Unity Ads vs AdMob vs AppLovin MAX: Which Ad Network Is Best for Unity Games

If you’ve shipped a mobile game in the last few years, you already know the drill. You build the game, you polish the core loop, you obsess over level design — and then, almost as an afterthought, you drop in an ad SDK because, well, you have to monetize somehow.

Here’s the uncomfortable truth: that “afterthought” decision is often worth more to your bottom line than three months of extra polish on your gameplay. Two developers can launch the exact same game, with the exact same number of installs and the exact same retention curve, and one can walk away with 5x the revenue of the other — purely because of how they wired up their ad stack.

The three names that dominate this conversation are Unity Ads (now folded into Unity LevelPlay), Google AdMob, and AppLovin MAX. Developers throw these three around interchangeably, as if picking one is like picking a font. It isn’t. They solve different problems, they behave differently at different scales, and choosing the wrong one for your stage of growth is one of the most common — and most invisible — ways indie studios leave money on the table.

This article breaks down what each platform actually does, how they differ under the hood, what kind of revenue you can realistically expect, and how to match a network (or combination of networks) to your game and your growth stage.

Networks vs. Mediation: The Distinction Nobody Explains Properly

Before comparing anything, it’s worth clearing up a distinction that trips up even experienced developers.

An ad network is a source of demand — it has advertisers with real budgets who want to buy impressions in your app. Google’s AdMob network is a demand source. So is AppLovin’s own advertising exchange.

Mediation, on the other hand, is the layer that sits above multiple networks and runs an auction to decide who gets to serve each impression. Unity LevelPlay, AdMob’s mediation stack, and AppLovin MAX are all, at their core, mediation platforms.

Why does this distinction matter so much? Because a single, standalone network can only pay you what its own pool of advertisers is willing to bid. If one advertiser values your Tier 1 user at $18 and a completely different advertiser sitting in a different network values that same user at $27, a single-network integration will never surface that higher bid. You simply never see it. Mediation exists specifically to solve this — it invites every network you’ve connected into the same real-time auction and hands the impression to whoever pays the most.

This is why the honest answer to “should I use Unity Ads or AdMob?” is almost never “pick one.” It’s usually “run both, through a single mediation layer, and let them compete for every impression.” The real decision isn’t which network to use — it’s which mediation controller runs the auction.

Unity Ads and LevelPlay

If your game was built in Unity, Unity Ads is the obvious starting point — the SDK is baked into the editor, the terminology matches what you already know, and a working rewarded video placement can genuinely be running within an afternoon.

There’s an important catch developers need to know about, though. Unity Ads as a standalone integration effectively no longer exists in its old form. After Unity’s merger with ironSource, everything monetization-related was consolidated under LevelPlay, and the legacy Advertisement package has been phased out. Developers still running that old integration will keep receiving some fill, but performance quietly degrades over time — the kind of problem that never throws an error message, it just shows up as a slowly shrinking revenue line you might not notice for months.

What Unity does well:

• Native integration with no bridging headaches, so you avoid the usual plugin and build-configuration pain.
• Genuinely strong rewarded video performance — Tier 1 eCPMs regularly land in a healthy range because the placements feel like part of the game rather than an interruption.
• A pool of advertisers that skews heavily toward other game studios, which means the ads you’re showing are relevant to the exact audience playing your game.
• Ad Quality tooling that lets you see which creatives are actually running and block the ones that are hurting retention.

Where it falls short:

• Adding new demand partners on top of the default setup takes more manual effort than it should.
• The dashboard has become noticeably more complex since the merger, and legacy naming conventions can confuse anyone new to the platform.

Best fit: Casual and hyper-casual Unity titles where rewarded video does most of the earning. Fast-session, high-frequency-restart games are exactly the kind of loop that benefits from Unity’s rewarded placements.

Google AdMob

AdMob remains the most widely integrated ad SDK in existence, and it earns that position for one simple reason — it works, on day one, in nearly every country, with almost no setup friction.

Strengths worth knowing:

• Global fill that’s hard to beat. If a meaningful chunk of your players are in Tier 2 or Tier 3 markets where gaming-first ad networks don’t bother bidding aggressively, AdMob keeps your fill rate close to full.
• The fastest path to a working integration, especially for anything already built around Firebase.
• Access to Google’s enormous advertiser base, including brand budgets that pure performance-focused networks simply don’t carry — which noticeably lifts banner and native ad pricing.
• Free and predictable, with no account manager required to get up and running.
• In-app bidding on AdMob genuinely moves the needle; developers who’ve switched from a pure waterfall to bidding routinely report meaningful jumps in both total revenue and ARPDAU.

Where it’s weaker:

• Auction transparency is limited — you don’t get as much visibility into why a particular bid won compared to more sophisticated mediation platforms.
• Google’s own demand competing in the same auction it operates naturally raises questions about neutrality.
• Policy enforcement can feel harsh and impersonal, with account issues often arriving as an automated notice with limited room for a real conversation.
• For studios with heavy, scaled gaming traffic, AdMob alone tends to have a lower revenue ceiling than more advanced bidding-first setups.

