Glance Advertising in India: Lock Screen Ads, Pricing, Formats, and Why Screen Zero Is Rewriting Mobile Marketing

Most advertisers still think of the smartphone lock screen as dead space — a momentary obstacle between the user and their app. Glance turned that assumption on its head, and the numbers are hard to argue with: the platform now reaches somewhere in the ballpark of 400 million devices across India, Southeast Asia, and APAC, making it one of the largest content discovery platforms ever built on a surface that most brands had written off entirely. What makes this genuinely interesting, from a media planning perspective, is that these impressions are delivered before the user has even unlocked their phone — which means there is zero competition from other apps, no feed to scroll past, and no algorithm deciding whether your creative gets seen.

What Is Glance Advertising and How Does It Work in India?

Glance is a content discovery platform built by InMobi Group — the Bangalore-headquartered ad tech company backed by SoftBank — and it operates natively on the lock screen of Android OEM smartphones. The platform is pre-installed on devices from Samsung, Xiaomi, Oppo, Vivo, Realme, and Motorola, which means it reaches users without requiring any app download or opt-in behaviour; the experience is simply part of the phone from day one. When a user picks up their phone, they are greeted by a dynamic, AI-powered stream of personalised content — news, sports scores, entertainment clips, gaming snippets — and advertising is woven into this stream in a format that feels native rather than interruptive.

What a lot of people miss is that Glance is not just a lock screen advertising product; it is a full content ecosystem that includes Roposo, a short-video platform, and Glance TV, which extends the reach of the platform to connected television screens. The advertising inventory on Glance sits across what the company calls Screen Zero — the lock screen itself — as well as a scrollable Glance Feed that users access by swiping up from the lock screen. These two surfaces behave quite differently in terms of user mindset and ad performance, which is something we always explain to clients before they brief their creative teams.

At SmartAds, we always tell our clients that Glance advertising is fundamentally an attention product, not a click product — though it delivers on both. The average Indian smartphone user unlocks their phone somewhere between 80 and 150 times a day, which means the lock screen gets seen with a frequency that no other mobile advertising surface can match organically. That daily active users figure, which InMobi has reported at over 140 million across its key markets, tells you something important about the depth of habit this platform has built.

What Ad Formats Are Available on the Glance Platform?

The creative palette on Glance is considerably wider than most brand managers expect when they first encounter the platform. The foundational format is the banner ad on the lock screen — a static or animated creative that occupies the lower portion of the screen zero surface — but this is really just the entry point; the more interesting formats are the ones that take advantage of the full-screen real estate that the lock screen naturally provides. Video ads on Glance play natively within the content stream, typically in a six-second or fifteen-second format, and because they autoplay without sound by default, the visual storytelling has to do the heavy lifting.

Roadblock ads are where the platform genuinely differentiates itself from anything else available in mobile advertising India. A roadblock on Glance means your brand owns 100% of the ad inventory on the platform for a defined period — typically a day or a specific daypart — which eliminates competitive clutter entirely. Within roadblock formats, there are further tiers: what the platform refers to as Micro, Macro, and Mega Impact roadblocks, which vary in the duration of exclusivity and the number of impressions guaranteed. We have run Mega Impact roadblocks for FMCG brands during Diwali that delivered north of 50 million impressions in a single day, which is a scale that is genuinely difficult to replicate on any other single mobile surface.

Native advertising on Glance is executed through content cards that are styled to match the editorial look and feel of the surrounding Glance content; these perform particularly well for brand awareness objectives because users engage with them as content rather than as advertising. On top of that, there is the One-Click Install format — which we will cover in detail later — and interactive formats that include polls, swipe-up gestures, and gamified elements. The Glance ad formats library has expanded significantly over the past two years, partly driven by generative AI capabilities that allow dynamic creative optimisation at scale.

How Much Does Glance Advertising Cost in India (CPM, CPC, and Roadblock Rates)?

