Author: John Koetsier

SKAN 4 strategy: how to transition from SKAN 3

SKAN 4 is here and we’re starting to see about 40% adoption across the supply side of the industry. That means about 40% of the postbacks Singular is receiving are now SKAN 4 postbacks. SKAN 3 is obviously still in the lead, and until the biggest platforms such as Google and Meta commit to SKAN 4, it will remain that way.

However, that switchover could happen at any given time. And that means it’s time to build your SKAN 4 strategy now to take advantage of Apple’s updated mobile attribution framework.

Spoiler alert: it’s not incredibly easy. The transition from SKAN 3 to SKAN 4 has some serious minefields to be aware of and prepared for. The good news for Singular customers, however, is that you can switch SKAN 4 on while remaining backwards compatible with SKAN 3. That gives you more time to prepare, to get more data from SKAN 4-enabled partners, and to remain SKAN 3 functional for partners who haven’t updated yet.

What you’ll find here, is a concise summary of the changes in SKAN 4 and an overview of how to approach each of the major ones, significantly updated for new data as of late April 2024.

In addition, I’ll add some details on what you can expect in your SKAN reporting from Singular.

 

SKAN 4 summary: what changed from SKAN 3

If you’re already a SKAN expert, just skip this section and move on to the section on preparing to make the switch. Otherwise, skim or read as needed for a refresher.

Crowd anonymity and source identifier: SKAN 4’s first big update

SKAN 3’s Privacy Thresholds are gone. Now Apple is using what it calls Crowd Anonymity to ensure privacy in mobile attribution. At the same time — and very related — say goodbye to the old campaign ID in SKAN 3. Now, that is the Source Identifier in SKAN 4.

SKAN 4 crowd anonymity

Crowd Anonymity determines how much data you get from SKAdNetwork both in postbacks and in your Source Identifiers, which are super valuable for encoding network dimensions such as campaign ID, asset, geo, ad placement data, and so on.

All of this is simple in concept but complicated in detail.

The simple part: more installs per campaign equals higher crowd anonymity which will return more data. If you get only a few installs per campaign, you’ll only get minimal data. A large number of installs per campaign — only Apple knows how many, and the parameters could change over time — gets you the most data.

If you remember nothing else about Crowd Anonymity, you’re probably OK on a high level. The big platforms will help you ensure that you have enough scale in each campaign to achieve high levels of Crowd Anonymity, but you may need to make some changes to make certain you have enough spend in each campaign to get good data out.

Crowd anonymity and source identifier SKAN 4

To break that down with a bit more detail …

  • If you have MANY installs per campaign
    • You’ll get all 4 digits of Source Identifier information in your SKAN 4 postbacks
      • You can use them to gather data on campaign ID, ad set, geotargeting, ad placement, or other info
      • You can optimize campaigns
      • You can get better insight on campaign results
    • Importantly, you’ll also get 64 potential values of post-install conversion data in your SKAN 4 postbacks, which you can use to understand engagement, activity, and revenue from your new app users at a much deeper level than SKAN 3
    • Note: you’ll be the full 4 digits of Source Identifier data and the full 64 values of post-install conversion for your first SKAN 4 postback for an install only: the second and third postbacks for that install will always have less data 
  • If you have FEW installs per campaign
    • You’ll get less data in your Source Identifier
      • Perhaps only 2 digits, similar but not identical to SKAN 3
    • You’ll get less data in your conversion values

Multiple postbacks: SKAN 4’s second big update

SKAN 3 only had 1 single lonely little postback, making mobile marketers struggle to understand the value of their ad campaigns. If you achieve sufficient Crowd Anonymity, SKAN 4 offers 3 postbacks spread out over time, providing more insight and more value.

  • Postback 1
    Postback 1 is the most data-rich postback, as you saw above, and it can be sent the quickest: within 2 days.
  • Postbacks 2 & 3
    Postbacks 2 and 3 are very simple: each only has 1 of 3 possible values that you can set, and they will be set over longer periods of time. Think high, medium, and low, or something like that.
    • Postback 2: 3-7 days
    • Postback 3: 8-35 days
  • Random delivery delays
    Note: just to make things more fun for marketers, actual delivery of postbacks will be impacted by a random timer. More on this later …
SKAN 4 postbacks

Postback 1 is the most critical postback for obvious reasons: it returns the quickest, and it carries the most data. There’s a lot of complexity in the range of values that you can potentially get from postback 1 depending on the level of crowd anonymity that you have achieved.

SKAN 4 conversion values

If you look at the above chart highlighting the data you can get from SKAN 4, Tier 3 is where you want to be on postback 1, which will give you full Source Identifier data and maximum first postback conversion values. Getting there requires that you achieve high levels of Crowd Anonymity in a campaign through a large number of installs. 

That buys you:

  • Maximum data in your Source Identifier
    • 4 digits of data
    • Plus a source app notification: essentially, a publisher ID telling you where the ad was shown 
  • Maximum data in your conversion values
    • 64 possible values, which Apple calls a “fine” conversion value

If you only achieve lower levels of crowd anonymity, you will receive less source identifier data and less conversion data:

  • Tier 0 returns no data at all
  • Tier 1 returns minimal data
    • Source Identifier: 2 digits only, not 4 (similar to SKAN 3)
    • Conversion values: 3 possible conversion values only, not the full 64 (similar to postbacks 2 and 3 in SKAN 4)
  • Tier 2 returns a very useful amount of data:
    • Source identifier: 4 digits (but omits the source app)
    • Conversion values: 64 values of fine conversion data

For postbacks 2 and 3, everything is much simpler, but that simplicity comes at the cost of less data. Postbacks 2 and 3 are always only one of 3 values each. Basically, you can use any values you choose for your P2 and P3 values, as long as there are only 3. Think along these lines:

  • 0, 1, 2
  • Bad, OK, Good
  • Window-shopper, Buyer, Subscriber

Swimming in complexity already? Freaking out? Take a deep breath. Don’t worry. Unified Measurement is now here.

The key learning is simple: larger, fewer campaigns will maximize data return. Achieve that and you will (almost) always get all available SKAN 4 data. Also, be aware: Singular will both enrich your data with first-party insights from your own app — your own analytics know when you get an install, engagement, and purchases — plus other data sources with different attribution strategies, and will present your data in a simple, user-friendly, understandable way. The result is that Singular just released Unified Measurement, which significantly expands the data you can get from SKAN without burning any of your SKAN conversion value slots.

But keep in mind, there’s more detail to think about, because we haven’t talked about delivery times yet.

Postback delays and locking conversion values: SKAN 4’s third big update

If every postback arrived precisely at the end of its postback period, Apple’s efforts at ensuring marketing measurement privacy would probably not be very successful.  The first postback, for example, can be updated until 2 days after app install. If marketing analytics platforms got the postback immediately, they could simply tie it back to new app user arrivals, and bingo: associate a specific SKAdNetwork postback with a specific app user.

Bye-bye privacy.

So Apple adds random timers, which have changed in SKAN 4:

  • Postback 1 random timer
    • 24-48 hours, or 1-2 days
  • Postback 2 random timer
    • 24-144 hours, or 1-6 days
  • Postback 3 random timer
    • 24-144 hours, or 1-6 days
SKAN 4 postbacks

These are massive delays, especially for the second and third postback. This is a really big deal, and it means that if marketers use the full postback update window in each case:

  • Postback 1 could arrive 3 to 4 days after an install
  • Postback 2 could be 10 to 15 days after an install
  • Postback 3 could be a staggering 36 to 41 days after an install

But that’s not all. Because this is SKAN 4, we’re not done with the complexity yet. There’s yet another new feature that Apple has introduced in SKAN 4 that can return SKAdNetwork postbacks sooner. It’s called locking conversion values. 

If marketers and developers choose, they can lock conversion values as soon as their in-app analytics detect an acceptable level of data. 

In other words, if someone installs your retail app and buys an item immediately, you could lock the conversion and prepare a postback to be sent right away. In a game, if they play 5 levels on day 0, you could do the same. Don’t forget, however, each postback still has to wait for the random delay to expire: between 1-2 days on postback 1, and between 1-6 days for postbacks 2 and 3.

(If Apple didn’t require this, advertisers could lock all postbacks regardless of value at some point and then, as above, tease out which postbacks relate to which new app users.)

This means that in a scenario where you get great engagement and activity basically immediately and you lock the postback, you could achieve the following postback arrival periods:

  • Postback 1 could arrive 1 to 2 days after install
  • Postback 2 could arrive 4 to 5 days after install
  • Postback 3 could arrive 8 to 14 days after an install 

Have you spotted the core challenge here? 

There’s a huge diversity between earliest possible and latest possible postback delivery times … which is poison for being able to measure and evaluate cohorts of new users. Essentially, marketers could see a potential diversity between earliest and latest possible postback delivery of:

  • Postback 1: from 1 to 4 days
  • Postback 2: from 3 to 13 days
  • Postback 3: from 8 to 41 days

Remember this delta.

That potential diversity in postback delivery dates will become significant for how you approach your SKAN 4 strategy, as you’ll see later in the section on making the transition from SKAN 3 to SKAN 4. Quick hint: it makes cohort measurement MUCH harder.

Web to app support: SKAN 4’s fourth big update

It’s not universal across all browsers — it only works in mobile Safari — and it’s not terribly comprehensive yet, but SKAN 4.0 does enable web to app measurement via the SKAdNetwork for Web Ads API. 

The benefit for marketers is clear: web ads can be cheaper than in-app ads, and web onboarding experiences can be richer, more immersive, and more engaging than a standard app listing page in the App Store.

There are a bunch of steps to make it happen: the entity serving the SKAdNetwork-attributable link needs to be registered as an ad network with Apple, the link needs to be configured properly, and there must be an endpoint to provide a signed web ad impression, but there are some strong possibilities here in both web-to-app user acquisition.

(Note: for owned platforms such as your own website or landing page, you can simply use Singular deep links for full measurement and analytics capability.)

It’s possible we’ll see more updates for web to app support in SKAN 5.

Conversion value decreases: SKAN 4’s fifth big update

Finally: bear in mind that in SKAN 4, unlike SKAN 3, conversion values can go up AND down. 

In SKAN 3, if you were updating a conversion value before the postback timer period clock ran up, it could only go up. Now in SKAN 4, you can also decrement conversion values.

This seems minor, but it’s a big deal for 2 reasons:

  1. It’s a complete mind-shift from SKAN 3
  2. It enables much more flexibility around the value of newly acquired users

Every app has flows that successful (ROI-returning) app users follow. And every app has flows that unprofitable users follow. The challenge in SKAN 3 is that sometimes the first few stages of user engagement and activity can look very similar for both groups. If that’s the case for you, in SKAN 4 you can decrease conversion values during the postback timer periods and supply yourself with valuable data for decision-making.

Example:

  • You run a subscription app
  • Some users sign up and provide long-term revenue
  • Some users sign up but cancel their subscriptions after the trial period
  • If you can find differences between those groups (and you might have multiple subgroups within each) you can include that data in your SKAN 4.0 postbacks
  • That data can help you value cohorts, estimate LTV, and optimize ad budget allocation

 

Preparation: getting ready for the SKAN 3 to SKAN 4 transition

OK. You’ve either read or skimmed through 1,800 words of how SKAN 4 works, or you skipped down here right away. What do you need to do to prepare for the transition from SKAN 3 to SKAN 4?

We’ve put together a detailed SKAN 4.0 readiness checklist which you can check out. But in short, here’s what you need to do:

1: Update the Singular SDK in your app

Sure, it’s obvious, but it also requires communication, preparation, and action on the part of your product team: schedule an update to the Singular SDK in your app. As of November 2022, the Singular SDK has been SKAN 4 ready.

And don’t worry: it’s SKAN 3 backwards compatible, so there’s no worry or risk of damage to existing SKAdNetwork implementations or attributions on legacy campaigns. You can safely update.

2: Talk to your acquisition and monetization partners

Find out where they are in their SKAN 4 transition plans. If they’re already moving forward now, you need to catch up. You can get a good sense of where major user acquisition ad partners are in their SKAN 4 transition plans at our SKAN 4 adoption dashboard.

