John Koetsier, Author at Singular

CAPIs, CAPIs, CAPIs: everything you need to know about conversion APIs

We saw in Q1 of this year that Conversion APIs, or CAPIs, are hugely critical in the post-privacy marketing landscape for driving advertising effectiveness measurement. How? Snap made it perfectly clear. In the company’s breakout earnings report with 5X the growth of the same quarter in the previous year, Snap called out CAPIs as a significant factor in driving performance marketing revenue, which grew much faster than brand marketing.

In the company’s investor letter, Snap said that CAPI integrations exploded 3X and represented half of all direct response ad revenue:

“Our improvements to CAPI, improved collaboration with advertisers, and growth in partner integrations has resulted in CAPI integrations growing approximately 300% year-over-year in Q1. Advertisers that represent approximately half of all DR ad revenue have now completed CAPI integrations.

But what are CAPIs, how do they work, what good are they for advertisers, and is there an easy button to get them up and running?

I spent some time with Singular’s Mike Gadd, customer success director for EMEA and India and former rock climbing instructor. Hit play and keep scrolling …

You get CAPIs, you get CAPIs, everyone gets CAPIs

It seems like everyone has a conversion API now.

Meta was probably first off the mark, offering a CAPI in 2020. That was a year before Apple released iOS 14.5 with App Tracking Transparency, effectively shutting a significant portion of the pipeline informing advertisers how their ads are performing. Just as devastating initially, however, was ATT’s damming of data flow about users, players, customers, and devices to marketing platforms.

When you know less about the people whose attention you’re selling ads against, the ads are less targeted, less relevant, less valuable. Facebook lost an estimate $10 billion in revenue.

How do CAPIs help fix that?

CAPIs correlate advertisers’ first-party data about acquired customers with advertising platforms’ first-party data about who they’ve delivered ads to. This can and should be privacy-safe, using hashed data to securely send a tag or identifier. Ad platforms check the hashed data, compare it to their own, and report a conversion.

Google has a CAPI, Pinterest does, TikTok has what it calls Events API, and Snap, as I mentioned at the top of this post, has a conversion API.

Here’s how TikTok refers to its CAPI:

“TikTok Events API provides advertisers with a reliable connection between TikTok and advertiser’s marketing data, across web, app, and offline (eg. Store, CRM) channels with the ability to customize the information they share with TikTok.”

“Reliable connection” is code for “doesn’t happen via Apple.” (Or any other company that could block the flow of information.)

Benefits for advertisers include capturing missing conversions, giving you a better picture of ad performance.

That’s obviously also a benefit for the ad platform. It’s also, as TikTok notes, a resilient solution for an evolving advertising ecosystem. Other benefits include granular control over what data you send and having, as Meta indicates, a single connection point that can reduce complexity in your tech stack.

Web, web to app, and CAPIs

CAPIs are not, of course, solely about ATT or iOS. As I mentioned above, they pre-date iOS 14.5. The web is a massive use case for conversion APIs, and that’s come into sharper focus as mobile app publishers expand both their marketing and their product offerings to the web.

“A CAPI is a bridge between your website generally and the advertising platforms that you’re working with,” says Mike Gadd.

In the past you might have embedded a tracking pixel in your website for Google, for Meta, for TikTok, and potentially other big platforms and ad networks.

That’s a bunch of maintenance, but it has other problems. It’s brittle: VPNs and privacy-focused browsers can block them. For example, Firefox has “Enhanced Tracking Protection,” Safari has “Intelligent Tracking Prevention,” and Brave has aggressive tracker blocking that can stop tracking pixels from loading, particularly if they’re from known tracking domains.

Another challenge from the advertiser side: if you embed a tracking pixel on your website and it works, you have no control over what data gets shared or scraped or seen by the ad network.

A conversion API is backend, server to server.

It’s entirely under your control: only data you want to set gets sent.

And it’s as unblockable as standard internet traffic.

This matters for marketers who are increasingly advertising on the web for a mobile app experience, mediated by a landing page.

“We are seeing more and more customers who are using web advertising to drive to landing pages and then download an app from there,” says Gadd.

“An interesting use case for CAPIs is being able to actually understand what’s going on in the app and use CAPIs to pass the information back to those networks … which wasn’t possible before … you were doing web advertising and app activity and you had this gap of being able to do your optimization. Now with CAPIs, it’s possible to be able to pass that back.”

PC and console gaming: also a major conversion API use case

Because so much PC and console game marketing happens on the web, a CAPI strategy using an intervening landing page works well here also.

That particularly helps when you don’t know which platform your customer will prefer.

“Definitely for PC/console we see a lot of customers who will have a landing page first,” says Gadd. “Sometimes that will be because you’re going onto multiple platforms, so you need to pick the platform that you want to go to, whether you’re going onto Steam or another platform.”

The landing page then of course not only provides the routing but part of the measurement that can then be reported via your CAPIs.

So where’s the easy button?

At Singular, we initially saw CAPIs being used primarily by enterprise or larger clients first, due to some of the technological sophistication required to set them up.

Also, those larger clients were more likely to have both web and mobile components of their business, or perhaps even console games or outposts on additional platforms. Now more and more clients are doing it, including midmarket and growing customers.

But it’s not necessarily easy.

“If we look at different integrations that we work with in terms of data connectors that pull cost data and monetization data and things like that, CAPI connectors are definitely the most involved integration that we will do,” says Gadd.

Which is why there’s a Singular integrations team that will do it with you.

The big ones are most popular, of course: Meta, Google, TikTok.

If you’re looking for help, simply chat with your Singular representative about how to set up CAPIs for your apps or games. Singular, essentially, is your easy button for CAPIs.

Connected TV ad strategies: 10 tips on optimizing ad strategies via streaming media

42% of the marketers in a recent Singular webinar said they were currently running CTV ad campaigns. Another 50% said they weren’t, but plan to, and only 8% said they had no plans. All of which likely means that about 92% of marketers could probably benefit from some hot tips on connected TV ad strategies.

That makes a ton of sense, because check out this chart from Evan Shapiro of who’s winning in total viewing share in the U.S right now:

YouTube leads the pack, followed by Disney and NBC, which both own significant assets in both traditional TV and smart, connected, subscription-based as well as ad-supported CTV: Disney+ and Peacock. Netflix is up there, as is Paramount, which has had some big success lately with Paramount+.

And you also see Amazon Prime, Roku, even Hallmark on the list.

Learning to navigate and win in this new landscape is fundamentally different than traditional mobile user acquisition or mobile marketing. So some new connected TV ad strategies should be helpful.

First: watch the connected TV ad strategies webinar

We had some amazing panelists in our recent Mastering Connected TV Ad Strategies webinar, and they’re the ones who have contributed these insights.

They include:

Alexandre Pham, EVP Enterprise, EMEA & APAC @ Vibe
- Vibe’s claim to fame:
  “Vibe is the Google Ads of TV. We allow any marketer, any brand, of any size, to advertise on TV within 5 minutes.”
Jake Richardson, Head of CTV Strategy & Partnerships @ Moloco
- Moloco focuses on AI:
  “Machine learning-powered performance advertising solutions”
Ashley Parducci, VP Customer Insights & Measurement @ TVScientific
- tvScientific says:
  “tvScientific is the first and only CTV advertising platform purpose built for serious performance marketers.”
Evyatar Ram, VP Product @ Singular
- Singular is an MMP and marketing measurement provider:
  “Singular empowers marketers to futureproof their growth with next-gen attribution and analytics.”

Check out the webinar on-demand right here …

OK: 10 tips on CTV ad strategies

1. CTV is incremental

1 fundamental thing you always want to know about a new channel is this: is it incremental?

