Country tiers in digital advertising: choosing your app's markets

Country tiers give you a starting point for choosing where to advertise. Use them to form a shortlist, then compare what it costs to acquire customers who keep using and paying for your product.

For an app team, the useful question is specific: which markets can support this app, at this price, with the budget and languages you can support? A tier label can help organize the research. Your campaign results should decide where the next dollar goes.

TL;DR

What the three country tiers mean

Country tiers organize the first questions in a media plan: how much might a customer spend, how competitive could acquisition be, and what would make this market worth testing? T1, T2, and T3 give teams a shared vocabulary for those expectations.

The three tables below cover 164 countries and territories, grouped for campaign planning. There is no universal advertising-tier register: an ad network, affiliate offer, or app category may put the same market in a different group. Use the exact country list supplied by your network or offer when setting targeting. A listing here does not establish that advertising or your product is available there.

Country codes use the two-letter ISO format. The tables give every entry in this reference; they do not assign a default tier to countries or territories that are not listed.

Tier 1 countries

Tier 1 is the starting group for testing an offer aimed at customers with more room to spend. Plan for competitive acquisition, then check whether the price and retention of your app can support it. A higher-cost market can still work when customers contribute enough revenue.

This table contains 20 countries. A shared tier does not mean shared language, search behavior, or willingness to pay for your particular app.

Tier 2 countries

Tier 2 gives you a broad set of markets to evaluate as you expand. Compare the cost of adapting your product and creative with the customer value you expect. Some markets in this group have substantial purchasing power; the label alone is a poor reason to lower your price.

This table contains 62 countries and territories. Evaluate each market on its own results before combining budgets.

Tier 3 countries

Tier 3 is often considered when looking for affordable reach. Test whether that reach produces the outcome your app needs: repeat use, purchases, subscriptions, or ad revenue. Measure the full path from install to value before increasing spend.

This table contains 82 countries and territories. The grouping does not predict the quality of an individual customer or guarantee inexpensive traffic.

Compare the cost of a paying customer

Cost per install, or CPI, is ad spend divided by attributed installs. It tells you the cost of getting someone to install. To evaluate a subscription app, follow that same group of users through to payment.

Consider two hypothetical campaigns. Each spends $1,000, and every user has had the same amount of time to convert. These figures illustrate the calculation; they are not country benchmarks or NaviStack campaign results.

Market B delivers four times as many installs. Market A acquires twice as many paying customers from the same spend. The calculation is:

Ad spend per paying customer = CPI / install-to-paying-customer rate

Use the rate as a decimal: $2 / 0.08 = $25. With zero paying customers, the ratio cannot give you a usable acquisition-cost estimate.

Even this comparison leaves a question open: what does each customer contribute? If Market A's customers cancel sooner or pay a lower price, its acquisition advantage may disappear. Compare revenue from equally mature groups of acquired users, account for refunds and the costs of serving them, and decide how long you can afford to wait for acquisition spend to pay back.

Return on ad spend, or ROAS, compares attributed revenue with ad spend. Revenue equal to ad spend is 100% ROAS; it does not cover your other costs. Record whether your revenue figure is gross sales or proceeds after deductions so the comparison stays consistent.

For an app funded by advertising, replace the subscription conversion step with the ad revenue generated by the acquired users over a defined period. Retention still matters: a low installation cost tells you little about how much revenue those users will generate.

Be clear about what a market test can prove

A test needs a question. You might be checking whether people understand an ad, complete onboarding, start a trial, or renew a subscription. Each outcome answers a different question.

Our recommendation is to validate willingness to pay in the market where you intend to sell. An onboarding test elsewhere can reveal a confusing screen, but it leaves demand for your offer in the destination market unresolved. Keep those conclusions separate when deciding whether to expand.

Choose a campaign objective that matches the question. Google documents that App campaigns can optimize for installs or actions such as in-app purchases, and that setup includes language and location choices. Selecting those settings is part of the experiment. Google's App campaigns overview

Before comparing results, write down the conversion event and observation period. A trial start is not a paid renewal. A group acquired yesterday has had less time to subscribe than one acquired a month ago. Avoid declaring a winner while those differences still explain the numbers.

Build campaigns around the decision you need to make

Apple recommends considering individual-country campaigns when a market needs a dedicated budget or when you want to understand its value. It also describes grouping countries with similar customer value or shared attributes such as language. Apple's campaign-structure guidance

For a small team, that suggests a practical rule: create a separate campaign when you need a separate decision. If one market needs different creative, a different offer, or a protected test budget, evaluate it separately. If several markets share the same offer and similar economics, a group can be easier to manage. Keep country-level reporting available so an average does not hide which market is driving the result.

Review the whole route from ad to purchase before launching. Check the promise in the ad, store listing, onboarding, paywall, displayed price, and support experience. For a subscription app, the subscription launch checklist provides a starting point for checking the purchase and access flow.

Avoid fragmenting a modest budget into more tests than you can interpret. Google specifies different bid-to-budget recommendations for different App campaign strategies and warns that substantial changes during learning can disrupt performance. Check the guidance for the strategy you use before setting a test budget or repeatedly changing targeting. Google's App campaign best practices

Choose your first markets

Start with a small shortlist you can explain. For each country, fill in the same planning sheet before spending:

Keep the tier in that sheet as context. When results arrive, add spend, paying customers, revenue, and how long those customers have been observed. If the evidence is still too thin to support a decision, record that explicitly. Choose the next market because you have a reason to test it, and increase spend because the results support it.