All that is actually needed to generate SKAn 4 postbacks is this:

  1. iOS 16.1 device (and up)
  2. Ad network encodes SKAN 4 click

These are getting pretty common. Most iOS users have updated to iOS 16, and many ad partners are sending at least some of their postbacks as SKAN 4 postbacks. What that means is that if you haven’t set up a SKAN 4 model in your Singular dashboard, you’re going to be missing some data. (Note: it’s pretty easy … click a button and choose some settings.) In particular, you won’t get any data for coarse conversion values: there’s no model prepared to receive that data.

So have the conversation and get started.

3: Talk to your web partners

If you currently run ads on the web or are now considering it thanks to SKAN 4, chat with those ad partners as well.

Get details on their timetables and anything you might need to do to integrate or work together.

4: Share your source identifier hierarchies

Part of the reason you want data from SKAdNetwork is to know what’s working. 

Part of the reason ad networks need data from SKAdNetwork is essentially for the same reason: so that they can optimize campaign targeting, delivery, and volume in near real-time to deliver the best results for marketers. Share what you’ve encoded into the SKAN 4 source identifier digits, so they know when they’ve succeeded, know when they’ve failed, and can act appropriately in each circumstance.

Singular makes this easy and automatic: talk to your customer success manager for any details or clarification you might need.

5: Plan your coarse conversion value strategy

In some cases, due to low install volume, all you’ll get for postback 1 is a coarse conversion value. And for postbacks 2 and 3, that’s all it’s possible to get. Decide how to use coarse conversion values and what events or revenue amounts to encode to each of the 3 coarse values: low, medium, high:

SKAN 4 coarse conversion value

Something we’ve see work: align your coarse conversion value strategy with your fine conversion value strategy, so that whatever data you get back — whether it was from fine or coarse — is coherent and actionable.

A coherent strategy between the 2 possible conversion payloads will ensure that your coarse conversion postbacks will be comparable and speaking the same language as your fine conversion postbacks, though of course they will be less specific.

Here’s an example with a mixed event/revenue model:

SKAN 4 coarse conversion value

With a simpler revenue-only model, decide which revenue ranges in your fine conversion values should count as “low” in your coarse conversion values, and do the same for both “medium” and “high.”

6: Build a framework to evaluate users at each of the 3 postback stages

The good news is that Singular will enhance reporting at each stage with SKAN Advanced Analytics, modeling for missing data due to insufficient crowd anonymity, and enriching cohort reporting for revenue and ROI at each stage. 

Even better: you’ll get confidence intervals so you know how much you can trust the modeled data: critical if you’re making significant budgeting decisions. And now with Unified Measurement augmenting SKAN data with MMP data and first-party data, SKAN in general is significantly more valuable as a measurement method. 

Add that to the extra information you can get from SKAN 4, and it’s a world of difference from the first few months of using SKAN 3.

 

Implementation: building your SKAN 4 transition strategy

OK. You’ve learned, you’re prepared, and you’re ready to begin making the transition. 

Wait just a moment. You may have all the technical details down pat, but there are a few strategic questions to answer before you flip the switch.

1. Building your conversion value models

Decide what data you need from each of the 4 possible postbacks you’ll be getting.

As I stated above, postback 1 fine and coarse conversion values should be aligned so that your post-install conversion data is compatible and makes sense. Postbacks 2 and 3 should be deep-funnel events that take place between D2-D35 or high-value conversions that will provide the most critical possible insight about the value of each cohort.

Possible models include:

  • Revenue
  • Conversion events
  • Engagement
  • Funnel
  • Mixed models
    • Conversion Events and Revenue
    • Engagement and Revenue
    • Funnel and Revenue
  • Custom events/revenue model

Bear in mind that most mobile experts don’t expect to get this right immediately. Don’t let the desire for perfection shackle you. Do what seems right, and you’ll be able to update it later without a long, painful transition period. (See model migration below.)

One other note: Singular already offers optimized SKAN conversion model recommendations in many situations. This feature literally ranks SKAN conversion models for effectiveness, analyzing your app, your postbacks, and your goals, and suggests the optimal conversion strategy. With always-on SKAN conversion model optimization checking in the background, you’ll get notified if there are potentially more accurate models to try. 

2: Test, because Singular gives you easy model migrations

Model migration has historically been extremely challenging in SKAdNetwork. The problem has been that when you migrated to a new model, you suffer from data gaps as the old model ages out and the new one phases in. In SKAN 3, that could be weeks. Under SKAN 4, it could be a significantly more extreme challenge due to the very long possible postback time periods, plus random delays.

You could literally be waiting for a month and a half to have entirely present and clean data for the new model.

But not anymore.

The good news is that with Singular’s SKAN Advanced Analytics, you can migrate seamlessly and quickly, getting accurately modeled data on the same day you transition. 

Schedule time to chat for more details.

3: Decide whether you’ll use conversion locking or not

Remember what we said about postback timing and conversion locking? There is a massive range between the earliest to latest delivery times in SKAN 4. That massive diversity is poison to your ability to generate accurate modeled cohorts. 

As mentioned earlier, SKAN 4 postbacks from the same campaign and from the same day could be separated by as much as:

  • Postback 1: up to 4 days
  • Postback 2: from 3 to 13 days
  • Postback 3: from 8 to 41 days

That’s why Singular’s recommendation to not use conversion locking. Your app is unique, your needs are unique, so your mileage may vary, of course, but in general, the cost of getting conversion value payloads in early postbacks is extremely high. 

The challenge is that you have limited clarity on what day the conversion was locked, which creates a lot of uncertainty around the estimated install date. The result of that is cohorts are much harder to accurately model and your understanding of campaign value suffers. Sticking with the standard conversion windows for each of the postback periods buys you the certainty that each conversion was locked at the same time. Yes, there are still random timer delays, but 1 unknown is better than 2. 

4: Choose when to set up your SKAN 4 models in Singular 

You could literally be getting SKAN 4 postbacks right now. In fact, you almost certainly are, even before setting up your SKAN 4 models in your Singular MMP dashboard. This does result in missing data, so you should implement your new conversion model strategies now to make sure you’re getting all possible data.

The good news: a SKAN 3 click from an ad network that hasn’t yet encoded SKAN 4 clicks or a pre-iOS 16.1 device will be handled properly by Singular.

The challenge:

If you start getting SKAN 4 postbacks before you configure a SKAN 4 model, you’ll start seeing SKAN 4 data. However, you won’t get any data for coarse conversion values, because they haven’t yet been created and encoded into a model. You will see 4-digital source identifiers, if your campaigns achieve high levels of crowd anonymity.

Another challenge: transitioning.

Singular has created “transition mode” for the inevitable period in which you’ll be getting both SKAN 3 and SKAN 4 postbacks. In transition mode 1, you can start getting SKAN 4 postbacks, but because you don’t have a SKAN 4 model set up, you won’t get coarse values or postback 2 or 3. In transition mode 2, you will have set up a SKAN 4 model, and both SKAN 3 and SKAN 4 will work. However, while in transition mode 2, SKAN 4 conversions for the first postback period will be limited to 24 hours using conversion locking, so that all your data (SKAN 3.0 and SKAN 4) is equivalent and makes sense.

This is operable via a toggle mode, so you can turn transition mode — and which version of transition mode — on or off as you choose.

The key decision you’ll have to make upon chatting with your ad partners is deciding when you’ll only accept SKAN 4 data and therefore will not invest in any subsequent SKAN 3-only campaigns. For example, if you use 10 user acquisition ad networks but only 5 are fully updated for SKAN 4, you might choose to run in transition mode. If, on the other hand, 8 are fully updated for SKAN 4 and only 2 are not, you might decide to go full steam ahead on SKAN 4 and pause campaigns with the laggard ad networks until they complete their SKAdNetwork 4 build-out and configuration.

Talk to your Singular representative about the right time to make all of this live.

 

Running SKAN 4: what to expect in your Singular SKAN dashboard

Assuming you’ve worked through all of the above, prepared, strategized, and transitioned, you should end up in a happier place than you were with SKAdNetwork 3. Even if you used SKAN Advanced Analytics to achieve close to 90% accurate D7 revenue.

For SKAN 4, Singular will display a coherent view of the data from all the postbacks that you are getting, providing a single number for revenue, installs, and events for each campaign.

That’s thanks to a modeling layer which takes in all postbacks, including those with null conversion values, coarse conversion values (low, medium, high, or whatever you’ve chosen), and detailed fine conversion values. Singular’s technology also takes into account activity, engagement, and purchases in your own first-party data from your app, and then provides a modeled view of the data. Thanks to Unified Measurement you’ll also get Singular’s incredibly accurate modeling of actual installs and revenue, based on SKAN, MMP data, and your first-party data.

SKAN 4 modeling layer

This campaign view will be aligned to the conversion models that you’ve set up for your SKAN 4 reporting, and will show what each campaign ID has achieved. That will include D1, D7, and D35 revenue, which is now more accurate than under SKAN 3 thanks to the additional data from SKAN 4.

With more data, you’ll also be able to set up SKAN 4 to provide deeper granularity for geo-based reporting:

SKAN 4 geo report

With modeled data from each potential postback and your own in-app data, you’ll also be able to see cohort revenue. In fact, you’ll get 35-day cohorts in iOS thanks to Unified Measurement.

SKAN 4 modeling layer

All of this is possible because Singular’s SKAdNetwork solution enriches campaign names, decodes conversion values, models missing data, and provides extremely accurate data estimates. All of which appears alongside your cost and percentage of installs that you’ve received conversion values for.

Get help?

We know this is complicated and new to most mobile marketers. Some haven’t had the chance to become SKAN 3 experts yet, and we’re already moving to SKAN 4, with the prospect of similar challenges on the Android side next year as Privacy Sandbox kicks into gear there.

We’re more than happy to help.

Get in touch today, and we’ll help you every step of the way.

Fixing iOS attribution

Can you fix iOS attribution?

Plus, importantly, can you do all that without losing half your SKAN conversion value payload?

In short: is it possible to fix iOS attribution? And, perhaps, achieve something even roughly similar to pre-ATT days? Maybe … hit play and keep reading!

We all know the problem: multiple competing iOS attribution methods

By default, this isn’t happening right now on iOS.

“You want to see in a single place: just show me how many installs is every channel driving? What’s my ROAS for every channel?” says Evyatar Ram, Singular’s VP of product. “It’s all over the place: some of the data’s here, some of the data’s there, some of the data’s cohorted, some’s not cohorted, some’s available immediately, some’s available three days later.”

Summing up, he adds:

“It’s painful.”

The reality is that different channels are using different attribution methods, resulting in different answers to the same question. You could — and frequently do — have a single user and a single install that is attributed to different ad networks or even different channels by different mechanisms.

Unified measurement: fixing iOS attribution

The good news is that this problem is now largely solved, thanks to Unified Measurement.

Singular’s always had a competitive SKAN solution with SKAN Advanced Analytics. But while it was the best available option in the iOS attribution space, it didn’t solve every problem: it didn’t dedupe every single install from every source, and too much showed up as organic rather than a result of a paid campaign. There have been different attempts to solve this problem in the mobile attribution space (SSOT is one). But SSOT burns half your SKAN conversion values, and Singular was unwilling to sacrifice so much post-conversion engagement and revenue data to build what essentially still results in a partial solution. 

That’s too high a cost, especially because it falls victim to censored data due to Privacy Thresholds in SKAN 3 and Crowd Anonymity in SKAN 4, eroding valuable signal even more. 

The long-term solution is Unified Measurement that reliably combines SKAN data with MMP tracker data in a way that is de-duplicated and accurate, says Singular product marketing manager Kelsey Lee.

“You know the real number of installs that are driven from every channel and you know your actual number of installs … as well as revenue cohorts and also events.”

The solution has been live for months for Singular clients, and the results have been impressive, with clients seeing numbers like 31% improved accuracy, a 43% boost in campaign ROI thanks to better organic versus paid attribution, or a 19% reduction in double-counted installs. Exact results per client depend, of course, on specific media mix, ad partner selection, and scale, but the bottom line is that accuracy is up across the board.

