Managed User Acquisition for Mobile Games

Managed user acquisition (managed UA) is paid user acquisition run for you by an outside team. You set the budget and the targets. The provider picks the ad networks, sets up and runs the campaigns, tests creative, moves budget toward what pays back and reports the results.

Studios can get that work done by a contractor inside their own accounts, a network's own account team, an agency or a managed UA service. The options differ in who holds the contracts with the ad networks, who owns the accounts and the data, and how the work is paid for.

What a managed UA provider does

The provider takes on the day-to-day work of paid acquisition. That usually covers:

• Network selection. Which ad networks to run, in which markets, with how much budget each.
• Contracts and billing. An insertion order (IO), the contract a media buy runs on, for every network you buy from.
• Campaign setup and tracking. Campaigns built in each network, with installs and in-app events attributed by your mobile measurement partner (MMP).
• Bidding and budget allocation. Daily changes to bids and budgets, and moving spend between networks toward the cohorts that pay back.
• Creative testing. Running ad variants and reading which ones work. Producing the ads is often priced separately.
• Reporting. One view of spend, installs, revenue and return across every network.

"Managed" also has a narrower meaning in ad tech. Many ad networks and demand-side platforms (DSPs) sell a managed service, where their own account team runs your campaigns on their platform. That covers one network. A managed UA provider runs several networks and decides how your budget is split between them.

Five ways to get UA done

Agencies sell managed UA too, so the label alone won't tell two offers apart. Ask whose contracts the media runs on. That decides how much of the work stays with your team.

Your contracts or the provider's

On your contracts, the provider runs campaigns in your accounts. You pay each network for its media and pay the provider for its work. You keep every contract, and every network you add still means a contract, a vendor setup, an integration and one more report on your side, even when someone else runs the campaigns.

On the provider's contracts, the provider holds the network agreements and buys the media itself. You sign one IO with the provider and get one invoice. Adding a network becomes the provider's job. Your spend then runs through one relationship, so before you sign, ask what happens to your campaigns and your data when the contract ends.

That per-network work shows in how many networks studios run. Gaming apps averaged 5.3 ad partners in 2025, down from 6 a year earlier, according to Adjust's Mobile app trends 2026. Hybrid casual, idle RPG and simulation games went the other way, to 9.8, 6.7 and 6.8 partners. Adjust reads the drop as studios choosing channels by predicted lifetime value. Our read, from running UA for publishers, is that the limit is often operational. Each new partner brings another round of contracts, setup and reporting, and the hours run out before the profitable inventory does.

What managed UA costs

Managed UA is priced the way agency work is: a percentage of ad spend, a monthly retainer, a smaller retainer plus a performance bonus, or, rarely, a price per install. Pricing guides published this year by two UA agencies put the percentage at 5–15% or 10–20% of spend, and retainers at $3,000–$25,000 a month. Creative production and tools such as your MMP usually sit outside the fee.

SuperMedia charges an 8% management fee on managed spend, billed as its own line next to the media. Creative production is billed separately. Our pricing guide works each model through at $50,000, $200,000 and $500,000 a month.

When managed UA fits

Managed UA tends to fit when:

• you have the budget and the targets, and not the people to run more networks;
• your core channels run well, and growth now depends on networks you don't buy yet;
• you would rather have one contract and one invoice than one per network;
• a launch or a scale-up needs networks live sooner than hiring allows.

It fits less well when:

• UA is your strategic moat and you can hire for it. Build in-house. If the reason is control, you can license the software SuperMedia runs on and operate it yourself.
• You need full-funnel brand work. TV, out-of-home, influencers and PR are an agency's home turf.
• Your spend sits on a few channels you're happy with. If breadth isn't this year's priority, a managed service has little to expand.
• An agency you already use is delivering. If switching would cost more than it gains, stay.

Questions to ask a managed UA provider

1. Whose contracts does the media run on? If it's the provider's, ask what happens to your campaigns and your data when the contract ends.
2. What is the fee as a number, and what is it charged on? Convert it to a monthly amount at the spend you plan, and ask for everything billed outside it in writing.
3. Which networks can you run for us today? Ask what adding one involves, on the provider's side and on yours.
4. What do you need from us to start? The answer shows how much integration work lands on your team.
5. Where does the reporting data live, and who owns it?
6. How are results judged? Agree the attribution source, the targets and the measurement window before the first campaign. For channels such as retargeting, ask how incremental lift is tested.

How SuperMedia does it

SuperMedia is the AI-native alternative to the UA agency. You bring budget, targets, and a tracking link — we grow your spend and improve your profit across 35+ networks under one IO. Agencies add headcount to scale; we add software.

SuperMedia is powered by the SuperScale Stack and needs no stack license.

Your spend runs through SuperScale's own network agreements — one IO, 35+ networks. Onboarding is a tracking link, not an integration project. From there:

1. You send budget, growth goals and KPI targets, plus a tracking link from your MMP.
2. We activate the networks. The contracts, procurement and SDK work are already done on our side, so each network only needs switching on.
3. Creative goes into production, resized and localised to each network's specifications, and creative-level analysis feeds the next round.
4. Campaigns go live, run by SuperAI, an autonomous AI workforce executing 80–90% of publishing ops inside guardrails, 24/7. Predictive LTV and ROAS modelling puts budget on the cohorts that pay back.
5. You read one report. Every network is unified in SuperPlatform, in your own BigQuery. You own the data.

What the 8% covers:

• Network expansion & sourcing
• Legal, procurement & IO handling
• Campaign setup & UA management
• Predictive LTV & ROAS modelling
• Creative-level performance analysis
• Optimisation & scaling
• Unified reporting
• Ongoing relationship management

Creative production, including resizing and localisation, is billed separately.

SuperScale has run UA and publishing operations for 70+ publishers and 200+ games. On one game we took over, UA ROI went from −39% to +11%, worth $1.37M in extra profit after all fees. On another, a 2024 engagement, ROAS went from 50% to 153% and CPI fell 78%, from $2.80 to $0.60, and the game reached breakeven in four months. The write-ups are in our case studies.

One platform: licensed or managed. If your own team would rather run UA on the same software, the SuperScale Stack is the licensed version, which your team operates on your own network agreements. You choose one or the other, and both prices are on the pricing page.

To see what managed UA could add on the networks you don't run today, put your own numbers into the ROI calculator, or talk to a publishing strategist.