The offer and the partnership

What AppLovin gives advertisers and how Tierra uses it to win and onboard business: the referral program, the matched-credit deal, Tierra's standing with AppLovin, why the channel fits a client, and the advertiser communities. Read alongside the playbook for the platform model and vocabulary. Rep contacts and the day-to-day routing rules live in the playbook.

The referral program

Tierra refers new advertisers to AppLovin, and both sides get credit when they sign up. This matters for two reasons: it's a real perk to offer a prospect, and referral-code access is something most agencies don't have. Tierra does, so it's a genuine edge in a pitch.

Always sign a new advertiser up through the tracked link so the referral registers:

Signup link: https://ads.applovin.com/auth/signup?referralCode=TIERRA
Referral code: TIERRA

New accounts get a matched credit: spend $5k, get $5k back (AppLovin's promotional terms). It's a low-risk way for a prospect to prove the channel out with real money behind it, not a token test budget.

Keep our referral payments confidential. The matched credit above is the client-facing perk you can offer a prospect. What AppLovin pays Tierra for referrals stays internal, and we don't discuss those details externally.

The referral basics also appear in the playbook by design, so both surfaces stay accurate. The fuller offer detail lives here.

Access and the trial offer

Access is open. AppLovin now onboards advertisers self-serve, with no minimum GMV or spend to get in and credit cards accepted. That's a recent shift: the early closed beta only took advertisers running roughly $20k a day or $30M in annual GMV. The channel is reachable for a far wider range of brands than it was a year ago, though the budget-and-margin fit below still decides whether it's worth running.

Three forms of credit come up when qualifying a prospect, and they're distinct:

The matched referral credit above (spend $5k, get $5k) is the standard client-facing perk.
A 30-day no-fee performance trial is available for a qualified prospect. AppLovin runs against a target CPA (around $50 is typical), the account funds a working daily budget (roughly $1k to $2.5k a day, since $500 a day is too little to learn from), and a second $5k credit can stack on top.
For a struggling account, the rep can fund finite restructure credits (on the order of $5k to $10k) to pay for a test. They cap out and a renewal isn't guaranteed, so design the test to prove something before the credit runs dry.

Keep our referral payments confidential, as above; the credits and the trial here are the client-facing side.

Onboarding an account

A few mechanics differ from other platforms:

There's no Business Manager layer. The brand owns its own account and the account owner is the billing owner, so set it up under a senior brand email or a shared alias the brand controls, not a personal inbox that might leave.
Add Tierra's agency email to the client's account as a member (through the Manage members screen), but never create the account itself with the agency email. An account created under the agency email can't later be added to another account, which blocks future work.
A "waitlist" message on signup almost always means the referral code wasn't entered. Re-run signup through the tracked link.
Standing up multiple accounts, or separate sub-brand accounts, needs an explicit rep green-light before launch. It isn't automatic.

The partnership

Tierra is AppLovin's top ecommerce agency and is positioned to become the single largest AppLovin advertiser in the world. That standing is one of Tierra's biggest assets, so treat it as something to protect, not spend.

The AppLovin team is lean on purpose. Rather than staffing up to run accounts themselves, they teach Tierra their best practices and trust Tierra to run the accounts. That trust is what the whole relationship rests on. To keep it healthy, Growth Strategists are the only people who contact the AppLovin reps directly, and everyone else routes questions through them. The full rep list and the routing rules are in the playbook.

Why AppLovin fits a client

AppLovin brings in genuinely new customers instead of re-capturing traffic a brand already gets from Meta or Google. Most channels compete for the same shoppers a brand is already reaching; AppLovin reaches people inside mobile apps who aren't in that pool. So it adds growth on top of existing channels rather than shuffling the same demand around.

Agency competition on AppLovin is also still thin. Tierra got in early, while the channel is young and the field isn't crowded, which is a large part of why the standing above was possible to build.

What AppLovin's own data shows

Useful figures for a pitch, drawn from AppLovin's case data (cite them as AppLovin's, not as a general guarantee):

Running the full creative roster beats cherry-picking only the top performers, on the order of 7 to 23% better.
One brand grew from about $60k to about $223k a week in four weeks by expanding from 20 creatives to more than 350 at the same ROAS.
Dynamic product ads show roughly a 25% median ROAS lift for brands with five or more products.

These reinforce the volume-and-testing message the rest of the playbook is built on.

Which clients fit

AppLovin suits advertisers with real budget and margin behind them. The platform's AI needs enough spend and enough conversions to learn, and the work (steady creative production, testing, scaling) only pays off at a size where the returns cover it. A client running a large enough budget with room in their margins gets the most out of it.

It's a poor fit for very small accounts. A brand that wants premium results on a tiny budget can't feed the model enough to learn, and the account stalls before it can prove anything.

The best-fit profile, from the accounts that have scaled: a white-hat ecommerce brand or app with real budget and margin, an average order value in roughly the $40 to $70 range, and ideally one already winning on Meta, which is a strong leading indicator. Subscription offers work well too; optimize them to CPP, or to ROAS when order bumps and upsells inflate the purchase count.

Weaker fits to qualify carefully: lead-generation telehealth, affiliate funnels, and anything on a budget too small to feed the model. Video sales letters are not a disqualifier. They can and do scale here, but they tend to run aggressive and lean on strong claims, so they need compliant framing and a rep pre-screen (see compliance framework).

When qualifying a prospect, weigh budget and margin honestly rather than forcing a fit. For more on how Tierra positions AppLovin and who it suits, see the AppLovin page on the Tierra website.

Communities

There's an active advertiser community on Telegram (the "AppLovin Masters" group) where advertisers compare notes: what's working, platform quirks, what the reps are saying. It's a useful pulse on the channel beyond Tierra's own accounts.

Never share any client's specifics there. No names, no performance numbers, no screenshots. The community is for general notes and platform questions, not client detail. Tierra plans to run its own community as well.

AppLovin is also piloting a generative-video program that agencies can onboard into, worth tracking as a future creative-supply option.

The playbook: what AppLovin Ads is, the rep contacts and routing, the referral basics, the platform model.
strategy: campaign structure and audience strategy for a fitted account.
media buying: budgets, scaling, and the spend levels the platform needs to learn.