Almost as important, Unified Measurement offers 35-day cohorts: much longer than the 7-day cohorts offered by some MMPs, and much more indicative of the true long-term value of marketing campaigns. 

35-day cohorts is something that just isn’t possible anywhere else.

The solution: UA measurement using the best from each attribution methodology

Unified Measurement takes the best from SKAN, which for all its faults is a true deterministic attribution method that is on-device and close to the user. Then it adds the best insight from multiple other forms of measurement, including first-party data, network data, MMP tracker data, and more to form the best possible iOS attribution solution.

An important part of that is allowing SKAN to retain as many bits as possible for your conversion data.

“Preserving what’s going on in your conversion model is ultimately going to make your reporting better at the end of the day,” Lee says. “And that means we’re also not subjected to any Privacy Thresholds or Crowd Anonymity … we don’t have to deal with censorship issues, because we’re not relying on the SKAN postbacks.”

The result is really good data for growth marketers, even if it’s not exactly a one-and-done silver bullet for iOS attribution for all time.

“It is the best solution, I think, that is available in the market,” Ram says. “But I think that it is an evolving space and I don’t think it’s sort of this one solution that you now will be set for the next 3 years. We have a lot of ideas of how to improve it.”

High on the list: media mix modeling, or MMM.

Also, as it gains more adoption, SKAN 4.

The same basic methodology will work for Privacy Sandbox on Android as well as any additional privacy initiatives that may occur.

“If you’re running iOS marketing campaigns, you can now operate effectively,” Ram says. “But we’ve also built a framework for the future which is going to basically future proof ourselves for other privacy changes down the road.”

More in the full episode

As usual, check out the full episode for more insight on the effective iOS attribution.

You can always watch Growth Masterminds episodes on our YouTube channel, or in your favorite podcast platform (Apple, Spotify).

TikTok has the most complete public ad library: Mozilla report says

According to a massive new Mozilla report on tech platforms’ ad libraries, TikTok has the most complete public ad library. However, Google, Apple, and Meta are right behind the short-video platform in terms of providing the most complete and functional tools to provide transparency into ads placed on their platforms. 

The bad news according to the report: none of the big tech companies ad libraries are completely functional yet, and some platforms — like X, the former Twitter — have huge gaps.

The EU’s Digital Service Act requires large online platforms to publish constantly updated ad libraries. The goal is to ensure no one is unduly impacting elections or other matters of public policy. Any platform that reaches more than 10% of the 450 million people in Europe qualifies, so that means a large number of American and international companies have to comply with this guideline.

The list includes:

  • AliExpress
  • Google
  • Apple App Store
  • Bing
  • Booking.com
  • LinkedIn
  • Meta
  • Pinterest
  • Snap
  • TikTok
  • X
  • Zalando

Ranking each ad library: the criteria and the results

Mozilla ranked each online platforms’ ad library by 13 criteria, including public accessibility, content of ads, duration of availability, searchability, ad performance data, documentation on how to access the information, and insight into who saw the ads.

At a high level, here’s what they found:

ad library rankings

(A blank cell means the functionality does not exist; red indicates a significant lack or problem; orange indicates minimum functionality; yellow indicates there is still a big gap; green means everything is provided.)

Since it’s hard to total up a visual like the one above, I assigned a score to each color:

  • Blank = 0
  • Red = 1
  • Orange = 2
  • Yellow = 3 (I may be color-blind, but I don’t see any yellow in the chart above)
  • Green = 4

Considering them less relevant for a user acquisition audience, I threw out Zalando, LinkedIn, Booking.com, and AliExpress, then manually totaled up the rows (unfortunately GPT-4 was completely unhelpful with this manual drudgery).

The result: the TikTok ad library wins, followed closely by Google, Apple, and Meta.

Large platforms' ad libraries ranked

Bing, Pinterest, and Snapchat all have some work to do, while X simply provides a CSV file and no web interface to check online ads.

Ad library usefulness: not just political

Of course, there’s a lot more an ad library could be used for other than checking for political ads or well-funded public policy pushes. It’s also an inexpensive way to keep tabs on competitors: see what ads they’re running, where, and how many.

Right now, honestly, an ad intelligence tool is your best bet for this. It’s just going to be easier and quicker to get the information you want. But if your budget is $0 and your needs are minimal, an ad library is very useful.

They could get more useful, too.

The EU has guidelines on what an ad library for a large online platform should look like, and the Mozilla report says there’s some room for improvement. Currently, here’s the requirement:

  • Content of the ad
  • Advertiser details
  • Duration of the ad campaign
  • Targeting parameters
  • Influencer’s paid posts
  • Number of people who saw the ads

Check First, the organization Mozilla hired to check the data and build the report, says that ad libraries should offer more comprehensive data and easier ways of accessing and slicing it up. That includes:

  • Filtering
  • More targeting information including segmentation
  • Historical data
  • Campaign details
  • More advertiser information
  • Creative content descriptions

This proposal may or may not be adopted by the EU, and it would involve significant effort from the platforms to enable, but it would make everything much more usable.

Room to improve

It’s a safe bet that given the current regulatory environment, the EU will require platforms to provide more data and probably easier access to slicing and dicing it. 

Mozilla says Apple could provide more detail on country breakdowns, Google could provide access by keyword, Snap should provide an API and better search, and TikTok has room to improve on accuracy.

That said, we’ve come a long way in the last 5 years:

“Now, 11 of the world’s largest tech companies have ad repositories. The road here has not been smooth, but this is progress,” the report says.

Growing mobile apps in 2024: 5 ways app makers are winning despite challenges

How are app publishers winning in a tough economy? How are they growing mobile apps despite so many economic, financial, and measurement challenges?

Let’s face it: 2024 isn’t looking pretty from a bunch of different perspectives.

  • GDP growth is slowing in many major economies, including the U.S.
  • Inflation is still high despite some progress
  • Ad spend growth is now underperforming what GDP growth we are achieving
  • Wars all over the world are still impacting economies, supply chains, consumer sentiment, and human lives (the worst part, of course)

In my recent chat at Mobile Apps Unlocked in Las Vegas, I talked about these problems but also the fact that top publishers are still winning: they’re still growing mobile apps. And I shared 5 reasons why they keep on winning despite the challenging circumstances. 

A few days ago, MAU founder Adam Lovallo asked me to share that presentation in a long-form blog post.

So here we are.

Yep, there are macro challenges to growing mobile apps: growth, inflation, wars

Deloitte tells us that the Americas will generally see slower GDP growth in 2024. The U.S. is down from 2.2% to 1.5%, Canada is slowing to an almost-invisible .4%, while Mexico and Brazil are both sharply down as well.

growing mobile apps

Columbia and Argentina are bucking the trend, as you can see.

Europe is projected to be a low-growth zone, according to the IMF, with Germany’s growth at just .5%, France at 1.%, and the UK at just .6%. Greater China, however, will be more robust, with growth in China projected to be at 4.6% and tiny Macau at an off-the-charts 27.2%.

Add to that inflation which the IMF says will still be high — particularly compared to recent years — at 5.8%. High inflation squeezes real income, which generally doesn’t rise as fast, leaving less left over for in-app purchases or subscriptions. (Which, yeah, makes it harder to grow mobile apps in 2 ways: monetization is harder, and growth capital is more expensive.)

The tough thing for app publishers, UA pros, and monetization experts is that this is accompanied by global ad growth that is underpacing the already-anemic GDP growth across much of the globe. The massive Covid growth spike is long gone.

global ad growth vs global GDP growth

According to Dentsu, advertisers are now spending almost $140/person globally, up 75% from the early 2000s. That’s still extremely high, historically speaking, and growing from there is challenging despite the massive TAM expansion of advertisable digital content. 

What about the mobile app ecosystem?

As necessary as privacy is (and I 100% mean that), it’s been a disaster for modern marketing machines. As we all know, growing mobile apps has become much harder.

There’s been a lot of change here:

There’s lost signal due to ATT, but there’s also bad signal with SKAN, when SKAN and non-SKAN numbers don’t add up to real-world totals, organics and paid are hard to distinguish, and marketers deal with duplicated counting of installs from different partners and different measurement methodologies.

The result: it gets hard to trust channel performance numbers.

But it gets even better: all this joy is soon to arrive on Android. 

(To be fair, Google is doing a lot to still enable targeting and retargeting in privacy-friendly ways, but we have yet to see what the performance degradation factor will be.)

Of course, it’s not only privacy that’s impacting our space, making growing mobile apps harder. We’re also seeing massive job loss in key companies in mobile gaming, particularly.

job loss mobile gaming

Far too many people have lost their jobs as we’ve seen layoffs from the likes of Unity, Amazon, Riot, Microsoft, Niantic, Sega, and more. Sure, there was overhiring during Covid — lots of it — and sure, there are lots of reasons for this.

But that doesn’t make it any easier.

Add to all of this that web3 for app architecture and NFTs for app monetization didn’t save us: the crypto crash cratered web3 games. (I literally asked from the stage: can anyone think of a big web3 game … and the response was crickets from the crowd.) 

Sure, crypto has since somewhat recovered, but NFTs, which many thought would be a cool and lucrative way to monetize games and apps … have not. Prove me wrong if you can, but web3 has not helped in growing mobile apps.

NFT marketplaces

Plus, as advertising has become more and more prevalent in every facet of our lives, the backlash has become very visible as well. There’s ad blindness, of course, but there’s also ad fatigue — or even antagonism — as Optimove discovered late last year:

ad fatigue growing mobile apps

And no, Apple Vision Pro and Meta Quest are not going to save us: Nolan Sorrento is a great movie villain but his strategy for maximizing ad revenue while not inducing seizures is not going to work in the real world.

Subscriptions are great, but in an environment with high inflation and slow growth, everyone has to consider how many little monthly holes they can poke in their bank account before the well runs dry. Which is why RevenueCat found that the share of monthly subscribers retained after 12 months dropped by 14% last year.

So yeah: it’s challenging out there.

Hence the title of my presentation: 2024 WTF.

Growing mobile apps: 5 strategies that are working

Five strategies that are winning include:

  1. Getting in the fight
  2. Getting better measurement accuracy
  3. Going beyond last click
  4. Continuing to test new partners
  5. Starting to test entirely new channels

I’m going to walk through each one of them here …

1. Getting in the fight

Growing mobile apps is easier when you’re actually in the fight. You might laugh at participation trophies, but those who aren’t engaging can’t win.

And the good news here is that across the board, ad spend by Singular customers is up 8% year over year for the last six months. That means top growth marketers are doubling down. And since they don’t do so when it’s not profitable, they’re reaping the rewards.

Not all verticals are equal here, though:

growing mobile apps - verticals

Plenty of verticals are seeing significant growth, but guess what: a ton of it is outside of games. Growing mobile apps is working right now, but these genres are seeing the most growth:

  • Business
  • Medical
  • Entertainment
  • Sports
  • Health/fitness

2. Getting better measurement accuracy

SKAN and ATT threw the iOS growth space for a loop. But measurement accuracy is returning. 

Last week, Singular unveiled Unified Measurement. It’s a massive leap forward.

Look: SKAN is here to stay. That means you need a solution that gives you the best data possible. Unified Measurement is an approach that uses multiple measurement methodologies at the same time, combined, to achieve significantly better results for people who are growing mobile apps.

SKAN by itself isn’t enough.

IDFV by itself, not enough.

Singular's unified iOS report

IDFA: same, even if you’re getting a lot of yes from your ATT prompts.

Any other single method also is not enough.

Using Unified Measurement for the new Unified iOS Report, we’re seeing accurate de-duping of SKAN and MMP attribution, much more accurate partner performance, and true organics. The result is much better-measured ROI on paid campaigns, sane eCPIs, and, as a massive bonus, long 35-day post-install cohorts.

Even better, it’s all transparent, showing you the numbers from multiple measurement methodologies so that you can have confidence that this is not just a made-up number.

3. Going beyond last click

Third, we’re seeing top mobile growers go beyond last-click measurement. 