Frankly speaking, this is the question we get asked most often, and it is also the one where we see the most confusion in the market — largely because most publishers and intermediaries are reluctant to publish actual numbers. So let us be direct. For standard lock screen advertising on Glance, the CPM works out to roughly ₹80 to ₹150 for run-of-network inventory, which is a number that surprises most first-time advertisers when they compare it to what they are paying for Instagram reach at comparable targeting depth. Premium placements — particularly roadblock inventory during high-demand periods like IPL or the festive season — can push CPM rates into the ₹300 to ₹600 range, and during peak Diwali inventory windows, we have seen rates go higher than that for guaranteed exclusivity.

CPC-based campaigns on Glance, which are more common for performance marketing and app install campaign objectives, tend to land somewhere between ₹8 and ₹25 per click depending on the audience segment, the creative format, and the competitive pressure on the inventory at that time. The CTR benchmarks on Glance lock screen ads are meaningfully higher than industry averages for mobile advertising — the platform reports average CTR figures in the range of 0.8% to 2.5% depending on format, which compares favourably to the 0.1% to 0.3% that most banner ads on mobile web or in-app inventory deliver. Viewability, measured through Integral Ad Science partnerships, consistently comes in above 90% for lock screen placements, which is a number that most brand safety managers find reassuring.

For minimum budgets, the platform is not really structured for very small spends; in our experience, a meaningful Glance advertising campaign in India requires a minimum commitment of somewhere around ₹5 to ₹10 lakh for a month-long run-of-network campaign, while roadblock formats typically start at ₹25 lakh and scale upward depending on the impact tier. That said, programmatic advertising access through InMobi DSP or InMobi Exchange does allow smaller budgets to access Glance ad inventory, which opens the door for mid-market brands that cannot commit to direct-buy minimums.

What Makes Glance Lock Screen Advertising Different from Traditional Mobile Ads?

The honest answer is: almost everything. Traditional mobile advertising — whether it is banner ads inside apps, interstitials between game levels, or pre-roll video ads on YouTube — operates in a context where the user has already chosen to do something else, and your ad is an interruption of that intention. Glance lock screen advertising operates in a fundamentally different moment: the user has picked up their phone but has not yet decided what to do with it, which creates a window of genuine openness that no other mobile marketing surface can claim. This is the insight that InMobi built the entire Glance platform around, and it is one that we think the industry has been slow to fully appreciate.

Non-intrusive ads are a phrase that gets used loosely in digital advertising India, but on Glance it has a specific technical meaning: the content and advertising on the lock screen are delivered as part of the native experience, not as an overlay or a pop-up that interrupts an action the user was already taking. The result is that user engagement metrics on Glance consistently outperform what we see on comparable mobile advertising surfaces — dwell time on lock screen content averages several seconds per impression, which is a meaningful difference from the sub-second exposure that characterises most programmatic banner inventory. We have found, across campaigns we have run for clients in categories ranging from e-commerce advertising to automotive, that the brand recall scores from Glance campaigns are noticeably higher than those from equivalent spends on conventional mobile ad networks.

One automotive brand we worked with had been running pan India digital campaigns across standard mobile ad networks for two years with solid reach numbers but disappointing brand recall — their tracking studies showed aided recall hovering around 18%. We shifted a portion of their ad spend to Glance lock screen advertising over a six-week period, maintaining the same overall budget, and their next tracking study showed aided recall at 31% — a lift that their research agency described as statistically significant. The creative was not dramatically different; the context was.

Which Brands and Industries Are Best Suited for Glance Advertising?

The platform skews toward mass-market reach with smart audience targeting layered on top, which makes it particularly effective for categories that need both scale and relevance simultaneously. FMCG brands have been among the earliest and most consistent advertisers on Glance, precisely because the platform's reach into Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities — where Android OEM smartphones dominate and Glance comes pre-installed — mirrors the distribution footprint that these brands are trying to activate. E-commerce advertising on Glance performs especially well during sale events, when the combination of high frequency and high-intent audience targeting creates a conversion environment that is difficult to replicate elsewhere.

App install campaign advertisers — gaming companies, fintech apps, food delivery platforms, and OTT services — have found the one-click install format particularly valuable, because it removes the friction of navigating to the Play Store entirely; the user can initiate an app download directly from the lock screen, which reduces drop-off at every stage of the funnel. Swiggy has been publicly cited as a Glance advertising success story, and from our own experience managing campaigns for food and delivery brands, the combination of daypart targeting — showing ads around lunchtime and dinner hours — with the lock screen's high-frequency exposure creates a performance marketing environment that delivers strong return on investment for these categories.

