Most UA conversations start with budget. How much can we spend, what CPI can we hit, when do we scale? Sensor Tower's data on the top 20 US finance apps suggests starting somewhere else.
The number
Sensor Tower looked at the top 20 finance apps by US downloads between Q2 2025 and Q1 2026. It compared three advertising metrics against download growth to see which one moved most closely with it. The data was presented at the TikTok Digital Summit 2026 in Istanbul.
- Growth in # of creatives
- 0.474
- avg. +346 creatives YoY
- Growth in ad impressions
- 0.410
- avg. +178M impressions YoY
- Growth in ad spend
- 0.337
- avg. +$30M YoY
Source: Sensor Tower, presented at TikTok Digital Summit 2026, Istanbul (Q2 2025–Q1 2026).
Creative count came out on top. It beat impressions, and it beat spend by a clear margin. The leaders in the group, including Klarna, Chime, and Robinhood, grew their unique creatives by more than 1,000 year-over-year. Klarna was highlighted separately for pairing new creative testing with 37% year-over-year download growth.
What a 0.474 actually means
This is a moderate correlation, not a law of physics, so it's worth being precise about it.
It doesn't mean that making more ads guarantees more downloads. It also doesn't prove that creative volume caused the growth. Apps that are growing often have more money and bigger teams, and those make more creatives possible.
What it does say is this: across 20 of the most competitive apps in the most competitive category, the teams that grew their creative output tended to grow their downloads. That relationship was stronger than the one between spending more and growing more. Doubling a budget without new creatives means showing the same ads to more people, harder. The data says that's the weaker bet.
Why creative count matters more than it used to
Three things in the same dataset explain the pattern.
Creatives die fast now. In financial services, roughly half of all ads are retired within 10 days of launch, up from about a quarter in early 2023. If your library is small, you run out of working ads long before you run out of budget.
The whole category sped up. New unique creatives per financial services advertiser per month are up 108% versus Q1 2023. Standing still on creative output means falling behind the median, not holding position.
The platforms reward variety. Meta's Andromeda update made the ad itself the main targeting signal. The system reads each creative and matches it to the people it fits, so every genuinely different ad is a new route to a new audience. Ten versions of the same ad with different button colors are one route, not ten. TikTok made the same point on stage: the industry solved volume, but not relevance.
That last point is the catch. The winning number isn't more ads, it's more different ads. New hooks, new personas, new use cases, new formats. Finance advertisers also moved from mostly image ads to mostly video ads over the same period, which is another sign that the leaders are spreading out rather than repeating.
How to use this if you're not Klarna
You don't need +1,000 creatives a year to apply the lesson. You need the habit behind it.
- Count your concepts, not your ads. Once a month, group your live creatives by idea. If most of them share the same hook, you have a variety problem, not a volume problem.
- Set a floor on new concepts per week. Pick a number your team can hold, even if it's three. Consistency matters more than bursts.
- Put a challenger next to every winner. Given 10-day lifespans, your best ad is probably already fading. Its replacement should already be running.
- Judge creatives past the install. Cheap installs that never subscribe don't count. Compare install-to-trial and install-to-paid per creative before you scale one.
- Hold budget flat for a test cycle. Try growing creative output for a month without raising spend. Then see which lever moved your numbers.
Where Pantheon fits
Producing different ads every week is the part that breaks most teams. That's the part Pantheon automates. Ad Intelligence shows what's working in finance right now. Ad Create & Clone turns any reference ad into new on-brand concepts for your app. Variations & Localisations cuts each one for every format, OS, and market. Your creative count goes up without your team size going up with it.
Bring one ad that works for you, and leave with a week of new concepts to test against it.
Sources
- Sensor Tower, presented at TikTok Digital Summit 2026, Istanbul (top 20 US finance apps by downloads, Q2 2025–Q1 2026; creative count and lifespan data, US, Q1 2023–Q1 2026).
- Meta Engineering, December 2024.