Sure, the customer journey for a mobile game maybe isn’t as complex as a major life purchase. You’re not buying a car, after all. But there’s a heck of a lot more going on than 1 ad view, 1 click, 1 install, 1 open, and magically … huge ROI.

You have to go beyond last click to get a better sense of the factors combining in growing mobile apps successfully.

That means MMM.

Last year when we asked, only 3% of mobile marketers told us MMM was not work exploring.

mmm

25% were already doing MMM, and 60% were working up to it. Those numbers are certainly higher now, and the reason why is simple: more signals, done well, boosts decision accuracy.

“The goal is to get as many signals as possible to make better decisions.”
– Edouard Favier, UA, A Thinking Ape

MMM highlights wasted spend, is fraud-resistant, shows when big changes are industry-wide shifts versus app-specific movements, and is a sanity check on partner and channel selection. Plus, with Singular, MMM is relatively easy and out of the box, making it a no-brainer addition to those who are growing mobile apps.

4. Continuing to test new partners

For the 2024 Singular ROI Index, one relatively tiny ad network came out of nowhere to rank on every category: geo, vertical, platform. Who is going to be that company next year?

There’s only 1 way to know, and that’s to test.

Also: having more ad partners is highly correlated with outsized growth. Every time I’ve checked the data … twice in the last 6-7 years at Singular and once at TUNE close to a decade ago, marketers who are testing more networks grow faster.

5. Starting to test entirely new channels

You need to think about testing entirely new channels, not just new partners.

As you might have guessed, I recently put together Singular’s ROI Index. Some things don’t hit the big numbers, but they clearly make a significant difference for specific apps. For example, UA spend for CTV is up 46% year over year for Singular clients. That’s a big movement.

Also, I keep hearing good things about out of home.

Other channels that I could see in the data working for specific apps and specific customers who were successfully growing mobile apps include:

  • Custom SMS
  • Email
  • Newsletter
  • Lockscreen ads
  • No-store direct install

Look, your mileage may vary, but try things that make sense for your vertical, your target customer, your geographic location. Sometimes you might just hit a gold mine for high-value, low-expense user acquisition.

Summing up: lots of challenges, lots of opportunities

It’s not easy out there. Money is tight, the economy isn’t amazing for many, and growth can be hard to come by.

But some are still making it work, and Singular customers are growing their ad spend as well as their return. See which 1 or 2 or 3 of the 5 strategies will work for you.

And if we can help … let us know!

Women in growth: celebrating 5 inspiring leaders

Some of the best careers are built with uneven bricks. Often the smartest people take twists and turns from role to role, and the most accomplished leaders follow unconventional paths to success. That’s certainly the case for many of the 5 women in growth leaders we recently interviewed in honor of Women’s History Month, which we celebrated in March.

Click play, then keep scrolling …

5 women in growth: different paths, similar destination

We were honored to have 5 women in growth for a LinkedIn Live recently. Each of them had a different path to an already-accomplished growth career in performance marketing:

  • Adrienne Rice, Performance Media Director, M&C Saatchi Performance
  • Dr. Matina Thomaidou, VP data science, Dataseat
  • Tamanda Itaye, Senior Global Performance Marketing Manager, WFP – ShareTheMeal
  • Saadi Muslu, VP Marketing, Singular
  • Susan Kuo, Chief Operating Officer, Singular
women in growth

Follow the boldface words to see their paths:

Adrienne started at an agency working on B2B brand awareness, did some direct response for non-profits, then worked on CPG advertising on network television. Matina achieved multiple degrees in computer science, then a PhD in machine learning. She took marketing science roles in Microsoft, Accenture, and then Facebook, which she calls “a great school.” Tamanda also started on the agency side but worked in South Africa, Mexico, and then Spain, with a mix of DTC and B2B. Saadi planned to be an architect, randomly took a marketing elective, and switched paths, ending up with an international management degree. She worked for an online travel agency, did email, social, and paid campaigns, then followed a mentor to San Francisco, jumped into product marketing, and eventually moved over to marketing leadership. And Susan started in fiber optics, moved to Electronic Arts, worked on sponsorships for big brands like Doritos and Coca Cola, and jumped into sales. She then started a marketing analytics company with 2 cofounders, exited, and started Singular with the same 2 partners.

The point?

There’s no 1 way to a successful career as women in growth and performance marketing. Each path is different, and that brings richness and variety to growth roles.

Biggest career triumph?

For Susan it was becoming a founder. 

For Saadi it was first about taking the step to move from B2C to being a product marketer, being told she would fail, using that as fuel, and proving a manager wrong. Second, it was moving from an individual contributor role to the leader of a marketing department: a big step in anyone’s career. 

Tamanda had a career triumph that is likely to resonate with others: thriving in difficult and changing situations:

“I would just say just thriving within the space, especially from my experience just moving from different regions, different countries, being able to work with people, different languages, language barriers, being able to collaborate and actually produce good results within the growth space … I would say that’s been the biggest triumph,” she says. 

“It’s not always easy, especially in the growth space … working with different teams, creatives … I think within the different environments I’ve worked in, just being able to thrive has been absolutely amazing.”

Matina’s biggest career triumph will also be familiar to many: leading her team to successfully resolving a massive problem for the entire industry. It was — of course — capturing sufficient signal from SKAdNetwork to optimize ad campaigns.

Adrienne’s was one that women but also men in growth over the past few years will recognize as essential: adaptability. The growth space is one of the fastest-changing tech and marketing ecosystems anywhere, and fast learning is critical. 

“I would say that [my biggest career triumph] is being able to be very adaptable and pivot in my career throughout the years,” she says. “Going from brand awareness, media, more to growth, very performance and data-driven.”

In fact, she was so adaptable she flew to Australia without a job, found a home, found a job, made friends, and made a life for a few years in a foreign country.

Toughest career challenge for our women in growth?

Not surprisingly, some of the toughest challenges for these women in growth are directly related to being women. None mentioned male chauvinism or bias, although it’s hard to imagine that having no impact on their careers.

Rather, most of these women in growth framed their obstacles as personal challenges, some of them rooted in family and cultural perceptions of how they should act.

“A lot of the women that I saw around me were people pleasers and I’m a long suffering and now recovering people pleaser myself,” said Saadi. “To not ruffle feathers and to not be confrontational and to not take up too much space was seen as a good quality to have and I had to really break through that conditioning to be successful in my career.”

That turned out to be a common theme.

“I grew up trying to please everyone, be the nice girl,” says Tamanda. “Breaking away from that and actually getting the work done and being more assertive — managing people, not just leading people, being aware also of different needs of different team members — that was really, really tough for me in the beginning as a leader.”

For Susan, it was having 2 babies in the same year.

One was a company: a new start-up in Singular, and the other was a (human) baby with her husband, which she took as an opportunity to change and adapt her role. That was a painful process and a challenging adjustment, and it required her to have conversations with her co-founders about needing additional help and bringing in more leadership to specific sections of the company.

For Matina, it was the realization that successful data science in marketing is not about machine learning: only 30% of the role is about the right models and the right AI. Instead, it’s about business knowledge and industry insight, which takes up 70% of her time, and requires building cross-functional teams that can share knowledge.

What do women in growth need to hear more?

What do women in growth need to hear more for people in the industry?

Saadi says: advocate for yourself. Don’t be invisible. Don’t be silent. Don’t expect executives to just randomly notice you.

For Tamanda, the same is true, but she also wants women in growth who have already become leaders to actually listen to the younger generation coming up. To be an advocate for them, and pass the baton on the success that they have achieved themselves.

Matina’s advice for young women in growth: you are not alone.

“You are not alone,” she says. “You are not isolated. You work in environments with other people. There are other people close to you that are able to support you, to help you, so when you are feeling stuck, it’s not always that you have to think what you’re doing wrong.  You can find the right communities, the right mentors, the right people, the right work environment, the right employer.”

And, importantly, the right mentor.

For Adrienne, it’s about confidence.

“Have confidence in your ability and that your opinions and perspectives have value,” she says.

“Don’t be afraid to ask questions. Don’t be afraid to chime in and give your perspective … you work in a male dominated society. You might feel like a little bit of an outsider, but that diversity is what makes organizations better and spurs creativity and. And you do bring a lot of value.”

Advice for women who are considering the growth space

“Commit and dive in,” Adrienne says. “You can’t be successful by skimming at the top.”

Try new things, says Matina. Growth is a space that moves very fast, but that’s part of what makes it exciting. And, she adds: don’t be afraid to dive into the technical aspects. That’s something that Saadi echoed: dive into the data. Everyone has an opinion, but the data will tell its own story.

For Tamanda, it’s all about being ready.

“You don’t know when the next opportunity is coming … so always give your best.”

For Susan, it’s about people. Women in growth help other women in growth:

“Women in our industry really do empower and help each other out,” she says. “Some of my closest connections and network at the end of the day when I need help in terms of getting in touch with certain partners or overhauling big projects and finding good talent … it really starts at some of the relationships that we’ve built over time in some of the organizations that are women led.”

Much more in the full chat

As always, there’s much more in our full conversation.

Check it out in all the usual spaces:

And … consider subscribing on your platform of choice!

Ad spend growth: app verticals that are growing over the last 6 months

Ad spend growth? Ad spend growth! There’s a lot of doom and gloom in the world today, and that extends to the growth space as well. GDP growth is slowing, inflation is still high, ad spend now underpaces the GDP growth that remains, wars around the globe are dragging on, and the gaming industry is dumping jobs left and right.

But some app verticals are still growing, and growing fast.

In my preparation for a keynote at Mobile Apps Unlocked in Las Vegas next week, we pulled some year-over-year comparison data for various verticals looking for either ad spend growth or decline.

The results were surprising, to say the least.

ad spend growth by verticals

If a picture is worth a thousand words, here’s a few more: it’s not all doom and gloom out there. 

Smart performance marketers don’t expend resources when they’re not getting return on investment … so good things are happening in more than a few verticals.

Ad spend growth: the 20% club

Business, medical, entertainment, sports, and lifestyle are all up significantly in ad spend growth.

  • Business: 31%
  • Medical: 31%
  • Entertainment: 28%
  • Sports: 24%
  • Lifestyle: 23%

The business category includes professional networking tools, job search engines, research and consumer insights tools, and more, and clearly there’s an economic impact driving some of this. Just as Covid increased leisure time and drove game usage, tight economic conditions are driving job search and related career activities.

Medical includes tools for brain health, ordering medical supplies, pharmaceutical supplies, and healthcare apps, and they’re clearly growing significantly right now as well, though I’m not certain what larger economic forces might be driving that.

Entertainment includes streaming apps, e-magazines, ticketing apps for in-person concerts and shows, and other apps for content distribution and consumption. The streaming wars might not be as hot as they were a year ago, but they’re still fueling ad spend growth.

Sports is pretty straightforward, you would think, but not really. This category, which is also fast-growing, includes numerous sports betting apps. But there’s also apps for organizing your community sports team’s activities, and sports memorabilia apps.

And lifestyle includes dating as well as virtual assistants or companions. It also includes self-help and motivational apps and services.

Games ad spend growth: just 7%

Games ad spend growth was just 7% year over year, but that’s actually quite significant. 

As GroupM makes very clear, ad revenue growth spiked massively during COVID. A lot of that was in mobile, and a lot of that was ad spend growth inside mobile games for user acquisition. That spike was unsurprisingly unsustainable and has dropped significantly in the past few years.

global ad vs global GDP growth

So to see ad spend growth again in mobile games UA right now is significant. That spend has to come from revenue somewhere — especially since high-interest rates are increasing the cost of venture capital — and so is indicative of game revenue returning to growth (something I’ll take a closer look at in the future).

The other part of games ad spend growing 7% that is significant is that this is on a very high base. 

Games are about half the App Store and Google Play, and are cutting-edge aggressive in UA and monetization. The slice of data I looked at was over $1.5 billion in both periods, suggesting that this 7% growth is widespread and not just an artifact of a few leaders in the space.