Frankly speaking, the categories that tend to get less value from Glance advertising are those with very niche B2B audiences or very high-consideration purchase cycles where a single lock screen impression is unlikely to move the needle — industrial equipment, enterprise software, and similar verticals. For consumer brands, however — particularly those in telecom, consumer electronics, personal care, and financial services — the platform's combination of scale, targeted advertising depth, and brand safety makes it one of the more compelling additions to a mobile marketing mix.

How Does Glance Target Audiences Across 400 Million Devices?

The audience targeting capabilities on Glance are powered by InMobi's first-party data infrastructure, which is one of the largest mobile-first data assets in Asia. Because Glance is pre-installed on Android OEM devices and operates at the operating system level, it has access to device signals — content consumption patterns, language preferences, location data, app usage behaviour — that most mobile advertising platforms simply cannot see. This first-party data feeds an AI-powered personalisation engine that determines which content and which ads are shown to which users, and the targeting granularity available to advertisers is considerably deeper than what standard demographic targeting on social platforms provides.

Audience targeting on Glance spans demographic segments — age, gender, device tier — as well as behavioural and interest-based segments built from content consumption patterns on the platform itself. Location targeting is available down to the city level, which means a brand running a campaign in Mumbai, Delhi, and Bangalore can allocate budget and creative separately for each market; we have run campaigns where the creative messaging was localised by city, which consistently outperforms a single national creative in our experience. Regional language targeting is a particular strength of the platform — Glance serves content in Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Bengali, Kannada, Marathi, and several other Indian languages, and ad creative can be matched to the language preference of the user, which is a capability that matters enormously in markets outside the top metros.

Retargeting on Glance uses InMobi's cross-platform data to reach users who have previously interacted with a brand's mobile properties — visited their app, engaged with their ads on InMobi Exchange, or been part of a custom audience segment uploaded by the advertiser. Mobile Measurement Partner integrations — with AppsFlyer, Adjust, Branch, and similar MMP platforms — allow app install campaign advertisers to close the loop between a Glance lock screen impression and a verified app install, which is essential for performance marketing accountability. What we tell our clients is that the targeting on Glance is only as good as the brief they give us; the platform has the data depth to be very precise, but vague audience definitions produce vague results.

What OEM Partners Does Glance Work With in India?

Glance's distribution strategy is built entirely around pre-installation partnerships with Android OEM manufacturers, which is the reason the platform achieved 400 million device scale without ever needing to run a user acquisition campaign of its own. Samsung was among the earliest and most significant OEM partners, and Glance is pre-installed on a substantial portion of Samsung's Android device lineup in India; given that Samsung consistently ranks among the top two smartphone brands by volume in the country, this partnership alone accounts for a significant share of the platform's reach. Xiaomi, which has historically dominated the budget and mid-range Android segment in India, is another major OEM partner, and the combination of Samsung and Xiaomi coverage means Glance reaches across both the premium and mass-market ends of the Android ecosystem.

Oppo, Vivo, Realme, and Motorola round out the core OEM partnership roster, which together cover the vast majority of the Android smartphone market in India outside of the Apple ecosystem. The Jio Phone Next — the ultra-affordable smartphone developed in partnership between Jio and Google — also came with Glance integration, which extended the platform's reach into the entry-level segment and into rural India in a way that most digital advertising platforms have never meaningfully penetrated. This OEM-first distribution model is what makes Glance fundamentally different from app-based advertising platforms; the inventory is not dependent on users choosing to download anything, which gives the platform a structural reach advantage that is very difficult for competitors to replicate.

At SmartAds, we often use the OEM partnership story to explain to clients why Glance's reach figures are not comparable to monthly active users on a social app — because on Glance, the device is the distribution channel, not the user's voluntary behaviour. A user who has a Samsung or Xiaomi phone with Glance pre-installed is part of the addressable audience regardless of whether they actively seek out the content; they encounter it every time they pick up their phone.

How Do You Measure ROI and Campaign Performance on Glance?

