AppLovin Discovery Campaigns Deliver 284% Incrementality After Four Months of Testing

Four months ago, CTC began testing AppLovin's newest campaign type: Discovery. The platform promised to reach completely new audiences that other channels couldn't access. Now, with enough data across multiple brands, the results are clear.

Discovery campaigns are averaging 284% incrementality, with 85-90% completely new visitor traffic. Even after excluding outliers, the remaining test results average 190% incrementality. For context, our benchmark for AppLovin Prospecting campaigns was already strong at 141-150%. Discovery campaigns are operating in a different tier entirely.

What Makes AppLovin Discovery Different from Prospecting

While AppLovin's Prospecting campaigns target 60-75% new visitors, Discovery campaigns reach 85-90% completely new audiences. The difference matters for 8 and 9-figure ecommerce brands that have exhausted their addressable audiences on Meta and Google.

Discovery represents AppLovin's effort to create a purely prospecting-focused campaign type. The tracking isn't perfect due to cookie limitations, but the incrementality tests confirm that Discovery campaigns are reaching users who have never interacted with your brand before.

CTC has started layering in a small percentage of Prospecting or Universal campaigns on top of Discovery to create a full-funnel approach on the platform. But the primary focus remains on Discovery for new customer acquisition.

"Discovery campaigns are highly, highly incremental. We're seeing results that are fundamentally different from what we've achieved on other platforms.""

Connor McLaughlin, AppLovin Specialist, CTC

The Creative Strategy That Wins on AppLovin

AppLovin's ad placements favor longer content than most advertisers are creating. According to the platform's own data, 31-45 second videos receive 37% of total AppLovin spend, while 46-60 second videos capture 44% of spend. Combined, that means 81% of spend goes to videos longer than 30 seconds.

The reason comes down to AppLovin's unique ad format. Users get 30 seconds of unskippable attention before the skip option appears. That gives advertisers significantly more time to deliver their message compared to the 3-5 second attention window on other platforms.

Long-form UGC and street interview content perform best on AppLovin. The creative needs to take advantage of that 30-second window and extend beyond it to capture the most favorable ad placements. Brands that upload only 15-20 second clips from their Meta libraries are missing the placements where AppLovin prefers to spend.

Captions also increase click-through rates since many users play mobile games with sound off. The creative strategy should assume silent consumption while maximizing the extended attention window.

Tactical Implementation: Weekly Refreshes and Drip Scheduling

Weekly creative refreshes drive the strongest performance on AppLovin, though brands can still see results with bi-weekly or monthly updates. The key difference is scaling speed. Accounts with weekly creative drops can increase budgets faster than those with slower refresh cycles.

One tactical discovery involves how to introduce new creative without tanking performance. AppLovin aggressively pushes spend to new videos to generate learning data quickly. While this benefits testing velocity, it can create temporary performance dips when multiple new videos launch simultaneously.

The solution is dripping new creative in batches of 2-3 videos every few days instead of bulk uploading 10 videos at once. This approach maintains performance stability while still feeding the algorithm fresh content.

"I would upload maybe 10 videos at once to test, but AppLovin is really good about pushing spend to new creative. You'll see some performance dips because you're giving so much spend to new creative you don't know is going to perform.""

Connor McLaughlin

The Creative Set Reporting Hack

AppLovin allows up to 10 videos per creative set, but this creates a reporting blind spot. Performance data appears at the creative set level, not the individual ad level. For brands that want granular creative feedback, the workaround is structuring one video per creative set.

This approach enables performance tracking for individual videos through creative set metrics. While not strictly necessary, it provides valuable feedback for content creation teams about which specific videos drive conversions versus those that spend budget without results.

The platform does show spend volume, clicks, and click-through rates at the ad level. Strong click-through rates combined with meaningful spend volume indicate the algorithm favors specific videos. But conversion data requires the creative set workaround.

Product Catalog Segmentation Strategy

AppLovin's unique ad format includes three sequential components: 30-second video, static image, and product catalog. The product catalog syncs directly from Shopify and can be segmented using custom groupings similar to Google's custom labels.

For campaigns focused on specific product categories, the catalog should reflect those products. A perfume campaign should display perfume products in the catalog section rather than showing the entire inventory. This alignment between video content, static creative, and product catalog creates a cohesive user experience.

The segmentation happens at the campaign level, allowing precise control over which products appear in each campaign's catalog section. This tactical detail impacts conversion rates by maintaining message consistency from video through product display.

Scaling Timeline and Budget Allocation

CTC has helped brands scale from zero to $30-50,000+ in monthly AppLovin spend within the first month. The $5,000 spend match partnership with AppLovin creates a 10,000 total test budget over 1-2 months, providing strong signal data for long-term channel viability.

The scaling speed depends heavily on creative refresh frequency and catalog organization. Brands with weekly creative drops and proper product segmentation can increase budgets more aggressively than those with monthly refreshes and broad catalog targeting.

For most 8-figure brands, AppLovin Discovery should be treated as a dedicated new customer acquisition channel rather than a small test. The incrementality results justify meaningful budget allocation, especially for brands that have hit ceiling effects on Meta and Google.

Frequently Asked Questions

Ready to Test AppLovin Discovery for Your Brand?

CTC manages AppLovin as part of a full-funnel paid media strategy for 7 to 9-figure ecommerce brands. If you want to find out whether AppLovin Discovery fits your customer profile and start with a $5,000 spend match, we can help.

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