For instance, if you’re advertising with plain vanilla SDK networks, you might be using multiple, but it’s entirely possible that all those fishing rods are ultimately dipping into a very similar river of potential users, customers, or players.

CTV is different, says Ashley Parducci:

“CTV is absolutely an incremental channel. We’ve found that with even the most saturated of apps. So we’re really excited to see what the reach is beyond search and social that our app marketers are traditionally doing today.”

Interestingly, her point is not just that CTV is incremental beyond SDK networks, which is understandable, but also the giants of performance marketing in search and social.

That’s impressive.

2. CTV is programmatic, RTB, targetable, and in multiple other ways buzzword compliant

Yeah, it’s TV. No, it’s not your momma’s TV.

CTV isn’t going to give you Android-like device-level targeting and trackability. It isn’t even going to give you iOS-like deterministic but non-granular attribution. But at the same time it is not the spray and pray of old-school linear TV.

“The same shift we’ve seen with programmatic advertising is also coming to CTV,” says Alexandre Pham. “So you have similar technologies, everything based on real time bidding, for example, and the capabilities and the targeting options that are much more precise than traditional TV advertising.”

Targeting is different, and we’ll get into that, but it’s not absent.

3. Competition is weak in CTV

There are huge opportunities right now for performance marketers in CTV, because the competition is not ready for the rigor and analytical approaches you bring.

“There’s a ton of brand advertisers in this space and very few performance marketers in this space,” says Jake Richardson. “If you’re first, you will get gains as a result of learning how your strategy points you towards the next five years while everyone else is still trying to figure out how to make CTV performance work.”

That doesn’t mean there isn’t competition.

You’re not getting My Super App ads streaming on Sunday Night Football for cheap.

But the competition, Richardson says, is largely brand competition. Which means that even though there’s money here, there are also cracks and optimizations and angles for smart performance marketers to come in, learn, optimize, and make bank.

4. CTV is diversification

Sole source is a dangerous strategy for any manufacturing brand. And a very limited pool of growth partners is a dangerous strategy for any marketing team.

So we’ve seen an increasing trend recently to diversification of channels and partners … in spite of the platform effects of App Tracking Transparency on iOS that reward scale per partner and per campaign.

“One of the main pillars that we’ve seen consistently over the last couple of years is diversification of UA activity,” says Evyatar Ram. “Everyone is expanding their reach. Everyone is trying to find new types of channels, whether it’s CTV or podcasts and influencers … and everything’s becoming a lot more complex.”

The interesting thing is that you can build some new connected TV ad strategies that are fundamentally different than your in-app ad strategies: on a big screen, with sound on, and a much higher video completion rate than on mobile.

5. CTV works for gaming, fintech, e-commerce, and more

A good thing to remember when building out your connected TV ad strategies is that CTV isn’t a 1-trick pony. Multiple verticals can work in CTV.

“What works for CTV is also anything related to the gaming space,” says Pham. “It’s gonna be IAP-heavy titles, subscription apps as well, fintech …”

“The biggest boost that we’ve seen [is gaming,]” says Richardson. “We have a lot of gaming clients, but then we also have a lot of consumer app clients and e-commerce clients.”

That’s interesting.

There’s been a lot of history of retail advertising on traditional TV, so the e-commerce success is not a shock. But gaming and other consumer categories are doing well on CTV.

6. CTV is a very different animal than in-app ads

It’s a bigger screen. Your ad is full-screen. Sound is usually on. Ad completion rates approach 100%. Targeting is household, not individual. Video is your only option, really. Interaction and engagement is limited.

“CTV is different,” says Singular’s Evyatar Ram. “You have to think of it as something different and you have to accept that it’s somewhat different and that’s part of the appeal … because it is different.”

In short, CTV is a new world. You can’t just do what you’ve always done in in-app advertising, or social advertising, or search advertising.

CTV requires tailored strategies — connected TV ad strategies — which means using different creative, different bidding, different targeting, and different measurement.

7. Subscription VOD doesn’t necessarily mean higher income than ad VOD

Traditional subscription video on demand like Netflix doesn’t necessarily only appeal to a higher income bracket. Ad-supported video on demand doesn’t necessarily only appeal to a lower income audience.

It really, really depends.

“I get customers that are targeting lower income, and they think that, no, I will not find my customer on a paid streaming service,” says Parducci. “But when you start to think about the economics of streaming, well I get three streaming services bundled with my cell phone plan, Instacart is including Peacock, for example … there’s just so much at play in the ecosystem.”

That resonates with me on a personal level.

I have Netflix, Amazon Prime, and Paramount+. We’re taking a break from Disney+, though, since we didn’t need 4 separate streaming services. And the Paramount+ is the cheap option with a few ads thrown in.

8. CTV is at the intersection of brand and performance

Brand versus performance is a complicated discussion, and ultimately all advertising has to be performant by some measuring stick, so it might ultimately even be a meaningless distinction.

However … all of us generally know what we mean by brand versus performance:

Brand is generally thought of as upper funnel, awareness, an assisting force, a halo effect
Performance is generally thought of as lower funnel, revenue-generating, closing the deal, and is often directly measurable

CTV intersects that conversation, says Pham.

“CTV is really at the intersection of branding and performance,” he says. “If your end goal, for example, you’re a gaming company, your end goal is to drive up downloads, you are also promoting your brand at the same time.”

“So even if you have website activity or you have games on PC or anything like that, you are also gonna have downstream events that are going on other channels … it’s just depending on what you wanna measure at this exact point.”

Which brings up a good point: measurement.

9. Measurement is different, but critical

Marketers typically want 2 things when it comes to measurement, says Singular’s Evyatar Ram.

“They want consistency, so they’ll be able to measure all their marketing activity using the same ruler, and they also want simplicity.”

That’s … a challenge for CTV.

One option that is working really well for some, particularly those with strong data science teams, is incrementality measurement, and that’s one that Singular can help with. There’s also adapting other in-app measurement techniques to CTV.

“The other option is to take the classic standard, let’s call it last click attribution framework that the industry is used to and adapt it to CTV,” says Ram. “On the Singular front, some of the things that we’ve done is, we can change some things in the attribution waterfall, in the time windows, in the importance of an impression versus a click … “

The goal is creating a CTV measurement solution that in-app advertisers recognize and can use alongside their other channels.

One note: it’s important to monitor other channels when you do a big CTV buy. Does your App Store search volume go up? Does your website traffic go up? Are they aligned to any calls to action that you had in your ads?

(You can get that kind of data in Singular, by the way, and correlate it to your marketing results. Talk to your Singular rep for details.)

10. Be realistic in your bidding strategies … but also be crafty

Start at the floor, says tvScientific’s Parducci, but look for a partner that’s very transparent on pricing. Then, as you start to grow your campaign and know what performs, you can bid up.

You also have to be realistic.

CTV might be the new kid on the block, but there’s some massive properties already in the space, and that drives costs up. But you can find deals in some places, if you look hard enough.

“You can’t run on Sunday night football at $38 CPMs running against all of the major car companies and hope that you’re gonna drive a $2 CPA,” says Richardson. “You just can’t. Whether or not you can drive a $2 CPA on NBC’s content is a different question … your bidding strategy has to adjust to your KPIs and be realistic.”

Sadly, the rules of physics do still apply …

So much more in the full webinar

You really have to check out the full webinar to get all the connected TV ad strategies that are going to propel you to success in CTV and streaming advertising profitability.

Check out the full webinar on-demand right here …

Amazon launches generative AI for ads: product videos, animated GIFs

Amazon’s new generative AI for ads will create custom videos showcasing retailers’ products in just a couple of minutes, automatically. Launched today at the company’s annual seller conference, Accelerate, Amazon’s new generative AI capability for ads will also be able to create short animations — think animated GIF — that make a static image more visually interesting and attention catching.