Best fit: Your first game, your first wave of downloads, or any title whose traffic is spread across many different countries. It’s also a sensible default for family-friendly and simulation-style titles, where advertiser content standards and stricter child-directed treatment genuinely matter.

AppLovin MAX

MAX is the option built specifically for studios that are past the experimentation phase. AppLovin’s entire business is mobile game advertising, and that specialization shows in both the strengths and the trade-offs of MAX.

What makes it powerful:

• The deepest, most competitive auction of the three, unifying dozens of ad networks and SDK bidders into a single real-time auction rather than a manually ordered waterfall.
• Purpose-built for mobile games, particularly titles that lean heavily on rewarded video and interstitials.
• No-code A/B testing lets you experiment with different mediation configurations without pushing a new app build.
• The highest realistic revenue ceiling of the three platforms, particularly for studios with meaningful daily active users.

What makes it demanding:

• It’s genuinely more complex to set up and tune than the other two — this isn’t the platform to choose if you want something simple.
• AppLovin’s own demand sits inside the same auction as everyone else’s, which means it isn’t a fully neutral referee.
• Getting approved isn’t automatic. MAX reviews applications, and small, low-traffic apps are frequently declined or deprioritized until they can show real scale.

What actually gets an app approved:

1. A live, published app on Google Play or the App Store — not a build sitting in testing.
2. Meaningful daily traffic — a few thousand daily active users makes the conversation easy; a handful of testers makes it very difficult.
3. Original, differentiated content. Obvious, unmodified reskins tend to get rejected outright.
4. A clean, correctly configured privacy policy and SDK privacy manifest.
5. No history of policy violations on the developer account.

Best fit: Studios with real daily activity, especially in genres with strong session depth. This isn’t only limited to the obvious hardcore genres, either — there’s a strong case for niche, low-competition categories too. If you’re curious how quieter, less crowded genres can still build loyal, high-retention audiences that advertisers value, it’s worth reading this breakdown of one of the most underrated genres in mobile gaming — the kind of audience depth that quietly makes a MAX application much easier to justify.

The Mechanic That Actually Moves Revenue: Bidding vs. Waterfall

Regardless of which platform you choose, the single biggest lever for revenue isn’t the brand name on the SDK — it’s whether you’re running bidding or an old-fashioned waterfall.

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A waterfall calls networks in a fixed order of priority: Network A gets the first shot, then B, then C, until someone fills the impression. It’s slow, it requires constant manual tuning, and it systematically underprices your best-performing users, because the network at the top of the waterfall doesn’t have to compete with anyone — it just has to clear its own floor price.

In-app bidding flips that model. Every connected demand source bids simultaneously, in one unified real-time auction, and whoever values the impression most wins it. Because more bidders are competing for every single impression, publishers typically see a meaningful lift in eCPM simply from switching to bidding, with no other change to their app.

All three platforms support bidding today. MAX has pushed furthest toward a bidding-only model, AdMob runs bidding alongside legacy waterfall groups, and LevelPlay uses a hybrid approach. For most mid-sized studios, a hybrid setup — bidding as the primary engine, with a small manual waterfall underneath for high-value direct deals — remains the most reliable configuration.

Ad Formats: Where the Actual Money Comes From

Choosing a network matters less than most developers assume. Your format mix matters more. As a rough directional guide for Tier 1 markets:

• Banner ads sit at the low end, but carry almost no retention risk.
• Interstitials earn considerably more per impression, but poorly timed ones can noticeably damage Day 7 retention.
• Rewarded video is where the real money lives, with completion rates often exceeding 85–95% when the reward genuinely feels worth it — and it’s also the format with the lowest retention risk of all.
• Native ads sit comfortably in the middle, blending into the UI without disrupting the session.
• App open ads perform well but need careful frequency capping to avoid annoying returning players.

For most successful gaming apps today, rewarded video alone accounts for the majority of total ad revenue. That’s not an accident — it’s the only ad format players actively choose to watch.

Designing rewarded placements players actually want:

• Offering a continue after a failed run is consistently the highest-converting placement in casual games.
• Doubling a reward at the end of a level or run.
• Unlocking a hint, an undo, or an extra tool in puzzle-style games — genuinely close to free revenue when the mechanic fits naturally.
• Skipping a wait timer in progression or builder-style games.
• Granting an extra life or booster in match-style games, where ads and in-app purchases reinforce each other instead of competing.

Keeping interstitials from wrecking retention:

• Never show one mid-gameplay — only at natural breaks or transitions.
• Leave a meaningful gap, at least 45–60 seconds, between impressions.
• Suppress interstitials entirely during a player’s very first session.
• Never stack one immediately after a rewarded ad.

