Merge Puzzle Ads: A Category Leaning on One Title

One merge title now buys like a match-3 giant. Gossip Harbor runs 7,658 ad plans and carries more estimated lifetime exposure than Royal Match - and in the same 30 days, the four other merge titles we tracked run between 763 and 5,067 plans each. Before treating merge as the genre that comes next, it is worth asking how much of the category's buying actually sits in a single store listing.

The shape of the category

Pull up the ad records for any week of casual puzzle and merge titles are hard to miss. What is easier to miss is how unevenly they arrive. In the 30 days to October 11, 2026, the biggest merge title we tracked ran 7,658 ad plans and the smallest ran 763 - a tenfold spread inside one mechanic. Across the same dates, the three match-3 leaders sit in a band between roughly 8,400 and 13,300 plans - about 1.6x between the top and bottom of the group.

That difference in shape is what this piece is about. Rather than score one genre against the other, we ran both groups through the same window and the same counting rules - five merge titles, three match-3 titles, September 12 to October 11, 2026 - and asked four narrower questions: how much buying each title runs, how concentrated the merge group is, which formats carry the plans, and how much of each library is still carried by new plans rather than old ones.

The revenue context explains why the comparison is worth making. A 2025 casual-games market report estimated puzzle in-app revenue above $8 billion for the year - the only major casual subgenre still growing - with match-3 itself just under $5 billion and roughly flat. The same report put merge-2 revenue at roughly a third of match-3's by 2025, up from under a tenth two years earlier. Revenue growth is why merge gets attention; ad records are where that attention can be checked against actual buying.

What comes back is a category whose leading title already operates at giant scale, with everything behind it still small - and a format mix that does not look much like match-3's.

Scale: one title at match-3 height

Read the top four rows together and one merge title sits comfortably among the match-3 giants. Gossip Harbor, a title released in September 2022, runs 7,658 ad plans on 6,615 deduplicated creatives - more plans than Gardenscapes, a 2016 title, and a creative library 58% larger. Its tracked exposure tells the same story harder: 3.68B in estimated lifetime exposure against Royal Match's 2.59B and Gardenscapes' 0.93B, on a creative count two-thirds the size of Royal Match's. Candy Crush, the outlier in both directions, still tops everything at 5.46B.

Then read the whole chart. The five merge titles sum to 16,317 plans; the three match-3 titles sum to 34,700 - match-3 still runs more than twice the delivery setups. The merge group is also lopsided from the inside: Gossip Harbor alone accounts for 47% of its plans, and Gossip Harbor plus Tasty Travels account for 78%.

Creatives and ad plans: deduplicated tracked records in the window, counted once. Reinvested: creatives in the window flagged as reused, with their share of the title's creatives. Est. exposure: global lifetime estimate for creatives active in the window; long-running libraries accumulate more of it, so treat the column as a delivery-volume indicator, not an efficiency score.

Formats: video leads, but merge leans on playables and images

Split each group's ad plans by the format of the creative they carry and a second difference appears. The match-3 group is a video-first operation: 77.3% of its 34,700 plans run video creatives. The merge group runs video on 65.4% of its 16,317 plans - and fills the remaining third with 22.6% image ads and 12.0% playable ads.

The playable share is the number worth underlining. One in eight merge-group plans carries a playable ad - an interactive mini-demo instead of a clip. Playables cost more to produce than videos, so a double-digit share reads as a deliberate bet: let the player try the merge loop before installing. The image share is the opposite play - cheap static variants for volume testing. Together they say the merge group's buying is more format-diversified than the match-3 giants', whose scale lets them concentrate on video.

Reinvestment: a product decision, not a genre trait

If merge really ran a different operating model from match-3, the clearest place to see it would be reinvestment - how much of a title's creative library stays in rotation, carried by new plans. The record refuses to cooperate. Royal Match, the match-3 giant, reinvests only 2.2% of its creatives. Gardenscapes, the other match-3 veteran, reinvests 18.9%. Among merge titles, Merge Mansion sits at 2.8% while Travel Town reaches 21.1%.

Both extremes appear in both categories. What the numbers actually track is library strategy: Gardenscapes and Travel Town keep a compact library alive and pushed into new plans, while Royal Match and Merge Mansion churn fresh creatives and let old ones retire. The median merge title does lean lower - the group's younger libraries have had less time to accumulate carried-over creatives - but nothing in this window supports "merge reinvests, match-3 doesn't." Check the title, not the genre.

Four creative patterns the volume runs on

Numbers say where the money goes; the creatives say what it buys. Reviewing the highest-exposure merge creatives in the window, four patterns repeat - and none of them would surprise a UA lead, which is the point. The category has industrialized them.

One more observation sits between patterns one and three. The Microfun titles - Gossip Harbor and Seaside Escape - both run creatives that open on near-identical CG footage: a woman with an infant in snowbound ruins, a fireplace, a rebuild. Same studio, two titles, one visual opening. Whatever else merges and match-3 do differently, the top of the merge category now produces its ad volume the way mature genres do: shared narrative assets, templated structures, localized variants.

Creative spotlights

Five creatives, one per merge title, drawn from the highest-exposure video ads in the window. Each was reviewed frame by frame against the footage before writing; the descriptions below cover what is actually on screen.

CreativeScope take

The honest summary of the window: merge has not replaced match-3, and the ad records say so plainly - the match-3 giants still run twice the plans. What has happened is narrower. Gossip Harbor has built a creative operation at giant scale, its tracked exposure now ahead of Royal Match's, and Tasty Travels has followed the same playbook to half its size. The rest of the merge category buys far more modestly, and leans harder on playables and images to stretch each dollar of production.

For UA and creative teams, three checks follow from the data. First, when you benchmark merge, benchmark the title, not the genre - reinvestment rates range from 2.2% to 21.1% inside both categories. Second, the format gap is a production-budget signal: the merge group fills a third of its plans with formats that are cheaper or more interactive than video, which is where a smaller team can compete without matching Gossip Harbor's output. Third, the four creative patterns above are templates, not coincidences - they repeat across five different studios, which means they are testable in your own account within a week.

What would change the read: a second merge title sustaining five-figure plan counts would turn "one title at scale" into a category shift. That is worth re-checking next quarter.

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