Ad measurement on Glance has matured considerably over the past few years, and the platform now supports a fairly complete suite of performance tracking that satisfies both brand and performance marketing objectives. For brand awareness campaigns, the primary metrics are impressions, viewability (measured through Integral Ad Science, which has a formal verification partnership with Glance), reach, frequency, and brand lift — the last of which is typically measured through third-party brand tracking studies or through InMobi's own panel-based lift measurement tools. The viewability benchmarks on Glance are among the highest in mobile advertising India, consistently above 90%, which is a meaningful data point when you are justifying ad spend to a CFO who has questions about digital ad fraud.

For performance marketing campaigns — app installs, lead generation, e-commerce conversion — the measurement framework relies on MMP integration, which connects the Glance ad impression or click to a downstream conversion event tracked by the advertiser's chosen measurement partner. AppsFlyer and Adjust are the most commonly used MMPs among our clients running app install campaigns on Glance, and the attribution window and model can be configured to match the advertiser's standard methodology, which makes cross-channel ROI comparison more meaningful. CTR, CPC, cost per install, and return on ad spend are the standard performance marketing metrics, and Glance's campaign dashboard provides real-time reporting on all of these.

What we have found, across multiple campaigns, is that the biggest measurement gap for most advertisers on Glance is not the platform's reporting capability — it is the absence of a consistent baseline. Brands that have not previously run lock screen advertising do not have a benchmark for what good looks like, which makes the first campaign feel harder to evaluate than it should be. Our approach at SmartAds is to set explicit pre-campaign benchmarks based on category norms and our own historical data before a single rupee is spent, so that the post-campaign analysis has something meaningful to compare against.

What Is the One-Click Install Feature and How Does It Help App Marketers?

The One-Click Install — or OCI — is arguably the most commercially significant format innovation that Glance has introduced for performance marketing advertisers, and it is one that we think is still underutilised by many app marketers in India. The mechanics are straightforward: when a user sees an app install campaign creative on the Glance lock screen, they can initiate the download directly from the lock screen without being redirected to the Google Play Store, without needing to unlock their phone first, and without navigating through any intermediate screens. The app begins downloading in the background while the user continues with whatever they were going to do next.

The impact on conversion rates is significant. In a standard mobile advertising funnel for an app install campaign, the drop-off between an ad click and a completed install is typically somewhere between 40% and 70%, depending on the category and the quality of the Play Store listing. The OCI format collapses that funnel almost entirely; because there is no redirect, no store page to evaluate, and no additional decision point, the friction that causes most of that drop-off is simply removed. A retail client in Pune that we managed an app install campaign for saw their cost per install drop by roughly 35% when we shifted from standard click-to-store creatives to OCI-enabled Glance lock screen ads — which, on a campaign budget of ₹30 lakh, was a saving that made a very visible difference to their quarterly performance marketing numbers.

For app marketers, the OCI format works best when the app has strong brand recognition — because the user is making a download decision without visiting the store page, the brand itself needs to carry the persuasion weight that the store listing would normally contribute. This is why we typically recommend OCI campaigns for established apps running re-engagement or reactivation campaigns, or for well-known brands launching new app features, rather than for completely unknown apps trying to build their first user base.

Is Glance Advertising Brand Safe? Understanding Content Moderation on the Platform

Brand safety is a legitimate concern on any content discovery platform, and Glance has invested meaningfully in building the infrastructure to address it — which is something we verify independently before recommending the platform to clients in sensitive categories. The platform operates a curated content model rather than a fully open user-generated content environment, which means the editorial content that surrounds advertising on Glance is selected and moderated rather than algorithmically surfaced from an uncurated pool. This is a structural brand safety advantage compared to social platforms where advertiser content can appear adjacent to controversial user-generated material.

Integral Ad Science has a formal measurement partnership with Glance that covers viewability verification and invalid traffic detection, which gives brand advertisers the third-party assurance that most large advertisers now require as a standard condition of their media buys. IVT rates on Glance are reported to be well below industry averages for mobile programmatic advertising, which reflects both the OEM distribution model — which eliminates the fake app ecosystem that drives most mobile ad fraud — and the active IAS monitoring. Content categories that are restricted from advertising on Glance include gambling, adult content, tobacco, and certain financial products that do not meet regulatory requirements, which aligns with standard brand safety frameworks used by most large advertisers.