“Using a single product image, video generator curates custom AI-generated videos tailored to a product’s distinct selling proposition and features, leveraging Amazon’s unique insights to vividly bring a product story to life,” Amazon says.

Here’s the new AI video generator:

And here’s the new live image generator:

What we know about the generated videos

Amazon has been working on generative AI for ads for at least a year.

According to TechCrunch, video clips from Amazon’s video generator will take about 5 minutes to generate, and advertisers will get 4 variations to choose from. While Amazon says it will eventually enable longer videos with more complex scenes, right now they are:

6-9 seconds long
720P resolution
24 frames/second

The live images, or short animations, can be customized with a headline (you can choose the font), a logo, and some background music or soundtrack.

Both functionalities are “live in beta to select U.S. advertisers,” but there’s no commitment from Amazon in terms of when this will be fully available for all. (Or when it will be available for languages other than English.)

They are also free for retailers and advertisers.

What Amazon doesn’t show in the demo videos, which are a bit long on style and short on substance, is how advertisers create them: what kind of prompts they can use, and what — if any — guardrails are built into the technology to minimize unwanted artifacts or hallucinations in the images and videos created.

Of course, for any generative AI for ads product, it’s important that there will be an advertiser approval stage.

I can see situations where buyers might want refunds if the videos or live photos accidentally promise features or functionality that don’t actually exist. Based on the videos Amazon showcases, the generative AI features seem focused on putting products in appealing and appropriate settings, which makes perfect sense.

Generative AI for ads: soon to be everywhere

Amazon, of course, is not alone in using generative AI for advertising. Google has been piloting this since late 2023 in Performance Max ads, though there’s been little move to make it fully mainstream.

Google did promise to make it beta for all advertisers by late 2024.

Microsoft, TikTok, and Meta are all also working on generative AI for ads, though TikTok’s solution is not for art or design but rather content and campaign creation assistance. Snap, Pinteres, Reddit, and X (Twitter) haven’t announced generative AI for ads tools or technologies yet, though all have their own generative AI capabilities.

In fact, TikTok just enabled generative AI to create “user-generated” content, according to app growth consultant Alper Taner. I can’t see it yet in TikTok Ads Manager, so it might be only in limited release, but Taner says “you really can craft UGC content in minutes using avatars (even with green screen effects), captions, translations, voiceovers etc.”

And Meta just announced that its generative AI ad tools are getting significant use … and seem to be very successful:

“We also continue to see strong adoption of our generative AI ad tools, with more than a million advertisers using the tools and 15 million ads created with them in the last month. On average, ad campaigns using Meta’s generative AI ad features resulted in an 11% higher click-through rate and 7.6% higher conversion rate compared to campaigns that didn’t use the features.”

Advertisers, of course, are using tons of tools on their own: see 10 things digital marketers are doing with generative AI right now for some ideas, or 80 generative AI tools for marketers, or 10 generative AI tools for app growth marketing.

Amazon says that 89% of consumers want to see more videos from brands in 2024. Which means, I guess, we should all get ready to see more video ads on Amazon and other platforms over the next few years.

“Video generator is another meaningful innovation that leverages generative AI to inspire creativity and deliver more value for both advertisers and shoppers,” Amazon Ads VP Jay Richman said in a statement. “We are hard at work delivering generative AI applications that empower advertisers to craft visually stunning, high-performing ads.”

One thing that’s not yet clear: if Amazon will provide a “generated by AI” tag on whatever gets created by its generative AI for ads engines.

Top 8 mistakes in paid user acquisition, with Replug’s Lorenzo Rossi

Fed up with the BS in the app growth world? So is Lorenzo Rossi, the co-founder and head of growth at Replug, a Berlin-based app growth consultancy. So we sat down and chatted about the top 8 mistakes people make in paid user acquisition.

And we pulled as few punches as possible.

Check it out: hit play and keep scrolling. (Oh, and don’t forget to sign up for Growth Masterminds wherever you like to get your podcasts or subscribe to our YouTube channel.)

Top 8 mistakes in paid user acquisition

Everyone’s always trying to be so nice.

That’s wonderful, but sometimes we need to know what NOT to do as well as what TO do. So what are the top 8 mistakes in paid user acquisition?

Let’s dive right in …

1. No MMP (and not setting your MMP up properly

Hey, I didn’t feed him any talking points!

But he’s not wrong.

Especially when starting out, many advertisers still operate without an MMP or don’t set it up properly. That’s a big problem even when you start to scale, especially thanks to the complexities on iOS under SKAdNetwork.

“People forget to set up SKAN 4, people forget to connect channels, people forget to send events back to Facebook, to Google, to all the platforms that they’re using,” Rossi says. “Many marketers still believe that Firebase is an MMP … I hope that the Google people won’t hate me, but Firebase is not enough.”

Without an MMP, tracking and analysis suffer, leading to poor decision-making. And that, not shockingly, leads to underperformance, wasted ad spend, and stunted growth.

Rossi notes that even after the introduction of iOS 14, many have yet to understand why an MMP remains crucial for effective tracking.

2. Sloppy targeting, especially on Meta

When an ad network gives you a big fat easy button, put your hands behind your back.

Do not press it!

Targeting can make or break your paid ad campaigns, and being lazy about it has severe consequences. Lorenzo emphasizes that platforms like Meta have introduced features like Advantage+, that promise “better ad performance via AI.” And Google, of course, has something similar with UAC, now Google App Campaigns.

But there’s a downside …

“We had a case a couple of months ago with a client … they wanted to target only 45+ users,” Rossi says. “However, there was Expand Audience, targeting Spanish or something like that. And all the budget was going to young kids: 17+, 18+.”

In other words, sometimes the easy button makes setting up ad campaigns too easy, leading to common pitfalls like targeting the wrong audience. Accurate targeting, excluding irrelevant users, and avoiding automated options can significantly improve your paid user acquisition performance.

And help you stop wasting money.

3. Over-reliance on Apple Search Ads

Hey, Apple Search Ads can be fairly awesome. You can get a lot of scale, there’s trackability, more data availability … a lot of good stuff. And ASA always ranks pretty well in Singular’s ROI Index.

But … there’s a but.

Relying solely on Apple Search Ads is a frequent mistake, Rossi says. While Apple users might be more valuable than Android users, scaling only on Apple Search Ads just because you’re getting easier tracking data isn’t cost-efficient.

Also, there’s another big problem with Apple Search Ads, used incorrectly:

“Like … why cannibalize all the organic traffic?” says Rossi

A balanced strategy including other channels like Meta and TikTok is essential for greater overall awareness and effectiveness. And for not paying for what you in some cases would have gotten for free.

4. Ignoring iOS in favor of Android

It’s shocking, but some app publishers and marketers are STILL staying away from iOS due to App Tracking Transparency.

“We have seen on several occasions that the developer wanted to focus only on Android, because as you mentioned, it’s more granular in terms of data they can analyze at the creative level, all these types of things,” Rossi says. “But what about your most valuable users?

Of course, this strategy of focusing entirely on Android because of easier trackability neglects the potential value of iOS users, who are often more profitable. iOS is actually accurately measurable now with SKAN, even without IDFA: the key is to ensure you’re properly set up for success.

(And yeah, we can help.)

5. Using a 1-size-fits-all creative strategy

Everyone knows you can’t just use images from Google Ads in TikTok. Or, hopefully everyone knows.

But many still think you can use the same videos for reels on Instagram and Facebook on TikTok as well, without thinking that the IG/Facebook experience is volume off, and the TikTok experience is volume on … and that significantly changes how you need to present your creative.

(Even if you end up using the same base video.)

