How Listonic closed the ad-revenue blind spot in a complex retail media stack
Listonic’s own ad stack brings together custom ad demand partners, brokered sources, and standard mediation networks. That setup creates revenue streams that standard MMP connectors don’t fully see. The team needed accurate ad revenue attribution inside one measurement setup — and a way to connect that revenue back to acquisition sources.
About Listonic
Listonic is a grocery shopping list app with more than 30 million downloads worldwide. It helps families and couples organize everyday shopping, share lists in real time, remember what needs to be bought, and make shopping easier without turning it into another planning project.
The shared shopping list is at the core of the product. In selected markets, Listonic also helps users discover relevant promotions and offers, so they can save money when it makes sense without having to hunt for deals.
Alongside the consumer app, Listonic operates its own retail media platform, helping FMCG brands and retailers reach shoppers at moments of real purchase intent — while they are planning what to buy.
Background
Listonic monetizes primarily through mobile advertising, with premium subscriptions as a secondary stream managed through RevenueCat. Unlike a typical app that relies mainly on rewarded video or interstitials from a few standard mediation networks, Listonic runs its own ad stack that manages providers and supports mediation across custom ad demand partners, brokered demand sources, and networks such as AppLovin MAX and AdMob.
That setup creates a higher volume of revenue-related events and a more complex ad revenue attribution problem. The hard question was never basic install tracking. It was whether ad revenue from non-standard partners could be trusted inside an MMP at all — at a scale of about 200 million ad impressions per month.
Challenge
To run growth with confidence, Listonic needed:
- A way to measure ad revenue from custom ad demand partners and brokered sources that don’t natively send revenue data into MMPs
- Numbers that reconcile with partner dashboards, so AdOps and growth can trust one view
- A single view that connects acquisition sources to real ad revenue, not just installs
Solution
Listonic integrated AdShift across Android and iOS and reports ad revenue from custom demand partners and standard mediation into one pipeline. Custom SDK ad integrations flow alongside AppLovin MAX and AdMob, with consent handled through Didomi and IAB TCF. Subscription revenue from RevenueCat sits in the same measurement stack, so paid and ad income can be read together. Each revenue event is attributed back to the installing user and acquisition source — including Google Ads and Apple Search Ads — so AdOps and growth share the same source of truth.
Results
Shortly after go-live, Listonic compared AdShift with partner reporting across its custom ad demand sources and standard mediation networks such as AppLovin MAX and AdMob. Coverage landed at about 100% overall — including custom demand partners that make up most of Listonic’s ad revenue and don’t natively push that revenue into MMPs. AdShift now measures about 200 million ad impressions per month. Paid channels already in market — Google Ads and Apple Search Ads — show attributed ad revenue on the same surface, including revenue from custom partners.
Listonic re-checked figures against their systems about two months after go-live and confirmed the numbers still matched.
“We tested two well-known MMPs for a couple of years. Ad revenue tracking was always presented as a supported feature, but in practice it was never accurate enough for our setup. That’s probably because our monetization is more complex than in a typical app relying mainly on rewarded video or interstitials, and the number of revenue-related events is very high.”
Looking forward
Listonic and AdShift continue to deepen campaign-level reporting, expand coverage across paid UA channels, and harden day-to-day views so AdOps can trust one surface for retail media and ad-monetized growth.
Does your monetization stack look like Listonic’s?
If a large share of your ad revenue sits with custom demand partners or brokered sources that don’t natively send data into MMPs, we should talk.