Not everything is up

Of course, as per usual, not everything is up. In some verticals, ad spend growth as actually ad spend decline. Social networking was essentially flat, and retail, productivity, finance, and travel were down, but especially travel.

  • Shopping: -2%
  • Productivity: -3%
  • Finance: -5%
  • Travel: -19%

These drops aren’t shocking, however. Artificially suppressed during Covid, travel rebounded as a category in the immediate post-Covid years, but is now subsiding. (High inflation isn’t helping with disposable income here.)

Fintech had a similar Covid bump, and seeing that demand soften a bit is also not a surprise.

More to share at MAU

I’ll have much more to share on the overall ecosystem and the financial environment, including 5 ways the best marketers are still winning, at Mobile Apps Unlocked in Vegas next week.

If you’re there, look me up!

Multiple breakdowns: how to get more data from your ad networks than they offer (sort of)

How can you get more data from your ad network partners than they provide? Simple answer: ultimately, you can’t. More complex answer: you can get more than they’ll give you on a single pane of glass, though. It’s called “Multiple Breakdowns.”

And, as it turns out, it’s extraordinarily useful.

Click play, turn your volume up, and keep scrolling …

The problem: siloed data dimensions

Here’s the deal: ad networks often don’t give you all the data dimensions you want in a single place. They have restrictions on the number of different breakdowns you can view simultaneously, and that has an impact on what you can learn.

For example, on Meta, you can’t really see breakdowns for age and gender together with the platform. Getting ad type and placement together is also a problem. On Google, you can’t analyze keywords alongside breakdowns by country. Most ad networks, especially the larger platforms, will have some form of built-in inability to offer all the breakdowns you might want to see in the same table or chart. With Apple Search Ads, just like Google, you can’t get the country and keywords together.

Here’s an example:

multiple breakdowns 1

You have campaigns A and B. You want to see country and keyword together to know how to target your ads more effectively in the future, or to build better creative for each geo.

But … you can’t.

The solution: multiple breakdowns

The solution is a new product feature Singular calls Multiple Breakdowns. Multiple Breakdowns is simply Singular pulling the data for you and performing some database magic.

Multiple Breakdowns

So if you’re using TikTok and you want to add platform to campaign, country, and placement, now you can. If you’re using Google or Meta and you want to add country, it’s possible. And you can now see the geo for your Apple Search Ads.

Not every breakdown is supported in Multiple Breakdowns, of course. Here’s what Singular is currently supporting:

Multiple Breakdowns solution

The result is that you get more of the data you need.

And you can make better decisions.

What does Multiple Breakdowns enable?

Multiple Breakdowns allows marketers to select and analyze multiple breakdowns, providing you with a more holistic view of campaign performance.

Now you can identify hidden trends, fine-tune targeting strategies, and measure performance with greater accuracy. By leveraging additional dimensions like age, gender, country, or even DMA, marketers can make better-informed decisions and optimize their campaigns more effectively.

Plus it makes life easier.

“Even if you don’t want to combine them all together to see all the dimensions in a single report, it’s very challenging and cumbersome to constantly switch between the different views and then see just one aspect at a time,” says Singular product manager Maayan Schor. “It’s a really disruptive workflow.”

But when you’re really using them, it’s likely something will pop out of the data:

“The main impact is granular control,”says Schor. “Multiple Breakdowns really helps marketers to identify any hidden trends that they didn’t see before, because they now have access to their additional breakdowns.”

That might impact targeting, creative insights, budget allocations, and more. One example: board games are surprisingly popular with Gen Z, but you wouldn’t necessarily know that if you aren’t able to slice and dice your data by demographics.

Note: currently Multiple Breakdowns are available via API and ETL. Your standard dashboard view will remain as is.

Enabling this new feature

Multiple Breakdowns is available immediately.

Talk to your Singular contact about enabling this new feature for you.

USA vs Apple: the 27 spiciest bits in the Apple antitrust lawsuit

Apple antitrust: this is a big one … an antitrust USA vs Apple lawsuit.

I’m not going to handicap the likely result, but regardless of whether Apple wins or the U.S. Department of Justice wins, Apple is going to be significantly preoccupied with this massive case for years to come. And, Apple will be looking over its shoulder every time it makes decisions about the App Store, app guidelines, payments, commissions, and rules for third-party apps.

Plus, Apple is fighting a 2-front war: the EU’s Digital Markets Act on one hand, and this U.S. antitrust lawsuit on the other hand. 

That’s a massive burden on innovation, but it should be good for third party apps.

But what is the DOJ alleging in this lawsuit?

Well, the lawsuit against Apple is 88 pages long and over 22,000 words. That’s long, and most of it is pretty boring. The good news is that I’ve read it so you don’t have to, and I’ve summarized the most interesting bits so you don’t have to. An important note: at the moment these are all allegations, and have yet to be proved in a court of law.

1. Apple has “shapeshifting rules”

The U.S. Department of Justice alleges that Apple changes the rules as needed to reinforce and entrench its own market position.

“Rather than respond to competitive threats by offering lower smartphone prices to consumers or better monetization for developers, Apple would meet competitive threats by imposing a series of shapeshifting rules and restrictions in its App Store guidelines and developer agreements that would allow Apple to extract higher fees, thwart innovation, offer a less secure or degraded user experience, and throttle competitive alternatives.”

Examples the DOJ gives: super apps, text messaging, smartwatches, and digital wallets.

“Apple has used its control over app creation, including its technical and contractual control over API access, to effectively block third-party developers from creating digital wallets on the iPhone with tap-to- pay functionality, which is an important feature of a digital wallet for smartphones. As a result, Apple maintains complete control over how users make tap-to-pay payments with their iPhone.”

2. This is not just about smartphones

The DOJ says Apple’s behavior isn’t just about smartphones: it’s about entire industries that are shifting to mobile but are impacted by “Apple’s anticompetitive and exclusionary conduct.”

That ranges from fintech — where Apple has dabbled with the Apple Card and the Apple Wallet — to fitness where Apple offers Apple Fitness+ as part of its Apple One subscription, to news where Apple has News+, and more:

“Critically, Apple’s anticompetitive conduct not only limits competition in the smartphone market, but also reverberates through the industries that are affected by these restrictions, including financial services, fitness, gaming, social media, news media, entertainment, and more.”

3. It’s not just the federal government

15 states and the District of Columbia are joining the federal Department of Justice in this case:

  • Arizona
  • California
  • Connecticut
  • Maine
  • Michigan
  • Minnesota
  • New Hampshire
  • New Jersey
  • New York
  • North Dakota
  • Oklahoma
  • Oregon
  • Tennessee
  • Vermont
  • Wisconsin

What that means is that any eventual settlement will be significantly more costly. Plus, of course, if there is a significant monetary penalty that the states share in, any states not participating in this action will then try to win their pound of flesh too.

4. Apple is more dominant than Android and Google BECAUSE of developers

The lawsuit says Apple is more dominant than the globally much bigger Android operating system and its main maker and beneficiary, Google.

The reason, the DOJ says, is third-party developers:

“Over more than 15 years, Apple has built and sustained the most dominant smartphone platform and ecosystem in the United States by attracting third-party developers of all kinds to create apps that users could download on their smartphones through a digital storefront called the App Store.”

The problem, according to the DOJ, is that as Apple’s power grew, so did its leverage over those third-party developers. 

5. Fees: Apple Wallet, Apple Pay, Apple Card

Apple charges a per-transaction fee to credit card companies that want to put their credit cards into Apple Wallet and enable tap-to-pay, which is why some credit card companies have been slow to integrate with the technology.

“When customers buy a coffee or pay for groceries, Apple charges a fee for every “tap-to-pay” transaction, imposing its own form of an interchange fee on banks and a significant new cost for using credit cards.”

  • Apple Pay is paying with your phone/watch
  • Apple Wallet is where credit cards and tickets are stored
  • Apple Card — only available in the U.S. — is an Apple-owned credit card, which lives in Apple Wallet

The fee for Apple Pay, according to the DOJ, is .15% Over time, this adds up: the DOJ cites a U.S. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau report that estimates Apple Pay facilitated nearly $200 billion in transactions in the United States in 2022, and growing.

“Apple has charged issuing banks 15 basis points (0.15 percent) for each credit card transaction mediated by Apple Pay.”

Samsung, on the other hand, does not charge this fee.

6. DOJ: Apple inhibits competition

Apple inhibits competition by blocking technologies, the Apple antitrust DOJ filing says.

“Apple reduces competition in the markets for performance smartphones and smartphones generally. It does this by delaying, degrading, or outright blocking technologies that would increase competition in the smartphone markets by decreasing barriers to switching to another smartphone.”

NFC comes to mind: for years only Apple apps could use it, which made it challenging for other apps to create authentication protocols, especially in the payments space.

As the DOJ notes: Apple is being forced to open up NFC in Europe.

7. Getting specific: 5 examples of consumer harm, according to the U.S. government

The lawsuit alleges 5 specific examples of consumer harm that it says Apple is causing:

  1. Super apps like WeChat are limited
    Super apps would need to be able to allow installation of mini apps, which Apple has suppressed for years
  2. Cloud streaming apps have been blocked
    Although recently loosened, Apple’s rules around cloud streaming apps have been restrictive
  3. Messaging apps lack access
    Apple makes other companies’ messaging apps on the iPhone worse, the DOJ says, “by prohibiting third-party apps from sending or receiving carrier-based messages”
  4. Smartwatches are second-class citizens
    Third-party smartwatches can’t connect to iPhones as first-class citizens with full access to notifications, etc.
  5. Digital wallets are harder to implement
    “Apple has denied users access to digital wallets,” the DOJ says, “that would have provided a wide variety of enhanced features and denied digital wallet developers—often banks—the opportunity to provide advanced digital payments services to their own customers”

Just one example for messaging apps:

“Apple designates as ‘private’ the APIs needed to send Short Message Service, or SMS, text messages, which is a protocol used by mobile carriers since the early 1990s to allow users to send basic text messages to other mobile phone numbers using their own mobile phone numbers. Developers have no technical means to access these private APIs, but even if they did, doing so would breach their developer agreement with Apple, and therefore put the developer at risk of losing the ability to distribute apps through the App Store.”

And another for super apps:

“Super apps also reduce user dependence on the iPhone, including the iOS operating system and Apple’s App Store. This is because a super app is a kind of middleware that can host apps, services, and experiences without requiring developers to use the iPhone’s APIs or code.”

Specifically:

“Apple recognizes that super apps with mini programs would threaten its monopoly. As one Apple manager put it, allowing super apps to become ‘the main gateway where people play games, book a car, make payments, etc.’ would ‘“let the barbarians in at the gate.’ Why? Because when a super app offers popular mini programs, ‘iOS stickiness goes down.’”

And on cloud streaming:

“In Apple’s own words, it feared a world where ‘all that matters is who has the cheapest hardware’ and consumers could ‘buy[] a [expletive] Android for 25 bux at a garage sale and . . . have a solid cloud computing device’ that ‘works fine.’”

8. Microsoft didn’t act like Apple

If you remember the early days of iTunes and the iTunes Music Store, which Apple also released for Windows, the DOJ notes that “Microsoft did not charge Apple a 30% fee for each song downloaded from Apple’s iTunes store.”

Apple will say this is very different, of course, given that the iTunes Music Store was a desktop app, not a mobile app.

As smartphones get more and more capable, however, it’s harder to make the distinction that they are not computers … even though the iPhone in particular has been built as a closed appliance. Apple will say that is for the sake of security, and they’re right. Others, including the DOJ, will add that it’s also for Apple’s lock-in advantage.

9. iPhones are too expensive

This is a novel one for me.

The DOJ says that Apple prices its phones too high … higher than it could if it did not engage in anticompetitive behavior, I suppose.

“Apple inflates the price for buying and using iPhones while preventing the development of features like alternative app stores, innovative super apps, cloud-streaming games, and secure texting.”

10. Apple harms innovation in specific app verticals, the DOJ says

This seems more plausible:

“Apple’s smartphone monopoly means that it is not economically viable to invest in building some apps, like digital wallets, because they cannot reach iPhone users.”