Plus, the audiences are different ages.

different creative for different channels

Using the same creative across different platforms is like using one brush to paint an entire mural—ineffective. And uncool. Also (and worse) unprofitable.

“If you have the wrong targeting, with good creative, it can work,” Rossi says. “If you have the perfect targeting with bad creative, it doesn’t work.”

And it doesn’t end with channel. Each channel has specific placements that offer specific benefits but also demand tailored creative. Without investing thousands of hours of learning time yourself, the only way to absolutely maximize your ad spend, therefore, is to get an expert who knows all this stuff.

And, of course, constantly stays up to date with the latest changes.

6. Lack of a holistic marketing strategy

Repeat after me: growth is not just about paid ads.

Again: growth is not just about paid ads.

(For more color on this, check out my recent chat with Hannah Parvaz on why growth marketing is a mindset, not a set of activities.)

Focusing solely on paid UA without integrating other marketing aspects is a significant oversight.

“What’s the point of spending money on paid user acquisition if all the other things don’t work at the same time?’ Rossi says. “You don’t have a mobile CRM in place, so you don’t send push notifications. You don’t send emails, you don’t activate the users, you don’t keep the users active …”

App store optimization, onboarding, and CRM all play crucial roles in a successful user acquisition strategy. Plus, building a seamless flow from your ad to the app’s first user experience ensures higher retention and user satisfaction.

All of it matters. Only some of it is about paid ads.

(Even when paid user acquisition is the fastest way to grow.)

7. Focusing on the wrong KPIs

Hard to believe, but vanity metrics still trap many marketers. Especially in paid user acquisition.

“As a paid UA team, we look at all the metrics because they’re important,” says Rossi. “We optimize everything from the impression, sure, from the click through rate, CPI, cost per registration. But it’s important to have the final goal in mind.”

And yeah: that’s profitability.

Metrics like CPI and CPA are important but not sufficient.

Rather, marketers — and CEOs — need to also focus on understanding the lifetime value of users and measuring final profitability rather than just upper funnel metrics. And the complete flow of how people onboard, engage, monetize, and retain.

8. Sticking to the basic basics of paid user acquisition

Starting with the basics is fine. Sticking with the basics will massively devalue your paid user acquisition efforts over time.

And, yeah, just using the same old same old big marketing channels and platforms that everyone else uses too is sticking with the basics.

“Back in the day there was the duopoly, Facebook and Google,” Rossi says. “You had an app, put the money there, scale, boom. “I mean, now the possibilities that we have in 2024 are endless and it’s not possible anymore to scale Meta for everyone or to scale TikTok for everyone.”

Sticking to a basic paid UA strategy without exploring multiple channels is a common mistake. There are other channels that also offer significant potential and sometimes unlock different sets of potential users or customers at a better price.

By the way, exploring OEM traffic is another often overlooked avenue that can yield great results for Android apps. (Check out our recent UA via OEM post and Growth Masterminds.)

So. Much. More (in the full episode)

Hey.

Paid user acquisition isn’t easy. There’s a lot of complexity (like, really a lot) and there’s high stakes, because mistakes cost real money.

However, avoiding these 8 common mistakes can at least start you on the path of saving some time, some money, and some frustration. By focusing on proper setup, accurate targeting, creative customization, a holistic strategy, meaningful KPIs, and diversified channels, you can dramatically improve your campaigns’ effectiveness.

Check out the full episode on whatever channels you prefer, and subscribe to get new insights every week on how the best in growth marketing think and act.

UA via OEM: Android device manufacturers have some new tricks up their sleeves

How valuable is it to get on a phone right from the very beginning, when a user is setting up their new device? I’ve personally disregarded UA via OEM for years now, just sort of assuming that it was functionally equivalent to the crapware you used to get (maybe still do?) on cheaper PCs from computer manufacturers not named after a common fruit.

Maybe that was a big mistake.

Or maybe, the user acquisition space on OEM platforms has massively evolved over the past couple of years, rendering UA via OEM an actually pretty impressive way of getting new users, players, and customers.

And maybe a bit of both.

I just chatted with Ashwin Shekhar, the CRO of Avow. Avow specializes in UA via OEM, and manages Samsung’s Galaxy App Store advertising inventory sales in the EU.

Hit play and keep scrolling while you listen. (Also, subscribe to our YouTube channel.)

As it turns out, there are now at least 3 different types of OEM install that happen during the out-of-box and setup experiences, plus many more ad placements in the ecosystems that most mobile OEMs are working hard to build out.

Out of box experience: 3 kinds of UA via OEM

We’ll hit the 3 distinct ways to acquire users during the out-of-box experience and initial device set-up first.

Factory preload
Out-of-box recommended apps
Google Play Auto Install (GPAI)

Factory preloads are pretty much what you’d expect from an early 2000’s Asus laptop: icons on your screen when you boot up for the first time.

The upside is that your app is there on-device. Plus, factory preloads are extremely cost-effective and offer massive scale. The downside is that the device owner made no choice about it and therefore doesn’t really have any sense of commitment to your app that might translate to engagement. Also, there are logistics involved in manufacturing devices, flashing them with an OEM software load, and shipping them to market. All of that means a delay—around six months—from deal signing to the first install.

Ouch.

Out-of-box recommended apps are better in a bunch of ways.

First of all, you get on the device in fairly high volumes, which is kind of the point. Secondly, there’s an element of user choice involved as they go through an out-of-box experience, which means there’s that element of user choice that is critical for post-install activation.

And third, because this type of install is mediated by the OEM and not Google Play, you can avoid the typical 30% Google cut on subsequent in-app purchases and subscriptions (although you may have to negotiate a deal with the OEM for a better rate).

A further benefit: better targeting capability that default on-device preloads.

Google Play Auto Installs obviously won’t provide relief from in-app purchases platform taxes, but they do have significant other benefits and are getting extremely popular, Shekhar says.

When users log into their phones with the Google account to essentially provision it with their settings, data, and apps, GPAI prompts users to review and opt-in to additional apps, which install directly from the Google Play Store.

This is the most popular pre-install method right now, says Shekhar, for a bunch or reasons:

Speed (no 6-month wait)
High user engagement (people decide to install apps)
Low risk (advertisers only pay when the app is first launched by the user)

That’s pretty impressive, especially the last item. But there are additional tricks up device OEM’s sleeves these days.

OEMs are becoming publishers

UA via OEM isn’t over after device unboxing and initial set-up, however, because OEMs are becoming publishers, in a sense.

And then they’re building out ad networks to target the inventory that they’re building.

Where are those ads showing up? The lock screens and the -1 screen are a couple locations. But there are many more, says Shekhar.

Up to 150 additional ad placements, in fact:

“Open the default browser, you could see it, you open the app store, you could see an editorial or a feature page ad,” he says. “Then you open your music player, or for example on a Xiaomi, they have a video player where they collaborate and collate content. Now within this content you can serve ads, you can serve multiple placements and so on. “

OEMs are constantly testing new placements, he adds, trying to figure out what a user likes and what works best.

This evolution has accelerated over the last few years because, similar to cellular and terrestrial carriers forever trying to become more than “dump pipes” ferrying other people’s content, product, and platforms to consumers, OEMs don’t want to just be device manufacturers.

They want their customers to use their apps for media playing, news and information discovery, even gaming.

How successful they’ll be and whether there’s damage to the native Android user experience along the way remain to be seen, but there’s no doubt that this is giving birth to a whole new opportunity for UA via OEM.

Much more in the full podcast

As usual, there’s much more in the full podcast.

Subscribe to Growth Masterminds and check out the full episode: we also chat about third-party app stores on iOS and how some OEMs are taking Apple’s example for how they’re building out their own publishing empires.

SKAN vs AAK: similarities and differences

SKAN vs AAK: what are the differences and what are the similarities? And, do they even matter right now?

