Web-to-App for Mobile Games: Funnels, Web Shops and the Ads That Feed Them

Web-to-app, often written web2app, has become one of the most discussed topics in mobile marketing. For games it means two related but different things. The first is acquisition: an ad sends people to a web page, often a quiz, a demo or an offer, before they reach the app store, instead of straight to the store. The second is monetisation: players buy currency and items in a web shop, outside the app stores' payment systems, a practice that court rulings since 2025 have opened up considerably. This guide covers both, the rules that apply, how measurement works, and where interactive ads fit into each.

Web-to-app acquisition

In a classic app install campaign, the ad goes straight to the store. In a web-to-app campaign, the ad goes to a web page first. Subscription apps popularised the approach: a quiz or onboarding flow on the web qualifies the person, sometimes takes a payment, and then sends them to install. Games use it in narrower ways:

• A playable demo on the web. An HTML5 playable is web content, so the same mini-game that runs inside an ad can run on a landing page, letting people from social, search or influencer traffic try the game before going to the store.
• Pre-registration and launch pages that collect interest before a game is out. Pre-registration campaigns cover the store-side tools.
• Offer pages that explain a welcome bundle or an event and then send the player to install or to the web shop.

The trade-off is friction. Every extra step loses people, so a web page has to earn its place by adding information, qualification or an offer the store page cannot. The platforms also optimise differently: a web-to-app campaign on Meta or TikTok is usually optimised for an event on the web page, so the ad platform learns from web behaviour rather than from installs.

Web shops and link-outs

The bigger change is on the monetisation side. For most of the app stores' history, purchases of digital goods inside an iOS or Google Play game had to go through the store's own billing, with the store's commission. Rulings in the United States have changed that, though the position is still moving.

• Apple. On 30 April 2025, in Epic v Apple, a US federal court found Apple in contempt of an earlier injunction and barred it from charging a commission on purchases made outside the app through links, or from restricting how those links and buttons look. In December 2025 the Ninth Circuit largely upheld the order but said Apple may seek a limited fee tied to the costs of the hand-off, and the Supreme Court has since agreed to hear Apple's appeal. At the time of writing, commission-free link-outs from US apps are allowed, but the final terms are not settled.
• Google. In Epic v Google, the courts upheld an injunction requiring Google to let developers in the US tell players about other ways to pay and link to them, running to November 2027. Google has changed its programmes and terms more than once in response, so check the current Play Console policy before building a link-out.
• Elsewhere. In the European Union, the Digital Markets Act allows alternative payment and distribution under each store's specific terms and fees. In most other countries the old rules largely still apply.

For a game, a web shop can mean keeping a much larger share of each purchase, and offering bundles or bonuses there that the in-app store cannot match. Many large publishers now run one. The costs are real, though: payment processing, tax, refunds and fraud are now your problem, and every step between the player and the purchase loses some of them.

Measurement

Web-to-app breaks the usual attribution chain, because the ad click and the install happen in different places. The main mobile measurement partners offer web-to-app tools that carry the click information through a web page and a smart link to the store, and connect web purchases to players in the app. Three practical points:

• Use one identity across web and app. A player who buys in the web shop must receive the purchase in the game, which usually means logging in with the same account in both.
• Carry parameters through every link. Campaign, creative and offer information should travel from the ad to the landing page to the store link. Deep linking in playable ads covers how.
• Count web revenue in ROAS. If a campaign's players buy in a web shop, leaving that revenue out of return on ad spend undervalues the campaign.

Creative for web-to-app

The ad has a different job when it leads to a web page. It no longer has to sell the install outright; it has to make the next step worth taking. That favours ads that create curiosity and a specific promise: try the first level here, see which hero suits you, claim the starter pack. A playable is well suited to this, because the playable and the landing page can be the same experience. The viewer starts in the ad and continues on the page, with their choices carried over.

Playable Ads Maker has a Web destination for exactly this: instead of a network package, it builds one self-contained web file whose call to action opens your own link, a product page, a web shop or an MMP tracking link, with the deep-link parameters the viewer's choices produced attached. The same project can still be exported for the in-app networks.

A simple web-to-app plan for a game

1. Decide which job the web step does: qualify, demonstrate, or sell. If it does none of them, send traffic straight to the store.
2. Build the page around one action, with the playable demo or the offer above the fold on a phone.
3. Set up web-to-app attribution with your MMP and test the whole chain on a real iOS and Android phone, including what happens when the app is already installed.
4. Run it against a direct-to-store control on the same audience, and compare cost per retained player and revenue, not cost per click.
5. If you sell on the web, keep the in-app store too, and make sure every purchase arrives in the game reliably.