There are just some apps you’re not going to build because Apple already provides a great experience for users, and winning against free, or included, or built-in is hard.

That has an overall harm on the market, the DOJ says:

“What’s more, Apple itself has less incentive to innovate because it has insulated itself from competition.”

Two pieces of evidence the DOJ supplies for this:

  • Apple has spent 2X the cash on stock buybacks as it has on R&D ($30 billion to $77 billion)
  • An Apple executive argued the company did not need to innovate hard, as many features were already “good enough”

11. Apple’s privacy story is a self-serving “cloak”

This will be interesting for marketers who have lost signal due to ATT and SKAdNetwork: the DOJ says Apple’s privacy branding is self-serving, and Apple’s own behavior compromises user privacy and security.

“Apple deploys privacy and security justifications as an elastic shield that can stretch or contract to serve Apple’s financial and business interests.”

Ouch!

And:

“Apple selectively compromises privacy and security interests when doing so is in Apple’s own financial interest—such as degrading the security of text messages, offering governments and certain companies the chance to access more private and secure versions of app stores, or accepting billions of dollars each year for choosing Google as its default search engine when more private options are available.”

12. Apple market share by revenue: 70%

We’ve seen this before — though honestly, around 2 years ago globally it was at 80% — but Apple does capture a massive share of the revenues available in the global smartphone market.

Apple’s argument that it is not a monopoly has always rested on the existence of the vibrant and massive Android community. The DOJ is saying that this hardly matters when the lion’s share of the profits in the space are hoovered up by iPhone.

I think this will be a hard point to make to a judge or jury. Higher prices are hardly illegal.

Interestingly, the DOJ invents a new metric: “performance smartphones.”

“Apple’s market shares—over 70 percent of the performance smartphone market and over 65 percent of the broader smartphone market—likely understate its monopoly power today.”

13. Market share among the young

In what I think is another weak point, the DOJ says that young people (and rich people) are more likely to want iPhones:

“For example, one- third of all iPhone users in the United States were born after 1996, as compared to just 10 percent for Samsung, Apple’s closest smartphone competitor. Surveys show that as many as 88 percent of U.S. teenagers expect to purchase an iPhone for their next smartphone.”

Sure it is not illegal to be trendy and desirable?

14. Apple is an antitrust beneficiary

Several times throughout the document, the DOJ makes the point that Apple is an antitrust beneficiary in terms of what the DOJ did to Microsoft during Apple’s “beleaguered” days of MacOS vs Windows.

“For example, the iPod did not achieve widespread adoption until Apple developed a cross- platform version of the iPod and iTunes for Microsoft’s Windows operating system, at the time the dominant operating system for personal computers. In the absence of the consent decree in United States v. Microsoft, it would have been more difficult for Apple to achieve this success and ultimately launch the iPhone.”

The implicit message: what’s good for the goose is good for the gander.

The DOJ weakens its case here, in my very humble opinion, however, by suggesting that antitrust laws that forced Microsoft to open APIs for third-party media players were a major factor in making the iPod a success:

“In the first two years after launching the iPod, Apple sold a few hundred thousand devices. The year after launching a Windows-compatible version of iTunes and gaining access to millions more customers, Apple sold millions of devices.”

In reality, as a journalist covering Apple during those days, the elegance and usability of the iPod drove its own popularity, and took people away from Windows to the Mac, helping revive Apple’s core business at the time.

That said, this is an interesting argument:

“But after launching the iPhone, Apple began stifling the development of cross-platform technologies on the iPhone, just as Microsoft tried to stifle cross-platform technologies on Windows.”

15. The App Store is Apple’s tool for “monopoly power”

Clearly, the App Store is the choke point through which Apple controls its iOS ecosystem. The DOJ says that constitutes monopoly power.

“Limiting distribution to the Apple App Store enables Apple to exert monopoly power over developers by imposing contractual restrictions and rules that limit the behavior of non-Apple apps and services. Specifically, Apple sets the conditions for apps it allows on the Apple App Store through its App Store Review Guidelines.”

That’s going to be a key point of contention in the trial.

This part is truly ouch, though:

“Apple selectively exercises that discretion to its own benefit, deviating from or changing its guidelines when it suits Apple’s interests and allowing Apple executives to control app reviews and decide whether to approve individual apps or updates. Apple often enforces its App Store rules arbitrarily. And it frequently uses App Store rules and restrictions to penalize and restrict developers that take advantage of technologies that threaten to disrupt, disintermediate, compete with, or erode Apple’s monopoly power.”

I suspect there will be no shortage of third-party developers who will testify to this, led by Epic Games.

16. Unfair distribution of private APIs

The DOJ says that Apple keeps private APIs for itself — hardly a shock — but also says it selectively releases those for just some third-party apps.

“Apple selectively designates APIs as public or private to benefit Apple, limiting the functionality developers can offer to iPhone users even when the same functionality is available in Apple’s own apps, or even select third-party apps.”

17. iPhone is a platform, not an appliance

To win, the DOJ needs to prove that smartphones are a computing platform, rather than a limited appliance which is carefully controlled for safety and security.

“Smartphone platforms are very different from other platforms, like landline telephone networks, whose value-adding features were built primarily by the platform operator and which were only opened to third parties when the platform operator was required to do so by regulation. When a third-party developer for the iPhone creates a valuable new feature, consumers benefit and consumer demand goes up for Apple’s products, increasing the economic value of the iPhone to Apple.”

According to the DOJ, Apple artificially limits its platform for monopoly reasons.

“It makes no economic sense for Apple to sacrifice the profits it would earn from new features and functionality unless it has some other compensating reason to do so, such as protecting its monopoly profits.”

18. DOJ: Apple’s maintenance of monopoly power is unlawful

The DOJ says apple maintains its monopoly power in 3 distinct ways:

  1. App Store guidelines
    “Apple exercises its control over app distribution and app creation to dictate how developers innovate for the iPhone, enforcing rules and contractual restrictions that stop or delay developers from innovating in ways that threaten Apple’s power.”
  2. Switching costs
    “Apple increases the cost and friction of switching from the iPhone to another smartphone.”
  3. Monopoly rents and fees
    “Apple uses these restrictions to extract monopoly rents from third parties in a variety of ways, including app fees and revenue-share requirements. For most of the last 15 years, Apple collected a tax in the form of a 30 percent commission on the price of any app downloaded from the App Store, a 30 percent tax on in-app purchases, and fees to access the tools needed to develop iPhone native apps in the first place.”

19. Apple Search Ads in the cross-hairs

Interestingly, Apple Search Ads has not escaped the DOJ’s notice.

In one place, the DOJ says that Apple “generates extraordinary profits” through “advertisements within the App Store” among other things.

In another, the DOJ says that charging developers for users to find their apps and selling keywords linked to one app to another app willing to pay is problematic.

“Apple also generates substantial and increasing revenue by charging developers to help users find their apps in the App Store—something that, for years, Apple told developers was part of the reason they paid a 30 percent tax in the first place. For example, Apple will sell keyword searches for an app to someone other than the owner of the app. Apple is able to command these rents from companies of all sizes, including some of the largest and most sophisticated companies in the world.” 

20. DOJ: Apple slowed its own innovation

The DOJ alleges that Apple slowed down its own pace of innovation in a way that “extracted more revenue and profit from its existing customers through subscriptions, advertising, and cloud services.”

One specific example the DOJ says is evidence of this is super apps.

“Apple did not respond to the risk that super apps might disrupt its monopoly by innovating. Instead, Apple exerted its control over app distribution to stifle others’ innovation. Apple created, strategically broadened, and aggressively enforced its App Store Guidelines to effectively block apps from hosting mini programs.”

A downside for the DOJ: WeChat is available on the iOS App Store, no?

I just checked the WeChat listing on the App Store, and listed among its features is this:

“MINI PROGRAMS: Countless third-party services all within the WeChat app that don’t require additional installation, saving you precious phone storage and time.”

However, the DOJ says:

“Apple blocked mini programs from accessing the APIs needed to implement Apple’s in-app payment (IAP) system—even if developers were willing to pay Apple’s monopoly tax. Similarly, Apple blocked developers’ ability to use in-app payment methods other than directly using IAP. For instance, super apps could create a virtual currency for consumers to use in mini programs, but Apple blocked this too.”

Another example: cloud streaming for games and apps.

One downside for the DOJ here: it’s not clear that consumers have really gravitated towards any of the big cloud streaming initiatives that the tech giants and others have released.

21. Cross-messaging to Android: second-class citizens

Many have talked about the tyranny of the green bubble in Apple iMessage, and how it looks when Android users enter chats.

The DOJ says:

“if an iPhone user messages a non-iPhone user in Apple Messages—the default messaging app on an iPhone—then the text appears to the iPhone user as a green bubble and incorporates limited functionality: the conversation is not encrypted, videos are pixelated and grainy, and users cannot edit messages or see typing indicators. This signals to users that rival smartphones are lower quality because the experience of messaging friends and family who do not own iPhones is worse—even though Apple, not the rival smartphone, is the cause of that degraded user experience. Many non-iPhone users also experience social stigma, exclusion, and blame for “breaking” chats where other participants own iPhones.”

This especially impacts teenagers, the DOJ says, citing that iPhone’s share is 85% in that demographic.

22. Apple uses a moat philosophy to maintain its monopoly, the DOJ says

Some examples the DOJ provides of technologies or sectors that it says can’t compete fairly on iOS:

  • third-party location trackable devices
  • third-party, cross-platform video communications apps
  • third-party iOS web browsers
  • eSIM technology
  • restrictions in sales channel
  • third-party voice and AI assistants

23. DOJ: Apple’s own subscription services compete unfairly

Apple now offers subscriptions in “news, games, video, music, cloud storage, and fitness,” the DOJ notes, which “could be used to keep users tethered to the platform,” and can increase switching costs.

The entire Apple ecosystem is part of the problem, according to the DOJ:

“Apple has countless products and services—AirPods, iPads, Music, Apple TV, photos, maps, iTunes, CarPlay, AirDrop, Apple Card, and Cash. These provide future avenues for Apple to engage in anticompetitive conduct and the ability to circumvent remedies. Appropriate forward-looking remedies are necessary to ensure that Apple cannot use these products and services to further entrench its monopoly power.”

One problem: for those inside the Apple ecosystem, there’s significant consumer benefit. Ease of use, consolidation, simplicity … so pulling it all apart would result in massive consumer harm.

24. Charging commission on in-app purchases on the web

The DOJ is not impressed with Apple attempts to continue to charge IAP commissions on purchases made elsewhere.

“Apple was recently ordered to stop blocking link-outs by third parties to their websites where users could buy the third party’s product cheaper. In response, Apple reportedly allowed link-outs to websites but now charges for purchases made on the web even if they are not an immediate result of a click from a link in a native iPhone app.”

When 1 road is closed, the DOJ notes, Apple finds “new roads to the same or worse ends.”

25. CarPlay wants to take over

Many manufacturers have taken CarPlay out over the past year or so, but it remains a popular and desirable feature for many consumers. (As a Tesla owner, I would appreciate CarPlay in my car, but cannot get it.)

A key reason:

“After leveraging its smartphone dominance to car infotainment systems, Apple has told automakers that the next generation of Apple CarPlay will take over all of the screens, sensors, and gauges in a car, forcing users to experience driving as an iPhone-centric experience if they want to use any of the features provided by CarPlay.”

26. Multiple app stores

The DOJ has not overlooked the inability of competitors to offer additional app stores for iPhone and iPad.

“The harms to smartphone competition caused by Apple’s conduct are amplified by Apple’s decision to grant itself exclusive distribution rights to iPhone users through the Apple App Store.”

27. Privacy and security are not the reasons, the DOJ says

Apple’s response to much of this, of course, will be that the way the iOS ecosystem has been engineered is to keep out malware and bad actors, and there’s a lot of truth to that.

Not enough, however, in the eyes of the DOJ:

“Privacy, security, and other alleged countervailing factors do not justify Apple’s anticompetitive conduct  … there are no valid, procompetitive benefits of Apple’s exclusionary conduct that would outweigh its anticompetitive effects. Apple’s moat building has not resulted in lower prices, higher output, improved innovation, or a better user experience for smartphone users.”