We all know that SKAdNetwork is kind of old news and AdAttributionKit is the new kid in class. Does that mean all your hard-won knowledge about Apple’s privacy framework for mobile attribution is obsolete?

The good news: absolutely not. Every network that has implemented SKAN is still running SKAdNetwork, while AAK implementation is probably not even on any adtech company development timeframes yet.

The other good news: there is some new stuff in AAK, which is pretty minor. But, it’s all good: extra functionality that makes SKAN better. (Or AAK better … you know what I mean.)

Ultimately, however, the SKAN vs AAK question probably won’t matter for a very long while anyways. More on that later …

1. SKAN vs AAK: what’s the same?

Let’s start here: Apple says that AAK is 100% fully interoperable with SKAdNetwork. That means that if you know SKAN, you know AAK.

What are the key points of similarity? Well, at a very high level, both are privacy-preserving methods of attribution that live largely on-device and that send notifications to marketers and ad networks about the effectiveness of their advertising.

Getting a bit more into the weeds, both have at least 7 major points of commonality when we look at SKAN vs AAK:

3 separate postbacks
- 3 opportunities to give you insight into ad effectiveness
Both coarse and fine conversion values
- Postbacks with 2 types of conversion values
  - Fine conversion values with up to 64 values
  - Coarse conversion values with 1 of 3 possible values
- The first postback can be fine, giving you more granular data, if you have enough install volume per campaign
- The 2nd and 3rd postbacks can only be coarse conversion values
Crowd Anonymity governs how much data marketers get
- More volume per campaign gets you more granular data
- In SKAN 3, this is called Privacy Thresholds, in SKAN 4, it’s called Crowd Anonymity
Random delays before postbacks get fired
- There are 3 conversion windows from which you can get data
  - Postback 1: 0-2 days
  - Postback 2: 3-7 days
  - Postback 3: 8-35 days
- Plus, there are added random delays: 0 to 24 hours after the conversion window
- So that you can’t reverse engineer SKAN or AAK and break privacy
Conversion value locking
- If you think you’ve got all the data you need before a conversion period is complete, you can lock your conversion value and get it earlier
- Note, there will still be a random delay to enhance privacy …
Source identifiers
- Campaign information about the ad that you’re getting data on
App ID, which is now called Advertised item ID
- Information about what app you’re advertising

If you’re paying attention to those points of similarity, then you’ve also picked up on something else important. AAK might be 100% compatible with SKAdNetwork, but it’s an upgrade to the most recent version of SKAdNetwork.

Which, of course, is SKAN 4.

Not SKAN 3.

AAK is still compatible with SKAN 3 in the sense that SKAN 4 is compatible with SKAN 3, but it’s built on SKAN 4. In fact, AAK is essentially SKAN 5 … the SKAN 5 we kind of expected for a year or so.

What that means is that if you’re still kinda just functioning on SKAN 3, there actually will be a bit of an upgrade curve, just because there’s all the new SKAN 4 features.

And if that’s the case, Singular has a ton of on-demand webinars you can check out, a SKAN 3 to SKAN 4 guide you can read, and way too many blog posts you can skim through to get it all figured out.

2. SKAN vs AAK: what’s different?

There are 5 major differences between SKAdNetwork … even version 4 … and AdAttributionKit. Actually as many as 6 if you understand the full scope of AAK.

In fact, SKAN vs AAK is a little bit apple vs oranges, in a sense. Because unlike SkAdNetwork, which is only about mobile app install attribution, AAK is actually 2 things:

App AdAttributionKit
Web AdAttributionKit

App AAK is the new SKAdNetwork, and it’s for mobile app install attribution, just as we’ve always known. Web AAK is the new Private Click Measurement, which is an attribution framework for the Safari browser.

It works fairly similarly to SKAN and AAK on the mobile side, but it really hasn’t been significantly updated in 3 years. So we can probably expect more from Apple on that at some point.

(And interestingly, Web AdAttributionKit actually does matter. Safari has about a 30% global market share for mobile browsing … and that hits 54% in iOS-heavy countries like the U.S. So it’s not something marketers can completely ignore.)

But if we focus primarily on mobile app install attribution, there are at least 5 key differences between AdAttributionKit and SKAdNetwork:

1. Built for multiple app stores
The biggest and most significant change is that AdAttributionKit is built for a world of multiple app stores, thanks to the EU and its Digital Markets Act.

That means there is now a “marketplace identifier” which will indicate which app marketplace an app install came from.

Does this really matter right now?

Of course not.

But after the EU and Apple fight a bit more about the terms around third-party app stores, and it becomes not totally financially insane to run a third-party app store, then it will likely start to matter.

2. Re-engagement support is here at last
One of the most requested features for SKAdNetwork was re-engagement support, which has now arrived.

Note: this doesn’t mean anything around audiences for retargeting or anything like that. It’s simply about measurement support.

The “conversion-type” field in AdAttributionKit can have 1 of 3 different values: download, redownload, and re-engagement.

3. Support for multiple creative types
In SKAdNetwork, an ad is an ad is an ad. AdAttributionKit, however, has explicit differentiation in both displaying ads and attributing conversion by creative type:

Clickable custom creative
- Think banner ad, or image ad
- This is an ad anywhere that leads to any app marketplace
- There’s a maximum of 15 minutes between when the app impression instance is initialized and when a tap (or click) can be registered
- Note that for a custom click ad, viewing it does not create an impression
- … meaning that the only measurement modality is a click
View-through ads
- These are typically videos and possibly also playable ads
- They can be anywhere and lead to any marketplace
- They must be displayed for a minimum of 2 seconds in order to generate potential view-through attribution
- The same ad network cannot have multiple open view-through ad presentations for the same advertised app at the same time
- In terms of measurement modalities, view-through ads only can result in views … not clicks
Recommendations
- Recommendations are in-app app listing features like SKOverlay (a small view into an app listing page)
- There’s also SKStoreProductViewController (a larger, full-screen version of the app listing page)
- While Apple doesn’t explicitly say so, these likely only work with the original App Store
- Recommendations are unique under AAK, because while the other 2 creative types have only 1 measurement modality each, recommendations have 2:
  - Recommendations register a view when they pop up
  - And they register a click when they are tapped
- Clearly, using SKOverlay and SKStoreProductViewController is going to be very powerful under AAK … perhaps even more so that it currently is under SKAN

As you can see, AAK only supports 2 types of ad interaction: click and view. It would have been interesting to see another, like “play” for playables. My assumption is that ad networks that support AAK will build multi-component ad units, just like today, that have video components, playable components, and maybe also banner components as well as recommendation components.

Which will be … interesting in terms of views, clicks, and ultimately attribution postbacks.

4. Support for deeplinks (universal links)
If advertisers want to opt into re-engagement measurement, they can add the “eligible-for-re-engagement” flag to the code that displays an ad.

(Frankly, I don’t see why you wouldn’t: there’s no downside, and it just adds an extra element of measurement that could provide valuable information.)

If the re-engagement flag is present and AdAttributionKit detects that the app being advertised is already installed, it can open the app to a specific screen using universal links.

5. Developer mode
It’s generally hard to test SKAdNetwork today because the postback delays and long conversion windows make developers wait a long time to find out if what they did worked.

Now Apple will allow you to set a developer mode for AdAttributionKit, which will remove the time randomization, shorten conversion windows, and send postbacks much quicker.

Other than this, AAK and SKAN 4 are basically the same.

3. But does it really matter?

When looking at SKAN vs AAK, we started off with what’s the same, and then we talked about what’s different. There’s another very important question, though, that I promised to address right at the top of this post

Does it really matter?

Does AAK really matter?

And I’m not sure that it does, or that it will in the near future.

