How do we evaluate a successful creative? Which KPI matters the most: install rate, CPI, retention, ROAS, daily active users?These are some of the most common questions UA teams ask, and after working across multiple companies and games, I can confidently say that there has never been one consistent answer. Some of the most data-driven organizations even attempt to build formulas combining several KPIs into a single "creative performance score," hoping to finally identify the magic formula.But here is the uncomfortable truth: there is no universal formula. Not because measurement is impossible, but because context changes everything.<h2 id="0ee8e527-4bc1-4460-8d63-eb7c6674ec83" data-toc-id="0ee8e527-4bc1-4460-8d63-eb7c6674ec83" style="font-size: 24px; line-height: 1.2;">Performance never lives in isolation</h2>Any experienced UA professional knows that comparing a campaign launched in December ,when CPIs surge due to seasonal competition, with one launched in August is misleading at best. Yet this type of comparison still happens frequently when teams try to evaluate creatives in isolation from market dynamics.The same applies to retention. A drop in early retention is often attributed to the creative that brought the users in, while the real driver might be a recent onboarding change, difficulty tuning, or an economy adjustment introduced by the product or design teams. Without looking at the broader system, conclusions can quickly become inaccurate and costly.Another classic trap appears when teams optimize only for the highest ROAS creatives and expect those results to scale linearly with higher budgets. In free-to-play ecosystems, the pool of high-value users is not infinite. Scaling spend inevitably changes audience composition, which in turn changes performance. What worked at a small scale will not always hold at a larger one.These are not tactical mistakes. They are the natural consequence of teams optimizing different parts of the business without a shared performance framework.<h2 id="4d6a3bd6-e6d8-446b-bb2f-6386b5f8dec5" data-toc-id="4d6a3bd6-e6d8-446b-bb2f-6386b5f8dec5" style="font-size: 24px; line-height: 1.2;">When teams don't see the system, they blame each other</h2>I made these mistakes myself early in my career. Like many specialists, I initially focused on mastering my own domain without fully understanding how strongly every part of the game ecosystem influences the others. Over time, one thing became clear: creative success is never just a creative question. It is a system question.User acquisition, product, monetization, design, marketing, and creative production are not independent functions. They are deeply interconnected levers of the same machine. A small change in onboarding, progression pacing, pricing strategy, or live-ops cadence can significantly impact campaign performance. Likewise, aggressive UA scaling can reveal product weaknesses that previously went unnoticed.When teams lack this shared understanding, something predictable happens: teams start pointing fingers at one another.UA blames Design for poor retention. Design blames Product for monetization pressure. Product blames Marketing for bringing "the wrong users." Creative teams are asked to "fix performance" without visibility into the broader drivers behind it.At scale, this stops being a marketing issue and becomes a leadership issue. Misaligned incentives create invisible friction across departments. Unmanaged friction compounds into cultural tension. And cultural tension eventually affects strategic stability.In reality, most performance issues are not owned by a single team. They emerge from misalignment across the system.<h2 id="c780c132-5be4-4dc7-aad1-a799bd1a579f" data-toc-id="c780c132-5be4-4dc7-aad1-a799bd1a579f" style="font-size: 24px; line-height: 1.2;">What high-performing teams do differently</h2>Organizations that consistently give themselves the best chances of success are typically not the ones searching for a perfect KPI formula. Instead, they tend to focus on a few key practices:Building shared performance definitions across UA, Product, Monetization, and Design.Evaluating creatives within product and market context, not in isolation.Aligning scaling decisions with monetization capacity and player experience.Treating performance as a cross-functional system outcome, rather than a departmental metric.There may not be a single magic UA creative formula. What most often drives stronger results is context awareness, alignment, and system thinking.<h2 id="cd516f84-477b-4e74-883a-d0f7568bbc00" data-toc-id="cd516f84-477b-4e74-883a-d0f7568bbc00" style="font-size: 24px; line-height: 1.2;">Beyond tactics: developing system awareness</h2>Because building this kind of shared understanding requires more than tactical skill, many gaming organizations are beginning to invest in cross-functional learning focused on performance system thinking, not just channel optimization.Over the past year, I have structured these principles into a learning architecture designed to help gaming teams understand performance as an interconnected system, spanning UA, monetization, product, and leadership decision-making.Mouna Ferré is Founder of Sparking Waves. If these challenges resonate with what you are navigating inside your studio, explore our courses.<a target="_blank" href="https://www.sparking-waves.online/en#Courses">Check out our courses</a>

The real risk in UA performance isn't choosing the wrong KPI. It's building teams that optimize in silos.

The Myth of the “Magic” UA Creative Formula

When teams don't see the system, they blame each other

What high-performing teams do differently

Beyond tactics: developing system awareness

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The Myth of the “Magic” UA Creative Formula

The Myth of the “Magic” UA Creative Formula

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