The evidence, for the DOJ, is Apple own desktop and laptop computers:

“As a point of comparison, Apple does not engage in such conduct on its Mac laptops and computers. It gives developers the freedom to distribute software directly to consumers on Mac without going through an Apple-controlled app store and without paying Apple app store fees.”

In fact, in fintech, Apple’s moves result in less privacy and security, according to the DOJ:

“When an iPhone user provisions a credit or debit card into Apple Wallet, Apple intervenes in a process that could otherwise occur directly between the user and card issuer, introducing an additional point of failure for privacy and security.”

Also, text messages sent to Androids are unencrypted, unless iMessage messages.

Ultimately, the DOJ says, this is all self-serving:

“Ultimately, Apple chooses to make the iPhone private and secure when doing so benefits Apple; Apple chooses alternative courses when those courses help Apple protect its monopoly power.”

Summing it all up

We’re all going to need to take some time to digest everything here in this Apple antitrust lawsuit.

While many feel the DOJ’s efforts are not likely to be successful, the fact that this lawsuit has been launched is likely going to be the catalyst for significant change on iOS in the years and decades to come.

I personally think there’s a way for Apple to adopt radical changes that will save it from the storm of legislation and lawsuits it is now facing in Europe, the United States, and elsewhere, without significant financial and platform downside.

But more on that in the week to come.

Top global ad networks: talking ROI Index with SplitMetrics

Singular just released the 2024 ROI Index showcasing the top global ad networks for mobile user acquisition. The goal: analyze billions of installs and trillions of ad impressions to showcase where you should be looking for your next best ad networks.

Some of the questions we wanted to answer:

  • Which ad networks are driving the highest ROI per genre, per region, per OS?
  • Which ad networks are driving the highest retention per genre, per region, per OS?
  • What are the key storylines in mobile adtech for 2024?

Check it out right now.

Immediately after launching the Index, I chatted with SplitMetrics marketing manager Lina Danilchik for her podcast App Growth Talks. (Check it out here, with a full transcript.) She agreed to crosspost it to Growth Masterminds, so here you go. 

Hit play and keep scrolling …

Top global ad networks: the “golden 6”

One of the topics we covered: the “golden 6.”

A total of 6 ad networks ranked in every single category on the 2024 ROI Index. If I had thought a little deeper, I might have called them Superb 6 or the Stellar 6. Maybe the Sensational 6 or Splendid 6, because “golden 6” lacks some punch. And some alliteration.

But here they are:

  1. Google
  2. Meta
  3. TikTok
  4. ironSource
  5. AppLovin
  6. Moloco

Google is a given: they’re huge. Meta is also a given, with essentially global scale. ironSource, now with Unity, and AppLovin lack the scale of those incredible platforms, but are interesting for the scope of the solutions they provide (everything from acquisition to analytics to monetization to publishing) and are the giants of the rest of the ad industry.

The most interesting member of the golden 6, the best of the top global ad networks?

Moloco, which made it despite not being a walled garden like Meta, not being a massive search engine and app store owner like Google, not being a massive viral hit like Tiktok, and not being a massive conglomerate like AppLovin and ironSource.

Rather, they did it the old-fashioned way, in a sense: just being an ad network. (Although, Moloco is trending towards conglomeration by offering their original DSP, plus a retail media solution, plus a CTV-focused monetization product.)

Top 3 insights from the ROI Index

Danilchik asked what my top 3 insights about the ROI Index were. You’ll probably find those in the 14 highlights I listed in this blog post, but for the sake of variety, here’s what I shared:

  1. 31 ad networks ranked
    That’s more than last year, and that growth is a good thing: more ad partners that are successful offer more choices, and reduce the industry potential for too much consolidation that could ultimately result in higher prices.
  2. Big getting bigger
    That all said, the fact of the matter is that the top ad networks grew more than the others, at least in terms of absolute scale of ad spend. Apple, Meta, Google, and TikTok increased their share of spend by 23.4% … good for them, but potentially worrisome for smaller competitors.
  3. Still room for the small guys
    Just to continue the pendulum swing all the way back 1 more time, Moloco making the Golden 6 despite being a fraction of the size of even the smallest of the 5 other ad networks and platforms is good news. It means that smaller companies can compete.

Reddit: growth and a specific type of opportunity

Reddit, which just announced its IPO — here’s what advertisers need to know — made it into the ROI Index after skipping a year. It’s not among the golden 6 as 1 of the top global ad networks, but it has huge potential.

One of the things Danilchik and I chatted about: if you’re going to succeed on Reddit, though, you’re likely going to need a very different approach: something native, something that fits the flow, something that integrates into what Redditors (people who use Reddit) are used to seeing.

And guess what …

Reddit just announced that it is priming the IPO pump with a brand new ad type: free-form ads. Think interesting posts on Reddit, but sponsored. Using a mix of text, images, GIFs, and movies, advertisers can try very cool things. 

Via Reddit:

“Free-form ads empower you to connect with your audience by providing a way to create quality content for redditors to dive deep into. This level of engagement can have a lasting positive impact on brand metrics, including increased purchase consideration or message association.

Use free-form ads to tell your story in a way that aligns with your goals, audience, and strategy – such as diving into the features of a new product, sharing expertise through a thought-leadership piece, or creating a shopping guide for key holiday moments.”

Though the scale of attention that Reddit has far outweighs (so far) its ability to drive results for advertisers, this might just turn the tide.

Innovations for the future of mobile growth

Another topic Danilchuk asked me about for App Growth Talks was innovations for the future of mobile growth. The 4 I picked were these:

  1. Multiple app stores
    We have this on Android in China and India and Russia, but not so much in the rest of the world, despite the Amazon Appstore and Samsung’s Galaxy Store. We’re going to see more, and we’re going to see them on iOS as well, thanks to Europe’s Digital Markets Act. EU antitrust chief Margrethe Vestager has already said she’ll be looking into the Core Technology Fee that Apple is planning to charge on apps downloaded from non-App Store locations, so while it might take a little longer, we’ll get something similar to the Android experience on iOS as well.
  2. Multi-platform experiences
    We’re seeing more and more multi-platform experiences. Not only do they provide access wherever people want it, they enable commerce wherever publishers net out more of the total fee. This should continue to grow …
  3. SKAN & Privacy Sandbox
    It may not be pleasant for most mobile marketers, but SKAN and Privacy Sandbox represent ongoing innovation in privacy and attribution that will define much of the next generation of mobile marketing analytics.
  4. Generative AI makings ads for an audience of 1
    Google and Meta are already putting ads together on the fly from pre-built assets, and since mid to late 2023, they’ve been employing generative AI to literally synthesize ads out of thin air. The big platforms that know us so well thanks to their gigabytes of data on what we do and how we behave will increase their investments in generative AI. The result will ultimately be ads made for an audience of 1.

Much more in the full podcast: top global ad networks …

Check out the full show, either in SplitMetric’s App Growth Talks, or in Singular’s Growth Masterminds. 

What you’ll find:

  • 00:00 Welcome to a Special Crossover Episode!
  • 00:43 Introducing John Koetsier 
  • 03:58 Unveiling the ROI Index: A Deep Dive into Mobile Ad Networks
  • 05:21 The Golden Six: Top Ad Networks Uncovered
  • 08:40 Exploring Apple’s Search Ads Performance
  • 15:08 Reddit’s Unique Position in the Ad Space
  • 19:10 Exploring AI’s Impact and Future in Tech
  • 21:15 The Evolution of Advertising with AI
  • 24:49 Emerging Technologies and Innovations in the Industry
  • 28:47 Insights from the ROI Index Report
  • 30:55 Advice for Small and Growing Mobile Businesses
  • 36:09 Concluding Thoughts and Future Sessions

Mobile games user acquisition strategy 2024

Mobile user acquisition in 2024 is like playing a console game on hard mode. There’s no aim assist, the bosses are all super badass, the levels are twice as long, sometimes you don’t even know when you’ve won, and sometimes when you’ve won you have no clear idea how.

Yay. 

Lucky you, in games marketing during the early privacy era of mobile.

But there is hope. There is usable data that you can extract from SKAN, and since Privacy Sandbox isn’t active yet, you still have the IDFA on Android. You can still get some IDFAs, and there are now very good ways of getting true organics and deduping all your installs on iOS. (Talk to Singular about some new tech on that front.)

But let’s kick this user acquisition in 2024 post by being real: there’s a lot of recycled nonsense out there in blog posts about user acquisition strategy, and since games are basically half the App Store and Google Play plus a monster portion of all the in-app revenue publishers make, a lot of it is about games. It’s time for something different.

This post is my attempt at advice for mobile growth marketers seeking to boost player acquisition in 2024. It’s based on chats with hundreds of marketers, over 103 episodes talking to the best marketing on the planet on Growth Masterminds, and deep dives into mobile advertising data for reports like Singular’s ROI Index. But look: if you’re in the mobile user acquisition space actively right now deploying tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars, you’re the true expert. 

My hope here is to stimulate creativity and new ideas by offering up a few perspectives in multiple mobile growth areas.

Some I recommend. Some I do not.

For some of these tips, I’ve seen them working, or heard from credible sources that they do work, but I do not personally recommend using the strategy. I’ll be clear about if I do NOT recommend a tip, suggestion, or idea, and why. But the choice is ultimately yours.

As always: YMMV.

Paid marketing for mobile user acquisition

1. Ad intelligence (expensive and cheap versions)

Use an ad intelligence tool to find out which ads have been the most successful in the past 3-6 months. Then copy them, emulate them, or just use them as inspiration. 

This is simple: all of us are smarter than some of us, which means by definition that in general, and over time, the market as a whole will surface better, more clickable, and higher converting creative than you specifically will. 

(Unless, of course, you’re that rare .1% outlier that beats the crowd every time. Statistically speaking, it’s unlikely to be you.)

Perhaps you don’t have the cash on hand for an ad intelligence tool, or you can’t convince your boss. No worries: go to Facebook’s ad library, and search for a top competitor. See what they’re doing, and adjust your strategy accordingly.

2. Pause all paid marketing for a week or two

This is suggestion #1 for Things That Will Scare Your Boss, but it’s also a good way to establish your true organic level (especially if you pause for even longer).

Then, when you start back up, start up 1 ad partner at a time. See which ones are incremental. See which ones don’t add value. Adjust your spend and campaigns accordingly.

3. Fake ads (not recommended)

Some game publishers are literally doing step 1 above to find all the best-performing ads, and then running similar ads regardless of what kind of game they have.

In this scenario, the ad and the game literally have no connection: nothing in the ad shows up in the game, and the gameplay, look, and feel is wildly different than the ad.

It sounds insane, but look: when smart people spend money and continue to do it over time, something is working for them. I don’t recommend it: I think reputational risk, retention risk, and risk to the whole fragile edifice of mobile games advertising is too great.  I also think it’s largely a waste money. I literally deleted a major, well-known game just 1 hour after installing it because the playable ad that sold me on trying the game bore no relation at all to the actual gameplay I encountered.

But it’s working for some. YMMV.

4. Make playable ads that depict early stages in your game, not later ones

Did you just read #3 above?

You can get into the same trouble by making playable ads (or video ads for that matter) that show a stage in your game the players won’t see for hours or weeks or months after they start playing your game. Big mistake. Your ad is not a fake ad, but it looks and feels like one, because the core loop players are experiencing immediately after install is NOT what you sold them on.

A bunch of those players will just say goodbye.

5. Make an event with influencers playing your game

Get a bunch of influencers to play your game together, or (especially valuable) against each other. Make it an in-app event (iOS) or live ops (Android) which will show up on the App Store and Google Play. Invite all your existing players to join the party.

Google says this drives a “3.6% increase in revenue and a 5.1% increase in 28DAU versus similar titles who don’t” do in-app events.

This is sort of a mix of organic and paid, because you’ll have to pay the influencers, but you should get organic spillover on the app stores. In addition, however, milk it on all your socials and your website. Livestream it. Clip the best parts and share them as shorts. Maybe make ads from some of the coolest bits with players winning big or losing hard.