AdAttributionKit, like SKAdNetwork, is a framework. It’s not an app, and it’s not a standalone product. It’s a bunch of software and a bunch of rules. To be effective, AAK needs to be implemented not only by Apple on iOS devices, but also by ad networks, MMPs, and advertisers.

In other words, it’s a complex beast. There’s a reason that 2 years later, SKAN 4 is still not widely adopted.

If you look at which adtech companies are adopting SKAN 4, and therefore are most likely to adopt AdAttributionKit, it’s the independents. The big ad platforms, the walled gardens, they’ve adapted to the post-IDFA era with their own modeling-based measurement, with their own first-party data, and tools and data that is inside their walls and under their control.

In other words, they’ve limited their exposure to Apple’s guidelines, requirements, and frameworks. And they have limited incentive to come back and play in Apple’s backyard by Apple’s rules.

So yeah, I guess AAK is the future. Just don’t hold your breath.

The future could be a very long way away.

Upgrade your MMP

An MMP is an MMP is an MMP, right? Dead wrong. And we’ve put together a totally free and completely ungated argument why you should upgrade your MMP now if you’re not using Singular.

Check it out right here.

TLDR?

You’ll grow faster. You’ll spend less. You’ll get the best technology. You’ll get the best service. And you’ll get there quickly and almost painlessly, thanks to dedicated support engineers that have migrated literally the biggest companies on the planet — some with literally hundreds of apps — to Singular from competing products. All available, if you upgrade your MMP.

I get it.

We can say just about anything. How can you believe us?

So listen to our customers who used to work with competitors.

“We used to work with Branch, but our campaign data didn’t have the visibility we wanted. We had a goal to increase user retention, but we hit barriers when we couldn’t see what our users did after they downloaded the app. We couldn’t see any post-install events like completed registrations or survey completion numbers. We needed a better solution that could provide complete visibility into our full user path.”
– Maria Victória Miranda, Director of Marketing, Offerwise

There’s more where that came from …

Reasons to upgrade your MMP

But that’s just 1 person at 1 company, right? Well, no.

Almost 1,500 marketers agree: people who took time out of their insane user acquisition schedules to rate MMPs on G2. The list of reason why to upgrade your MMP goes on:

Best support
Best partner
Easiest admin
Easiest set-up
Easiest to use

“Our experience with Singular has been fantastic. The team has merged seamlessly within Uber and is available 24/7 to answer tough questions!
– Ankit Srivastava, Global Marketing Technology Manager, Uber

And the list goes on:

Best cross-channel insights
Best analytics
Best customizable dashboards
Best cross-platform attribution
Most API integrations

But the big kahuna, the ultimate kicker, the stat that beats all stats, is that more than 1,400 marketers said Singular is fastest to ROI. For most, it’s less than half a year. Another 32% get full payback in less than a year.

That compares to competitors where up to a third of all customers never got full payback on their MMP investments.

That’s horrendous.

That’s the opposite of what you want from an MMP. In a sense — work with me here — an MMP should be a profit center, not a cost center. An MMP should save you more money than it costs in smarter marketing, less wasted budget, higher ROAS, better retention, and higher customer/user/player LTV.

If not, that’s a good reason to upgrade your MMP.

Pricing is better too

Look, sometimes you just go with the most expensive solution if that’s what you truly believe is best for you long term. The amazing thing about Singular is that despite having the best tech, best support, and so many other bests (check the full report here), it’s not the most expensive solution.

No hidden fees for features that should be included
No massive price increases 30 days before renewal when your MMP thinks it’s too late for you to do an RFP for alternate measurement partners

“Previously, everything we needed we had to pay more for. Now, our success is Singular’s success and we really feel that.”
– Said Salles, Co-Founder & CGO, Pipa Studios

Plus, there’s special switcher pricing and onboarding periods (talk to us).

Full meal deal when you upgrade your MMP

This isn’t 2015 anymore.

You don’t just need attribution for mobile. You need fraud prevention. You need web. You need console. You need CTV. You need creative analytics, custom dashboards, ETL to get your data where you want it in the form that you require it. You need cross-platform. CAPIs, SDKs for web and other platforms that matter. You need ad mon that blends with IAP revenue and is automatically calculated in your ROAS and LTV metrics. You need SKAN, and soon enough, Privacy Sandbox (yeah, we’re already running live tests on that with Google and multiple partners.). And maybe you need out-of-the-box MMM.

You need the full meal deal, and you need it without paying an extra 25 cents for ketchup or relish.

That’s what you get when you upgrade your MMP, along with the original and still best cost aggregation from virtually any ad partner on the planet.

“I don’t see any reason to not use an all-in-one tool and pay less. I can’t understand the logic of paying double or even triple to use 2 or 3 tools at the same time, so really – tell me why not.”
– Itay Milstein, VP Marketing

It just makes sense.

Check the full report on why you should upgrade your MMP

Look, I could just re-create the report here in a blog post, but it’s just a click away. It’s 100% free and ungated, so there’s no risk and no downside.

It also discusses migration and gives real-world examples of people and brands that have done it before. TLDR on migration? Its bark is worse than its bite.

In other words, it’s not as bad as you think it is.

Check out the full report on why you should migrate your MMP to Singular right here.

It’s also available in multiple languages other than English:

AI and mobile games: Roblox chief scientist Morgan McGuire

Imagine coding a game by voice. As in, telling a smart AI system what you want your game to be, how you want it to look, and how gameplay should happen. And then the smart AI system just goes off and writes code, compiles the software, and provides a nice publishable package. That’s just part of what we’re going to see in the future of AI and mobile games.

We’ve seen early bits of that already.

But it’s going to get mind-blowingly incredible.

I recently chatted with Roblox chief scientist Morgan McGuire about the future of AI and mobile games. Hit play, and keep scrolling …

“I think we’ll get to the point where in the future you could, if you wanted, make a game entirely with voice. So by talking to the system, working with it over the course of an hour,” Morgan McGuire, chief scientist at Roblox, recently told me.

“It’s just up-leveling what you’re doing. Instead of typing every single thing using your mouse, we can have AI take your intent and produce it for you.”

And it’s likely not far away.

AI and mobile games: the potential

AI is increasingly being used in game development for almost everything. And the potential for what game publishers can do with AI is off the charts. Here’s just a few examples:

Content generation
Maps, phrases, ideas
Game management and liveops
Segmentation, offers, challenge levels, player matching for battle games
Smart NPCs
Way better team play even in solo mode, as the former Unity CEO also highlighted.
Endless levels or world-sized environments
Larger environments and longer games with less work
Art and design generation
Character, clothing, accessories, weapons …
In-game communications
If you’re going to allow players to chat in a global game, real-time translation would be handy. And if you need to moderate that — with humans or AI — you need to understand multiple languages.
Game development
Building game components and eventually full games with AI
Game analytics and monetization
Optimize player progress while monitoring in-app purchases and offering the right upgrades
Cheat detection
Finding players or bots that are not playing according to the rules

Of course, not everyone is using AI for everything. The tools are mostly new and still growing into proven everyday applications. But almost every marketer is using AI already, and most developers are too.

Some, however, have almost no choice but to rely heavily on AI.

AI and mobile games: what Roblox is doing

Roblox fits into that category for a lot of reasons.

First, Roblox’s aim is to connect a billion people in a safe online environment. It’s already massive, with 380 million monthly average users, which is roughly 2X Steam, 3X PlayStation, 5X Minecraft, and 2.25X Fortnite. In fact, Roblox is so big that VC and game-maker Matthew Ball says it’s likely that Roblox has more monthly users than the entire AAA gaming ecosystem combined.