We have seen this backfire when advertisers assume that brand safety on Glance is a given without checking the specific content adjacency settings for their campaign; the platform does allow advertisers to set content category exclusions and to specify the types of editorial content their ads should appear alongside, and not configuring these settings properly can lead to placements that a brand's legal or compliance team would find uncomfortable. Our standard practice at SmartAds is to run a full brand safety configuration review before any Glance campaign goes live, which takes an extra day but has saved more than one client from an uncomfortable conversation.

Glance Advertising vs Google Ads, Meta Ads, and Dailyhunt: Which Is Right for You?

The comparison that comes up most often in our client conversations is Glance versus Meta — specifically Instagram — because both platforms offer visual, mobile-first ad formats with audience targeting capabilities. The meaningful difference is context: on Instagram, the user is in an active browsing mindset, choosing to engage with content they have opted into; on Glance, the user is in a passive, pre-intent state, which produces a different kind of attention. Neither is inherently superior; they serve different moments in the consumer journey, and the most effective campaigns we have run use both in combination — Glance for broad awareness and high-frequency brand exposure, Meta for retargeting and conversion.

Google Ads — particularly Universal App Campaigns — is the natural comparison for app install campaign advertisers, and the honest assessment is that Google UAC offers broader reach across a more diverse set of surfaces, while Glance offers deeper engagement on a single high-attention surface. The CPM on Google UAC for comparable audience targeting in India works out to somewhere between ₹40 and ₹100, which is lower than Glance's standard rates, but the viewability and engagement depth on Glance consistently outperforms what we see from UAC inventory in our campaign data. For advertisers with performance marketing objectives and strong creative assets, Glance typically delivers a better cost per engaged user even if the absolute CPM is higher.

Dailyhunt, ShareChat, and Josh are the most relevant Indian content platform comparisons, and each has a meaningful user base; Dailyhunt in particular has strong regional language reach that overlaps with Glance's audience. The structural difference is that Dailyhunt and Josh are app-based platforms that require user acquisition and active session behaviour, while Glance's lock screen advertising inventory is available to every user on every device where it is pre-installed, regardless of active engagement. For pan India campaigns targeting both metro and non-metro audiences simultaneously, we have generally found Glance's reach-to-cost ratio more favourable than Dailyhunt for brand awareness objectives, though Dailyhunt's news content adjacency gives it an edge for certain categories like finance and politics.

Seasonal and Festive Advertising Opportunities on Glance

Festive season inventory on Glance — covering the September to November window that includes Navratri, Dussehra, and Diwali — is among the most competitive and highest-priced ad inventory in mobile advertising India, and for good reason. The platform sees its highest daily active users and engagement metrics during this period, which coincides with peak consumer spending intent; the combination of high attention and high purchase intent makes festive Glance inventory genuinely valuable for brands in e-commerce, consumer electronics, personal care, and FMCG categories. We typically advise clients to book festive roadblock inventory at least six to eight weeks in advance, because the premium slots — particularly Diwali day and the days immediately before it — sell out well ahead of the season.

IPL is the other major inventory event on Glance, and the platform has developed specific sports content integrations that make lock screen advertising during the tournament particularly effective for brands targeting young male audiences. The sports content on Glance — live scores, match highlights, player statistics — creates a high-frequency engagement environment during IPL season that keeps users returning to the lock screen multiple times during match days; we have seen CTR figures on Glance lock screen advertising during IPL that are roughly double the platform's non-sports benchmarks. One FMCG brand we worked with ran a roadblock campaign across the IPL final weekend and achieved over 30 million impressions in 48 hours, which delivered a reach figure that would have required a much larger budget to replicate on conventional digital advertising India channels.

The thing is, seasonal pricing on Glance is not always proportionally higher than off-peak rates — the demand concentration means that the inventory that does not get booked in advance often goes unsold or gets sold at significant discounts in the final weeks before the event. We have occasionally picked up late-availability festive inventory for clients at rates closer to standard CPM, which requires flexibility in campaign planning but can deliver exceptional value when it works out.