Poorly timed interstitials are one of the fastest ways to quietly tank Day 7 retention, sometimes by a shockingly large margin — and once players churn, no ad network on earth can monetize them.

Genre Changes Everything

Advertisers don’t pay for impressions — they pay for the audience behind them. That’s why eCPMs vary so wildly by genre. Strategy, RPG, and mid-core games attract players advertisers believe are more likely to spend money elsewhere, so those genres command significantly higher bids than pure time-killer casual titles.

Action-oriented and combat-style games sit particularly well in this category, since players engaging with progression and combat systems tend to be higher-value users across the board. If you’re building or evaluating a project in that space, it’s worth looking at something like this pinata shooting game template as an example of how action mechanics and reward-based progression can be combined into a format that’s both fun to play and naturally suited to rewarded-video-heavy monetization.

Genre isn’t a cosmetic choice — it quietly sets the ceiling on what your ad stack can ever earn, no matter how well you tune the auction afterward.

Retention Is Secretly a Monetization Feature

This is the part most ad-network comparisons skip entirely. eCPM is revenue per thousand impressions. Impressions only exist because of sessions. And sessions only exist because of retention.

Doubling your Day 7 retention typically does more for your annual revenue than any eCPM optimization ever could — and it’s usually far cheaper to achieve. Systems that give players a reason to come back tomorrow (progression, competitive elements, daily rewards) are the most reliable lever available, because every returning session is ad inventory you didn’t have to pay to acquire.

The sequencing matters: fix retention first, then optimize the ad stack. Studios that do it backwards end up with a beautifully tuned auction serving an audience that’s already stopped playing.

So, Which One Should You Actually Pick?

Choose AdMob if this is your first game, your daily active users are still in the low thousands, your traffic is spread across many countries, or your audience skews younger.

Choose Unity LevelPlay if your game is Unity-native, rewarded video is your main earner, and you want the shortest possible distance between the editor and a working monetization stack — just make sure you’re on the current package, not the legacy one.

Choose AppLovin MAX if you have real scale, a gaming-heavy audience, and someone on the team willing to actively tune the setup. The revenue ceiling is the highest of the three, but so is the operational effort required to reach it.

The setup most successful studios eventually land on isn’t really “choosing one network” at all — it’s running a single mediation controller (either MAX or LevelPlay) with AdMob, Unity Ads, and a handful of other networks all plugged in underneath as competing bidders. You’re not picking a network. You’re picking which auction house all of them compete inside.

A sensible rollout path looks something like this: launch with AdMob alone for the first few months to learn your retention curve and geography mix, then enable bidding and add one or two additional networks to measure the lift, and once you’re consistently seeing a few thousand daily active users, apply to MAX or migrate fully to LevelPlay — running a split test against your existing setup before fully committing.

For a deeper technical breakdown of each platform’s setup requirements, auction mechanics, and 2026-specific migration details, this detailed comparison guide on Unity Ads, AdMob, and AppLovin MAX is worth reading in full.

Frequently Asked Questions

Can I run Unity Ads and AdMob in the same game?
Yes, and in most cases you should — just make sure only one of them is acting as the actual mediation controller, with the other plugged in as a demand source underneath it. Running two full mediation SDKs at once tends to cause auction conflicts and added latency.

Which network actually pays the highest eCPM?
There’s no single universal winner. AppLovin MAX tends to produce the highest blended eCPM for scaled gaming traffic, Unity often leads specifically on rewarded video in Tier 1 markets, and AdMob wins on consistency and fill in emerging markets. Your specific geography mix ultimately decides the answer.

Why does my eCPM seem so low compared to what I’ve read online?
Almost always it comes down to traffic quality and geography rather than the network itself. A Tier 1 user can be worth many times more than a Tier 3 user for the exact same impression, and new apps typically sit through a learning period while the auction calibrates to their audience.

Is it genuinely hard to get approved for AppLovin MAX?
Yes, noticeably harder than signing up for AdMob. You’ll need a live app, real daily traffic, clearly original content, and a clean policy history. The common path is to launch on AdMob first, build up real traffic, then apply once you have the numbers to support it.

Should I focus on ads or in-app purchases?
Realistically, both. Hybrid monetization has become the standard approach for casual and hybrid-casual games — rewarded ads monetize the players who will never pay, while in-app purchases capture the small percentage who will. Removing ads for paying users is standard practice worth building in from the start.

Final Thoughts

If you want the short version: start with AdMob, move to LevelPlay if you’re Unity-native, and graduate to AppLovin MAX once you’ve earned real scale — and prioritize bidding over waterfall in every single scenario.

But none of this matters if the underlying game isn’t worth playing twice. Revenue is downstream of retention, retention is downstream of how good the core loop feels, and the ad network sitting on top of it all can only amplify what’s already working. Pick a genre with real monetization headroom, build something players genuinely want to reopen tomorrow, wire up a bidding-first mediation stack, and measure everything you do from there. That’s really the entire playbook.