Keeping something that size that safe and moderated — keeping out the predators so the kids can enjoy themselves and not get targeted — is a mammoth task. Especially with more than 50 languages in use on Roblox, in an environment that allows real-time chat and voice communications between players and sees more than 50,000 text-based messages a second

Essentially what this is an AI-sized task. Which is precisely what Roblox has done.

“We have the world’s first voice moderation system that will monitor 100% of voice chat on Roblox,” McGuire told me. “This is deployed.”

Real-time translation. Real-time moderating. And done at a level of quality — not just quantity — that surpasses human capabilities, McGuire says.

But Roblox doesn’t only have a content moderation problem. Like any other successful game maker, Roblox has a content problem.

A big one.

Every month, people spend a staggering 6 billion hours on Roblox. Every day, people spend time in more than 5 million active experiences (think games, environments, or social spaces). All of that needs building, refreshing, maintaining, updating. And without constant development of new and exciting experiences, players might go elsewhere.

After all, Fortnite is a tap away. So is Minecraft.

“As the user base grows, we need the content to grow. It has to grow roughly proportionally,” says McGuire. “Going back for roughly the last 15 years, the games industry and the film industry had exactly this problem: they couldn’t produce content fast enough. They were victims of their own success.”

The solution: generative AI.

100% of Roblox content is community built. And while there’s been tools to help build it, it’s still 3D modeling and programming. Even with the friendliest and easiest language on the planet, not everyone is going to get into writing code and developing games.

But with voice input to an AI game generation engine … suddenly anyone can.

“AI is what enables us to lower the barriers to creation,” McGuire says.”So that the people with great ideas, the strength of their ideas will shine through and they don’t have to spend one year, three years, five years learning how to program, learning how to do 3D modeling, learning how to do rigging animation.”

Building a game from scratch by voice isn’t there yet.

But Roblox has already unveiled generative AI tools for image generation — think game accessories, avatars, clothing, etc. — and for what Roblox calls 4D generative AI. Those are generative tools that don’t just make discrete images but game-ready components with an awareness of 3 dimensional spaces, physics, and how to interact with avatars.

Now AI isn’t just making static objects, but it can also bring them to life within interactive, moving 3D spaces.

The ultimate goal is to match the content consumption stat — 100% of Roblox content is community built — with a content creation stat: 100% of Roblox users create new content.

AI and games: what’s missing

There’s a big missing puzzle piece in growing AI in mobile games, however. AI is already saving Roblox millions of dollars a year in human moderators it doesn’t have to hire, but it’s not enough.

AI isn’t efficient enough.

It costs too much in terms of compute and energy.

So if Morgan could wave a magic wand, it would be to solve the efficiency challenge in AI processing. His ultimate goal: to achieve machine efficiency about 10 times better than what we see today, paving the way for more sustainable AI applications.

“Every time we make something more efficient, we make our business better,” he says. “We monetize better, our profit margin gets better … but we’re also consuming fewer resources.”

It’s a trillion-dollar opportunity, McGuire says, for someone who could achieve it.

And the result will be more new … everything.

“A million people are making new ideas on Roblox every day,” he says. “And if one of them is a winner, then it’s great for all of us. We all get to experience that new thing.”

Much more in the full podcast

As usual, there’s much more in the full podcast with Roblox chief scientist Morgan McGuire. Check it out, subscribe to Growth Masterminds, and get all the insights.

Find all the links you need to subscribe right here …

Holiday marketing mastery: 11 tips to dominate growth in Q4

Q4 is the golden quarter. Holiday marketing mastery can make or break the year for many verticals, especially retail and e-commerce. The problem is it’s a busy, noisy world during Q4. Ad spend can be as much as 50% higher than an average month. And it’s pricier too: ad prices jump 20-30% during Q4.

(This year that price hike could get even worse in the U.S., with federal parties pumping hundreds of millions of dollars into digital advertising as the election cycle continues.)

So how can you dominate growth in the golden quarter? And what are some good-as-gold holiday marketing tips?

Good news: we just had 4 amazing marketers give us their best holiday marketing tips. (Check out the full webinar here on-demand, or keep reading for a few of the highlights.)

Holiday marketing experts: 4 great ones

We were super-blessed to have 4 amazing marketing experts who shared their expertise:

Hannah Parvaz
- Founder @ Aperture
- Has led growth at 4 companies
- Former app marketer of the year
Sherwin Su
- Senior Manager at Reddit
- Also been at Pinterest and VaynerMedia (but he didn’t drop any F-bombs, shockingly)
Mark Menery
- VP @ Dataseat
- Formerly Apptopia, Millennial Media, and JumpTap
Janos Perei, Head of Growth @ Sybo
- Sybo makes one of the most-downloaded games in history … Subway Surfers
- Formerly at Voodoo and also a former CMO at Skill Yoga

11 tips to dominate growth during the Q4 holiday season

Here are some of the top tips from the webinar …

Q4 is not just about retail and e-commerce

“If you think about especially ad monetized games, it is a massive opportunity for generating revenue.”

– Janos Perei, Sybo

We typically think Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Christmas … Q4 is all about retail and e-commerce.

Wrong!

There’s also more leisure time, and therefore more time to chill and relax with games.

Q5 isn’t just an Audi SUV (it’s also cheap UA)

“Sometimes there is a time period just after the Christmas days that is often referred to as the fifth quarter, which also provides excellent opportunities for a very progressive and quick scaling from about the 27th of December all the way to the first, maybe the second week of January.”

– Janos Perei, Sybo

Holiday marketing in Q4 can be expensive, with prices up 30% in some verticals. But just at the tail end of Q4 and the beginning of Q1 there’s an opportunity for those who are prepared.

Brand and e-commerce advertisers slow their spend, providing a quiet (and cheaper) space for gaming and other verticals.

Health & Fitness, anyone?

There are pockets of affordability … try some brand spend

“If CPMs are doubling, how are you focusing on some buying some cheaper traffic, some awareness traffic during this time to start to prime people with your brand messaging so that then when you hit them in Q5 with all of these direct response ads and messages, people are gonna be much warmer.”

– Hannah Parvaz, Aperture

Yeah, you’re probably primarily a performance buyer, and so is Parvaz. But when your costs double, there are other ways that to stay top of mind that are a fraction of the price.

Invest there to keep your customers, users, and prospects warm, and then when you come with your offer later on, they’re primed to accept.

Conversion rates are jumping too

“Shopping and spending is gonna be at an all time high. So this combats a little bit of the price inflation because conversion rates are also about to increase.”

– Sherwin Su, Reddit

Important to remember when you’re getting sticker shock at the higher ad prices: this is a buying season, and people are in the mood to spend money.

While keeping some caution and continuing to test your hypotheses, don’t be too scared to open your wallet that you spend the entire season on the sidelines.

Remember not all Q4s are the same

“There’s Q4 marketing, but there’s also the specific things about the specific time period that we’re in … we have all kinds of things going on economically, all kinds of political challenges, an election cycle in the US for instance … so it’s not just about Q4, it’s also about what’s going on now.”

– John Koetsier

(Yeah, I’m quoting myself. Sorry not sorry.)

Q4 has a lot of repeating patterns, so there’s a temptation to treat each Q4 the same. But we have to layer on specific economic realities, or specific themes that are important in the culture this particular Q4, because they’re going to have an impact on consumer behavior and spend.

Adjust your brand promise for Q4

“Start to isolate what are different things that someone might be using your product or game for. Start experimenting around different features or benefits. Start seeing which ones are getting the most engagement at the top of the funnel for clicks. Start looking at which ones are converting best at the bottom of the funnel …”

– Hannah Parvaz, Aperture

If you’re a fitness app, in summer people might want you for offense: to get into beach shape.

In Q4, that might morph into defense: burning off the extra calories they’ve ingested at the office party, the friend party, the family dinner, and all those bloody chocolates their family bought them for Christmas gifts because they couldn’t think of anything else to give.