Real-World Glance Advertising Case Studies: Campaign Results from the Field

One of the more instructive campaigns we have run on Glance was for a mid-sized fintech company launching a new credit product targeted at salaried professionals in Tier 1 and Tier 2 cities. The brief was brand awareness with a secondary objective of app installs, and the budget was ₹40 lakh over six weeks. We structured the campaign in two phases: a two-week brand awareness phase using full-screen video ads on the lock screen, followed by a four-week performance phase using OCI-enabled app install creatives targeted at users who had engaged with the brand awareness content. The result was a cost per install of roughly ₹18 — against a benchmark of ₹35 that the client had been achieving on Meta — and a brand awareness lift of 22 percentage points among the target segment, which the client's research team described as the strongest result they had seen from a six-week digital campaign.

A second case study worth sharing involves a national quick-service restaurant chain that wanted to drive footfall to newly opened outlets in three cities — Mumbai, Delhi, and Bangalore. The campaign used daypart targeting to show lock screen advertising between 11 AM and 1 PM and again between 6 PM and 8 PM, which aligned with the pre-lunch and pre-dinner decision windows. Geo-targeting was set to a 5-kilometre radius around each new outlet, and the creative used a native advertising format styled as a content card with a limited-time offer. Over four weeks, the campaign delivered measurable footfall lift of roughly 18% at the targeted outlets compared to a control group of similar outlets that did not receive Glance advertising support — a result that was tracked through the client's own POS data and validated against their historical opening-week patterns.

The third case study is perhaps the most relevant for brands considering Glance for the first time: a consumer electronics brand that was sceptical about lock screen advertising and wanted to test it against their existing programmatic advertising mix before committing to a larger investment. We ran a 30-day test with a ₹15 lakh budget, split between Glance lock screen advertising and a comparable run-of-network programmatic buy on InMobi Exchange. The Glance campaign delivered a viewability rate of 94% against 61% for the programmatic comparison, a CTR that was 4.2 times higher, and a brand recall score that was 15 points above the programmatic benchmark. The client moved 30% of their annual mobile marketing budget to Glance in the following quarter.

Glance Advertising FAQs

Q: What is Glance advertising and how does it work on the lock screen?

Glance advertising is a form of mobile marketing that delivers brand content and commercial messages directly on the lock screen of Android OEM smartphones — which is the screen that users see every time they pick up their phone before unlocking it. The platform, built by InMobi Group and pre-installed on devices from Samsung, Xiaomi, Oppo, Vivo, Realme, and Motorola, uses an AI-powered personalisation engine to serve a stream of content — news, entertainment, sports, gaming — alongside advertising that is matched to the user's interests and behaviour. Because the advertising appears before the user has navigated to any app, it occupies a moment of genuine openness rather than interrupting an existing activity, which is the core reason why engagement metrics on Glance consistently outperform conventional mobile ad formats.

Q: How much does it cost to advertise on Glance in India?

Standard run-of-network CPM rates on Glance work out to roughly ₹80 to ₹150 for most audience segments, though premium targeting and high-demand periods push rates higher. Roadblock formats — which give a brand exclusive ownership of the platform's ad inventory for a defined period — typically start at somewhere around ₹25 lakh for a Micro Impact roadblock and scale upward for Mega Impact formats during peak seasons like Diwali or IPL. CPC-based campaigns for performance marketing objectives tend to land in the ₹8 to ₹25 range depending on the audience and competitive pressure. For programmatic access through InMobi DSP or InMobi Exchange, smaller budgets can access Glance inventory, though direct-buy campaigns typically require a minimum commitment of ₹5 to ₹10 lakh for a meaningful campaign.

Q: What ad formats are available on the Glance platform?

The Glance ad formats library includes lock screen banner ads, full-screen video ads, native content cards, roadblock formats across Micro, Macro, and Mega Impact tiers, interactive formats with swipe and poll mechanics, and the One-Click Install format for app install campaigns. Video ads are available in six-second and fifteen-second formats and play natively within the content stream. The roadblock format is the most distinctive offering — it gives a brand 100% share of voice on the platform for a defined period, eliminating all competitive advertising from the lock screen experience.

Q: How many users can I reach through Glance advertising in India?