6. Video ads that don’t suck

You know the ones that do. 

They present as a playable ad, often in a rewarded ad scenario. But when you tap them, the ad network running the ad bumps open an app listing page over the ad. Attempting to close the ad does exactly the same thing, sometimes multiple times, usually with a timer. Trying to trick people into installing is just lame, and the ad networks are only doing it so aggressively so they get more impressions, SKAN (loser) postbacks, and maybe maybe maybe the odd instant download.

Work with your ad networks to get an ad experience that drives value, not just clicks/impressions/store opens. Mobile games user acquisition is hard enough without deceptive ads making people even more suspicious of advertising.

7. Playables that don’t lie

Yeah. Same thing.

You know the playables that when you try to actually  … PLAY THEM … pop open an app listing page begging you to install before you’ve experienced very much at all? Not cool, and not likely to generate a positive long-term response.

Also avoid: full-up playable lies.

I won’t name names, but there’s an 8-Ball Pool competitor that I installed because it showed gameplay in video and playable ads that looked smart for on a phone. I’ve only ever wanted to play 8 Ball Pool on a tablet because I’ve always felt a smartphone is too small to really check the angles. This competitor, however, showcased gameplay that zoomed in on the corner of the pool table that you could make a shot on, giving you a great view of the angles and post-shot action. And it featured 1-finger usage: aim and select force all in a single step.

But once installed?

Nope.

Back to the full massive pool table on a smartphone screen, with tiny balls, tiny cue sticks, and exactly the kind of hard-to-read angles I did NOT want. Plus a 2-step figure the angles, then set the velocity process.

Instant delete, with significant prejudice against ever trying it again. 

Market the game you have, not a game that doesn’t exist.

(Unless you’re doing market research on what game to make! That’s a different use case, and very valid! But make sure it’s not connected to your brand so you don’t generate negative buzz and get reputation blowback.)

8. Try more ad partners

I said it back in 2021: “top gaming companies use 2-3X more ad partners than average mobile app marketers.” This is still true today. I recently saw data that top growers by install count are working with significantly more ad networks.

So: in general, try more options, and use more partners. You’ll learn more, you’ll see more, and you’ll get more.

Note: there is now a caveat to that advice.

For Android, this is still 100% true. Go nuts. With the right marketing measurement partner — who could that be?!? — it’s totally doable. For iOS, it’s also true, but the caveat is that it is less true if you lack scale. (Translation: you’re not spending dump trucks full of cash.) The fact of the matter on SKAdNetwork is that you need scale to get data from SKAN, or else you’ll lose too much insight to privacy thresholds AKA crowd anonymity.

Everyone uses Meta and Google and Apple Search Ads. Go beyond. Here’s a good place to look.

9. Pick channels that don’t suck

Pick the right channels, said the user acquisition consultant with a smile. Yes, that’s generally a good idea.

Easier said than done? Actually … not so hard.

A good place to start: the Singular ROI Index, which takes into account billions of dollars of ad spend and finds the top ad partners. Not all of them work best for every game, every budget, and every vertical. But they’re a great place to begin.

Unconventional growth strategies for mobile games

1. Buy games

Buy unprofitable games that actually do have users — and maybe user accounts with first-party data — and transition their users to games you own that are profitable via cross-promotion. Rinse and repeat, and eventually you may be able to recycle players continuously, onboarding and upgrading them to your profitable titles.

Mobile games user acquisition, meet user farming.

2. Partner with a publisher

Yeah, not new advice. And maybe not something you want to do as an indie or startup game maker. 

But for lots of reasons, big games publishers can drive success. They have scale, they have resources, they have cross-promotion capabilities, they have connections. And, it can help you focus on building your game if they will focus on growing it. 

3. Mini metaverse

Players age out eventually. Few stay playing for multiple years, even for massive long-term franchises like Clash of Clans. Provide a place for them to go by connecting players in one game to players in another game. 

Let valuable players leverage their expertise and loot in one game to enter the second game at a higher-than-base level, but not too high: make it a challenge, but one they’re better prepped for than total newbies to your studio’s games.

4. Combine and conquer

Dividing is great for your enemies. Combine with similar studios to join forces and expand the number of players you can generate insights from. Combine indie studios for more reach, more audience, more intelligence, more resources. 

Do it intelligently enough with the right kind of contract, and you can keep the little world you always wanted to create and would hate to lose, while also reaping the benefits of being bigger.

5. Try crazy ads (like, literally crazy)

Get a few of the developers’ moms or dads to record a video about why people should download their kids’ game. Let them do it in whatever super-cheesy way they want. Maybe, just maybe, 1 of them will go viral on TikTok.

I know one app that literally exploded thanks to one video by a small account that just hit the right spot at the right time and went massively viral. If you don’t create the opportunities to get lucky, you won’t.

Dream up other equally wacky strategies and throw them into the bubbling caldron of the internet. You never know: magic might result.

Don’t neglect organic growth for mobile user acquisition

1. Optimize organic because it’s doubly good

No, this probably won’t be quite as important as your paid strategy, but any and all work you do in organic marketing multiplies your paid efforts. There’s an organic multiplier for paid; there’s a paid multiplier for organic.

Why?

Familiarity is good. Multiple mentions is good. Richer non-ad content is good. Long-form content and SEO and quirky short-form video are all good. Add them, use them, promote them, and watch your CTR and CVR for paid campaigns increase. 

And (this is the “doubly good” part) … you also get the benefit of organic user/player/customer acquisition, which is probably going to be one of your highest-value sources.

So get your name out there.

No cash? Hire a cheap but smart and talented intern and set them free. (Provide some oversight, but once you know you have the right person or people, let them go nuts.)

2. Sweat your assets

Never, never, never do a thing once just to do the thing once.

Doing an influencer event? Add it to your socials. Take a video. Share it to YouTube. Clip it for Twitter. Publish it in a podcast. Make shorts for TikTok and YouTube. Doing a long-form blog post detailing strategic game insights for your hard-core clan battle game? Do a Twitch livestream with the author. Do a Twitter thread with the key points. Put paid on it in non-traditional places.

Let a thousand flowers bloom.

3. Then give the winners wings

As you’re doing organic marketing, pay attention to what resonates. 

Once you find winners, support them with paid, EVEN IF YOU CAN’T DRIVE A DIRECT INSTALL FROM IT. Drip it in with a few dollars a day. Trust the process, use MMM, engage your faith-based marketing antenna — whatever you have to do — and feed the victors. 

Good + more good = multiplied good.

Non-marketing growth drivers to add to the mix

1. Make sure your game doesn’t suck

(This is the high-end advice you come to the Singular blog for, right?)

Look, sure: that’s obvious. But sometimes games makers forget.

I know you love all your children equally. But some of them just suck. Grow a pair, abandon the stillborns, and transition energy and investment to winners. I know a studio that kept a game in country-limited beta launch for FIVE WHOLE YEARS trying to force their past predictions of success to turn out true.

More often than not, that’s wasted energy, and comes with massive opportunity cost that your other games will pay for.

2. Get the tools you need to boost engagement and retention

If you’re not using all the modern tools like Braze or CleverTap to understand, segment, address, and personalize gameplay for your users, you’re losing out. 

Engage. Communicate. Offer. Change. Adapt. Do whatever it takes to drive high engagement and high retention because the best user acquisition in the world can’t make a mobile game successful without it. The leaks in the bucket will almost always surpass the rate at which you can fill it.

3. Pick the right niche

Don’t fight the giants. Find the right category.

Know yourself, know your studio, and know your vertical. Do you really have the hundreds of developers and millions (hundreds of millions) of dollars to challenge the biggest players, or do you need to sneak under their radar for a while and grow something else?

Sometimes that’s all about being strategic about what category you pick in Google Play or the App Store.

4. Craft your onboarding like Michelangelo painting the Sistine Chapel

Onboarding is so hard to get right and so essential to do.

It has to be quick but it has to be great. It has to help and not obstruct. This is HARD.

Beginnings are where you can lose 80-90% of your users, or where you can fire them up for long-term engaging, playing, and buying. Invest the time to build it right, test it often, and adjust it for different cohorts of users coming into your game from different places and different campaigns. Players from different campaigns who clicked on ads with different messaging may have different motivations: adjust your onboarding to match.

Financial keys to mobile game growth

1. Re-measure LTV frequently

Obviously if your CAC exceeds your LTV you’ve got a problem. Make sure you really understand your LTV — including from different sources and partners as your marketing naturally changes and evolves — and make sure you keep measuring that. 

When your vertical changes CAC can change. When the economy changes, LTV can change. When the entire mobile ecosystem changes (SKAN, Privacy Sandbox for Android), all of these elements can change at once.

Be nimble so you’re ahead of the changes — or just behind them — and don’t waste too much money.

2. Borrow from the future to fund growth

If your engagement is strong, your retention is good, and your monetization is predictable, chat with companies like Pollen VC that will lend you money for user acquisition campaigns based on your current players, engagement, and revenue.

They typically have strong models to measure and predict revenue and growth, so all other things being equal this can be cheap funding to drive strategic growth.

Target the right players in the right way

1. Don’t promote your game. Target player motivations

Target player motivations rather than promoting your game.

People want quick fun? Aim your ads at easy entertainment. People want satisfaction from a challenging path to completing something beautiful? Aim your ads at the satisfaction of finishing. People need to decompress and chill? Focus on escape from reality.

You get the picture. Facebook says there are 8 major motivations for people playing mobile games:

  1. Self-expression
  2. Social connection
  3. Progression
  4. Expertise
  5. Discovery
  6. Power
  7. Escapism
  8. Relaxation

Find the ones that hit, and hit them hard.

You’re not selling your game. You’re selling what people need. You’re selling what people want.

Measurement that boosts growth

1. Pick the right MMP

Yeah, it’s totally self-serving to add this to the list. Doesn’t mean it’s not true.

You can pick the cheapest MMP. You can pick the oldest MMP. You can pick the MMP that you’ve always picked because it’s the MMP that you’ve always picked. Or you can pick the MMP that the biggest games pick. I would hate to name-drop here, but they might just be publishers like Rovio, Glu, Supercell, Riot, Ubisoft, EA, and Zynga.

(Singular’s also costs less than many alternatives, and doesn’t charge for every little add-on.)

Getting the right data the right way right away is critical to mobile games user acquisition. Innovation matters. Combining cost and conversions matters. Smart modeling for missing data matters. Find out why.

2. Incorporate MMM (media mix modeling)

Mobile marketing is getting less measurable. Wait, that’s not exactly true. Mobile marketing is getting less measurable by conventional tracking-based methodologies. Start looking at MMM to provide insights that you need for growth. 

(Here’s the Singular guide to kickstarting your MMM journey)

The good part is that you’ve always known last click is a proxy for successful marketing but not a 100% causally-connected explanation of what marketing worked and why. Now MMM can open your eyes to marketing that has always worked, but isn’t directly trackable.

Singular offers MMM that is super-easy to get started with: simple, automated, ready to go out of the box.

3. Suck it up and get good at SKAN

All that said about MMM said, you can’t go into 2024 without rocking at SKAdNetwork. It can work, it doesn’t have to give you $500 CPIs, and it can both be predictive and drive massive growth.

But you can’t do it without the right technology to model missing data. And it’s hard to do if you’re still whining about losing the IDFA.

You need to become a SKAN expert, and in 2024 or 2025, you’re also going to need to become a Privacy Sandbox for Android expert. MMM is great, but we’re not going to abandon usable signals from deterministic sources

Mobile games user acquisition strategy for 2024

It’s always been hard. It’s generally been expensive.

But mobile games user acquisition is now harder than ever, thanks to the IDFA and GAID disappearing. And with budgets going down as the global economy cools off, you’re having to grow more with less funding.

That means being smarter. More creative. More innovative. And working harder than your competition.

Hopefully these tips offer at least 1 suggestion for something you can try that will help you hit a user acquisition home run. Is the list missing something I should add? Let me know!