquisition dashboard). When you create a campaign you choose a goal and a bid type, and the network then competes for impressions inside the thousands of mobile games that monetize with Unity’s ad SDK or LevelPlay mediation.
The bid you set is a ceiling, not a guaranteed price. If your creative earns a high click-through and install rate, the system can win impressions at a lower effective cost because the predicted value of showing your ad is higher. Weak creatives push your effective cost up even when your bid stays the same.
The main pricing models you will see are:
- CPI (cost per install): you bid a flat amount per install, by country. Easiest to forecast, but it treats every install as equal.
- ROAS campaigns: you set a target return on ad spend at day 7 or another window, and the system bids per impression based on predicted revenue. These need in-app revenue events flowing back.
- Retention campaigns: the algorithm optimizes for users who come back on a set day, useful for games that monetize slowly through ads.
- Event-based optimization: the target is a specific in-app event such as tutorial completion or level 10.
What drives your Unity Ads spend up or down?
Five factors decide most of the bill. Understanding them is more useful than chasing a benchmark number from a forum, because those numbers rarely match your genre, your country mix or your creative.
Geography
Tier-1 markets such as the US, UK, Germany and Japan cost far more per install than Southeast Asia, Latin America or Turkey. Many studios soft-launch in cheaper markets such as the Philippines, Brazil or Canada to measure retention before paying tier-1 prices. If your game monetizes through in-app purchases, the cheap installs are only cheap if those players eventually pay.
Genre and audience overlap
Hyper-casual and hybrid-casual games compete for broad audiences, so volume is large but so is the number of bidders. Mid-core strategy and casino titles chase smaller groups of high-value players, and bids in those categories tend to be much higher per install because each payer is worth more.
Creative quality
Unity Ads serves video, playable and end-card formats. Playables usually require more production work but give players a sample of the core loop. In a typical account the gap in effective cost between the best and worst creative in a set is large enough that refreshing creative is the cheapest way to lower spend per result.
Optimization goal
A CPI campaign gives you installs at a predictable price. A ROAS campaign might deliver fewer installs at a higher average price, yet return more revenue. Comparing the two on cost per install alone is misleading.
Seasonality
Competition rises in Q4, around major holidays and when large publishers launch big titles. Expect higher prices in late November and December, and plan tests for quieter weeks.
Example budgets for three common setups
The figures below are illustrative planning examples, not market benchmarks. Replace them with your own data after the first two weeks.
- Indie puzzle game, soft launch in two tier-2 countries: example daily budget of $100-200, CPI bidding, three video creatives and one playable. Goal: collect day-1 and day-7 retention for 1,000-3,000 installs.
- Hybrid-casual game scaling in the US: example daily budget of $1,000-3,000, retention or ROAS goal once revenue events are verified, six to ten active creatives rotating weekly.
- Mid-core strategy title: example daily budget of $2,000 and up per major country, ROAS day-7 goal, separate campaigns for iOS and Android because value per user often differs between platforms.
A useful rule for sizing a test: estimate the number of conversions the optimization goal needs, multiply by the CPI or cost per event you expect, and fund at least that for the learning period. Underfunded tests produce noise, and noise looks like a failed channel.
How do you estimate the cost before launching?
You can build a rough model before spending anything. Start from what a player is worth to you, then work backwards to a bid ceiling.
- Estimate lifetime value (LTV) per install from your own data or soft-launch results: ad revenue per daily active user multiplied by expected days of activity, plus in-app purchase revenue.
- Decide your payback window, for example 90 or 180 days.
- Set a maximum CPI that keeps LTV at the end of that window above cost, with margin for refunds and platform fees (Apple and Google take their share of in-app purchases).
- Compare that ceiling with the bid suggestions shown in the Unity dashboard for your countries.
- If the suggested bid is far above your ceiling, fix the product or the creative before buying traffic.
Where does money get wasted on Unity Ads?
Most overspending comes from setup issues rather than high bids. These are the ones we see most often during account reviews:
- Broken attribution. If your mobile measurement partner (AppsFlyer, Adjust, Singular or similar) is not passing postbacks correctly, ROAS campaigns optimize against missing data.
- Too many countries in one campaign. A single bid across the US and India means you either overpay in India or never win in the US.
- Creative fatigue. Performance usually falls as the same video is shown repeatedly to the same audience. Watch the trend in install rate per creative week over week.
- Ignoring source-level data. Unity reports performance by publisher app (source ID). Some sources send installs that never open the game twice. Lowering bids or blocking those sources is standard practice.
- Judging ROAS too early. A day-7 ROAS goal cannot be evaluated on day 2. Give the campaign time to mature before you change targets.
Unity Ads compared with other mobile networks
Unity is one network among several. AppLovin, ironSource (now part of Unity), Mintegral, Google App Campaigns, Meta and TikTok all buy mobile game installs. Each has different inventory and different strengths.
Unity’s inventory sits inside games, so the audience is already playing on mobile. That tends to suit gaming advertisers better than, for example, a finance app. Google App Campaigns reach Search, YouTube and Play Store placements, which helps non-gaming apps. Meta and TikTok offer interest and lookalike-style reach with stronger social creative formats.
Most studios run two to four networks and compare cohorts by network in the measurement partner, not in each network’s own dashboard. Self-reported numbers from each network tend to overlap and claim the same users.
Where to start this week
Pick one game, one or two countries and one optimization goal. Confirm that install and revenue postbacks show up in both the Unity dashboard and your measurement partner, with matching counts within a reasonable margin. Prepare at least three distinct video concepts and one end card.
Set a test budget large enough to reach the learning volume, write down the LTV-based CPI ceiling you calculated, and review source-level data after the first week. If you want a second opinion on the setup, our team reviews Unity accounts as part of mobile user acquisition work, but the checklist above is enough to run a clean first test on your own.
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