The Glance platform reaches somewhere in the ballpark of 400 million devices globally, with India representing the largest single market; the daily active users figure in India is reported by InMobi at over 140 million, which makes it one of the largest single-surface digital advertising audiences in the country. The reach is distributed across both metro and non-metro markets because the OEM distribution model means Glance is present on devices across all price tiers and geographies, including Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities where Android OEM smartphones dominate.

Q: Which OEM smartphones come with Glance pre-installed?

Glance is pre-installed on Android OEM devices from Samsung, Xiaomi, Oppo, Vivo, Realme, and Motorola — which together account for the substantial majority of the Android smartphone market in India. The Jio Phone Next also came with Glance integration, extending the platform's reach into the entry-level and rural smartphone segment. Apple devices are not part of the Glance ecosystem, as the platform operates at the Android operating system level.

Q: Is Glance advertising suitable for small businesses and startups in India?

The direct-buy formats on Glance are structured for mid-to-large advertisers, with minimum budgets that are typically out of reach for very small businesses. However, programmatic access to Glance ad inventory through InMobi DSP or InMobi Exchange allows smaller budgets to participate in the ecosystem, though the targeting and format options are more limited than what is available through direct campaigns. For startups with app install objectives and budgets in the ₹5 to ₹10 lakh range, a programmatic Glance campaign through InMobi Exchange is worth evaluating alongside Google UAC and Meta app campaigns.

Q: What is the difference between a Glance Lock Screen ad and a Glance Feed ad?

The lock screen ad — on what Glance calls Screen Zero — appears before the user unlocks their phone, in a passive, pre-intent moment where the user has not yet decided what to do with their device. The Glance Feed is a scrollable content stream that users access by swiping up from the lock screen; it is a more active, browsing-mode environment, similar in user mindset to a social media feed. Lock screen advertising delivers higher frequency and broader reach because every phone pick-up is an impression opportunity; Glance Feed advertising delivers higher engagement depth because the user has actively chosen to browse content. The most effective campaigns typically use both surfaces in combination.

Q: How do I measure the performance and ROI of my Glance advertising campaign?

Brand awareness campaigns on Glance are measured through impressions, viewability (verified by Integral Ad Science), reach, frequency, and brand lift studies. Performance marketing campaigns use MMP integration — with partners like AppsFlyer, Adjust, or Branch — to attribute app installs, registrations, or other conversion events back to Glance ad exposures. The campaign dashboard provides real-time reporting on all standard metrics, and InMobi offers panel-based brand lift measurement for advertisers running awareness-focused campaigns.

Q: What is the One-Click Install feature and how does it help app marketers?

The One-Click Install — OCI — allows users to initiate an app download directly from the Glance lock screen without being redirected to the Google Play Store and without needing to unlock their phone. The app downloads in the background while the user continues with their normal activity. This format dramatically reduces the friction in the app install funnel, which typically sees 40% to 70% drop-off between an ad click and a completed install on conventional mobile advertising formats. In our experience, OCI campaigns consistently deliver lower cost per install than standard click-to-store formats, with the savings typically in the 25% to 40% range.

Q: Is Glance advertising brand safe? What content categories are restricted?

Glance operates a curated content model with active editorial moderation, which provides a structurally safer brand environment than open user-generated content platforms. Integral Ad Science provides third-party viewability and IVT verification, and IVT rates on Glance are reported below industry averages for mobile programmatic advertising. Restricted advertising categories include gambling, adult content, tobacco, and certain unregulated financial products. Advertisers can configure content category exclusions and adjacency preferences at the campaign level.

Q: Can I target specific cities or regions in India with Glance ads?

Yes — city-level geo-targeting is available on Glance, and campaigns can be structured with separate budget allocation, creative, and targeting parameters for different cities or regions. Regional language targeting is also available, allowing ad creative to be matched to the user's language preference across Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Bengali, Kannada, Marathi, and other Indian languages. Hyper-local targeting within a specific radius of a location — which we used in the QSR footfall campaign described earlier — is available for certain campaign types.

Q: What industries benefit most from advertising on Glance?

FMCG brands, e-commerce platforms, app-based businesses, consumer electronics, telecom, OTT and entertainment, and financial services have historically been the strongest performing