IPM, or Installs Per Mille, is a mobile advertising metric that measures the number of app installs generated per one thousand ad impressions. It is one of the most important metrics for evaluating the effectiveness of ad creatives in mobile game user acquisition, as it captures the entire conversion funnel from seeing an ad to completing an install.
How IPM Is Calculated
The IPM formula is straightforward:
IPM = (Installs / Impressions) x 1,000
For example, if your ad receives 50,000 impressions and generates 1,500 installs, your IPM would be 30. This means for every 1,000 times your ad is shown, 30 people install the game.
IPM effectively combines two conversion steps into one metric: the click-through rate from ad to app store, and the app store conversion rate from store listing view to install. This makes it a more holistic measure of creative performance than either metric alone.
Why IPM Matters for UA Managers
For UA managers and growth leads, IPM is the single best metric for evaluating ad creative quality. Here is why it outperforms other metrics:
- Isolates creative performance: Unlike CPI, which fluctuates with auction dynamics and bid strategies, IPM reflects how persuasive your creative actually is.
- Enables fair comparison: You can compare IPM across different ad networks, campaigns, and time periods to identify your best-performing creatives.
- Predicts scalability: High-IPM creatives tend to scale better because ad networks reward engaging ads with more impressions at lower costs.
- Drives creative iteration: Tracking IPM over time reveals when creatives start losing effectiveness due to creative fatigue.
IPM Benchmarks by Game Genre
IPM benchmarks vary significantly by game genre, platform, and ad format. Here are general ranges based on industry data:
- Hypercasual games: 30-80+ IPM. These games have mass-market appeal, so ads convert a broad audience.
- Casual games (puzzle, match-3): 20-40 IPM. Strong creative concepts around satisfying gameplay moments perform well.
- Midcore games (strategy, RPG): 10-25 IPM. Narrower audiences mean lower IPM, but higher lifetime value compensates.
- Hardcore games: 5-15 IPM. Niche appeal results in lower IPM, but highly engaged users justify the investment.
These benchmarks also differ by ad format. Playable ads and rewarded video ads tend to produce higher IPMs than static banners because they give users a taste of the actual gameplay experience.
Strategies to Improve IPM
Improving your IPM requires optimizing both your ad creatives and your app store presence:
Creative Optimization
The single biggest lever for IPM improvement is producing more creative variations and testing them systematically. Studios that test 50+ creative concepts per month consistently outperform those that test fewer than 10. Key approaches include:
- Diverse visual hooks: Test different art styles, characters, gameplay moments, and emotional triggers to find what resonates with each audience segment.
- Multiple ad formats: Run video, playable, and static formats simultaneously. Each format reaches users in different mindsets.
- Rapid iteration: When you find a winning concept, create multiple variations to extend its effective lifespan before fatigue sets in.
This is where AI-powered creative tools become essential. Layer enables studios to generate hundreds of ad variations from a single concept, using over 300 AI models for image and video generation. Instead of waiting days for manual production, teams can produce and test new creatives in hours.
App Store Optimization
Since IPM includes the app store conversion step, your store listing directly impacts your IPM:
- Screenshots and video previews: Align your store assets with your top-performing ad creatives for a consistent experience.
- Icon testing: Your app icon is the first thing users see in the store. Test multiple variations.
- Description and ratings: High ratings and clear descriptions remove friction between clicking an ad and installing.
IPM and the Creative Production Pipeline
The biggest challenge with IPM optimization is not understanding the metric but rather producing enough creative material to test. Traditional creative production workflows create a bottleneck: designers can only produce a limited number of concepts per week, and each concept may have only a few variations.
Modern workflow automation tools solve this by letting teams define creative templates and then generate dozens or hundreds of variations automatically. Layer's platform connects AI image generation directly into creative production pipelines, enabling teams to maintain high IPM by constantly refreshing their creative supply.
With custom style training, studios can ensure that AI-generated creatives stay on-brand while still exploring a wide range of visual concepts. This combination of speed and brand consistency is what separates high-performing UA teams from the rest.
Measuring IPM Across Your Portfolio
For studios running multiple games, tracking IPM at both the creative and portfolio level reveals important patterns:
- Cross-game creative insights: A visual concept that drives high IPM in one game may work across your portfolio with adaptation.
- Genre-specific benchmarks: Build internal benchmarks by genre so you know what "good" looks like for each title.
- Seasonal trends: IPM can fluctuate with competition during peak seasons like holidays. Track year-over-year trends for accurate evaluation.
By establishing IPM as your primary creative effectiveness metric and building a production pipeline that supports rapid testing, you create a sustainable competitive advantage in user acquisition. The studios that generate and test the most creative variations per dollar spent are the ones that consistently achieve the highest IPMs and the lowest CPIs.