The reading list our operators actually use.
We don't publish much ourselves — we'd rather point at the work that genuinely shapes how high-budget gaming accounts get run. Curated and re-checked quarterly.
Measuring what platforms can't tell you.
Once you cross seven figures in monthly spend, platform-reported ROAS stops being a steering signal. These are the canonical references on incrementality and ghost-ads measurement.
Measuring advertising incrementality using Ghost Ads
The clearest written explanation of ghost-ad measurement and why holdout-based incrementality is the only honest way to evaluate paid spend at scale.
Meta's shift to incrementality optimization
What changes for high-spend gaming accounts now that Meta optimises against incremental conversions instead of last-touch attributed ones.
Why paid UA is the primary driver of discoverability
Guest post explaining why 'turn on the organics' is a fantasy — and how paid UA actually drives the rankings that drive the organics.
Living inside SKAN 4 / AdAttributionKit.
The post-IDFA stack is now four years old and still misunderstood. These guides are what we hand new analysts on the iOS side of the team.
Inside SKAN: the full SKAdNetwork guide
The most complete public reference on SKAdNetwork mechanics — postbacks, conversion values, null attribution, redownloads — written for practitioners.
SKAdNetwork 4.0 strategy review
Coarse vs. fine conversion values, multiple postback windows, hierarchical source IDs — and which of those actually change how you bid.
Conversion value design post iOS 14
The original conversion-value primer — still the cleanest explanation of why CV schema design is the single highest-leverage UA decision on iOS.
Index pages that compound for years.
Programmatic SEO for gaming brands isn't 'spin up 100k pages'. It's information design — and the public case studies below are the ones we benchmark against.
CSGOSkins — programmatic SEO breakdown
How CSGOSkins layers item, market and statistics templates to attract 4M+ monthly visits — annotated page-by-page with what's working and why.
Gaming marketplace SEO case study (+40% YoY)
A mid-size gaming marketplace going from a stalled SEO program to 500K+ monthly organics — useful as a reality check on realistic timelines.
Launching a new gaming site to 380K users / month
Cold-start SEO playbook for a brand-new gaming domain — sandboxing, topical authority, and what to actually do in months 0–6.
What's actually happening in mobile gaming.
Macro context for anyone planning the next 12 months of UA. We rely on Naavik for the gaming-specific lens that the ad-tech blogs miss.
Navigating Q5: mobile UA's hidden quarter
Why the late-Dec to mid-Jan window is structurally underpriced for mobile UA — and how to plan creative and budget for it.
How strategy & card games are surviving post-IDFA
Genre-level deep dive on a category that disproportionately suffered from ATT — and the operator playbooks that pulled it back.
Match Masters: a global success no one believed in
Deconstruction of one of the most efficient UA scale-ups of the last few years — what the team did differently on creative, monetisation and live ops.
Every link above goes to an external publication we don't own. We curate this page because the public conversation on gaming UA is fragmented across ad-tech blogs, analyst newsletters and one-off case studies — and most operators waste a lot of cycles re-finding the same canonical pieces. If you publish something we should add, send it over.
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Direct contact: contact@sage-systems.com