(Oops, private pet peeve.)

The point is: be flexible.

If you’re a game, players might play at other times for a few minutes of stress relief from their jobs. In Q4, they might have more leisure time and be able to go deeper and spend more time — and more money — in your game.

In each case, there are different “jobs to be done” that your app can fit within its overarching brand promise.

Know your limit, play within it

“Have a very clear objective and understand your risk management policies … how far are you willing to engage in the competitive pressure? What would be the margins, the thresholds that you can expect and still tolerate in terms of the spend or what is maybe a cutoff point where you say, you know what … I would just rather preserve my profitability and start lowering my volume and scale until the fifth quarter opportunities arise.”

– Janos Perei, Sybo

It’s like going to an auction, right?

The item you want is up for big, and someone else wants it to, and you start bidding each other up and up and up, and you face gets red and your hands get sweaty and you start to have tunnel vision … and you might just spend way more than your super-shocked spouse thought you should.

Have a plan.

Figure it out.

Set your limits.

And if the game gets too risky, preserve some dry powder for opportunities that will inevitably arise later on.

Talk to your ad partners

“Talk to your partners … the ad demand partners who have done this for a really long time and understand what the market is gonna do, what the pricing is gonna do, what the landscape is gonna do.”

– Mark Menery, Dataseat

Hey.

You’re paying for a service. Sweat the assets. Or, in this case, sweat your partners.

Get their insights on what to do, where to find pockets of affordability, and how to achieve your profitability goals at a budget level that works for you.

Adjust to weekly or even daily budgets

“We have had some advertisers who run relatively consistent throughout the year, and then come Q4 they move not just from monthly to weekly budgets, they’ll go from weekly to daily, and sometimes it’s becoming hourly.”

– Mark Menery, Dataseat

In Q4 prices are up 30% or more. If you’re not careful, you can run through your whole weekly budget early, and be left with nothing for the last few days of the week.

So switch to daily budgets in order to ensure you have a continual flow of promotion.

Creativity isn’t just about creative; do something cool and unique with marketing strategy

“One of the things that worked well with some of my subscription products was creating a gifting package. And what we did was advertise that to our most active users through ads … very simple … vut what we saw then was dramatic numbers of sales through that. We also did a plan where we did buy one get one free with subscriptions. If someone bought through our website, we just sent them an additional code.”

– Hannah Parvaz, Aperture

Just buying more ads is a brute force approach to growth. Creative marketing strategies and tactics have the ability to double or triple your growth rate.

In this specific case, 50% of the company’s Q4 sales resulted from this BOGO gifting initiative.

(You may have noticed a similar holiday quarter growth strategy from Masterclass, which has offered a free gift subscription when you buy one for some time.)

Have some patience (even though you’re a performance marketer)

“A lot of marketers are really obsessed with instant gratification … if I dial this up, I wanna see immediate conversion rates and things like that.”

– Sherwin Su, Reddit

In the real world, you don’t ask someone for a date 2 seconds after meeting them. (Well, unless you Tom Cruise or Leonardo di Caprio.)

Allow some space for people to get to know you, get to understand what you do, get some degree of familiarity with your brand, your logo, your app.

Especially in retail, or even in verticals like gaming, some degree of warming up an audience is going to pay off in longer-term customers/users/players over time that are more profitable.

Which also means you need measurement capability that is more than just last-click.

So much more in the full webinar

I’m sure it’s hard to believe, but these are literally the top tips from about a third of the entire webinar. There is so much more I could have included here.

Check out the full webinar to get all the insights on holiday marketing in the coming golden quarter, Q4.

Installing a third party app store on your iPhone

How do you install a third party app store on your Apple iPhone? Like, for example, the Epic Games Store?

It’s actually pretty hard to get a third party app store on your iPhone or iPad. At least it used to be, before the Digital Markets Act and the Epic Games Store. While there are plenty of blog posts suggesting “great App Store alternatives,” most of them are defunct, not for iOS, or look completely dodgy and super-risky.

Third party app stores for iOS

There are not that many third party app stores for non-jailbroken iPhones. Here are a few examples, along with what I found when trying to access them on my iPhone:

Tweakbox: “server can’t be found”
Tutu App: no response, connection timed out
Appland: white label app store maker, no obvious way to install
GetJar: Android and several other platforms, but no iOS
AppValley: Redirects to TopStore, advertises “tweaked” apps and looks suspicious

Thanks, but no thanks: I like my iPhone without spyware, adware, and tweaked apps that just might be stealing developers’ and publishers’ hard work and repackaging it.

There are some new options, though:

Epic Store: actually works … but only in the EU
AltStore PAL
Setapp Mobile from long-time Mac software maker MacPaw
Aptoide
mobivention App marketplace

The Epic Games Store does in fact work, unlike many of the ones in the first list above. In fact, Epic has a lot of experience running app stores for multiple platforms. There is, however, another problem. At least, if you’re not in the European Union, where the Digital Markets Act actually matters. And it’s a bit of a fatal problem: you simply can’t install it.

Here’s the flow from my recent attempt:

You can try … but Epic will inform you that the Epic Games Store on iPhone is only available for customers in the European Union. You can still “continue anyways,” but then iOS will notice what’s going on, step in, and put a stop to these third party app store shenanigans by providing an alert that you cannot install this app.

Clicking “learn more” brings you to Apple’s support documentation on installing third party app stores in the European Union … and not anywhere else.

Fortunately, some enterprising individuals who are in the European Union have actually installed the Epic Games Store, and shared their experiences. One is Julie Tonna, a user acquisition expert and former Apple employee. In fact, she was a platform specialist at Apple Search Ads with a focus on gaming.

And she knows a bunch about adtech too: she’s also a former growth partnership manager at ironSource.

Installing the Epic Games Store in the European Union

If you live in the EU, it’s a whole different ball game. Now you can actually install a working third party app store.

Here’s how it works, according to Tonna’s LinkedIn post:

Visit epicgames.com on your iPhone or iPad
Tap the “Install on iOS” button, then confirm by tapping OK
Tell iOS you’re OK with this by going to Settings, hitting Allow For Marketplace, where Apple tells you that your device settings currently don’t allow it and that installing this app — and others via it — “may give them access to your data”, then confirm again
Go back to your browser and hit Install again, then confirm again
After the Epic Games app installs, you’ll be able to launch it from your home screen or App Library
Tap Accept yet again when you open the app to accept the Epic Games EULA
Find a game you like … and hit Install Game
In the prompt that pops up, hit the Install App button

It’s more than just a few steps, and there are plenty of warnings along the way that this is unusual, non-standard, and potentially dangerous behavior.

But now you’re cooking with gas: using apps and games via a real, functioning third party app store on iOS.

At last, after more than 4 long years, you can yet again enjoy Fortnite on your iPhone. (Apple booted Fortnite off the iOS App Store in August of 202 when Epic turned on a direct payment option in the app that bypassed Apple’s in-app purchase system.)

Plus, if you happen to buy anything in Fortnite, the Epic Games Store will take just a 12% slice of your cash and Epic Games (the publisher) will get 88% of your payment … as opposed to 70% in most cases via typical in-app purchases on iOS.

If there are any other good third party app stores available for iOS, let me know. The list of potential app store providers out there is significant, and there are some pretty interesting names on it … but the list of actual functioning third party app stores is much smaller.

Will the Digital Markets Act spread to other countries?

The big question, of course, is whether the ideas around openness and competition in app stores and in-app purchases that are embedded in the EU’s Digital Markets Act will go viral to more countries.

And in a lot of ways they already are. As I mentioned in a recent post on how the traditional App Store model is under attack both from above and from below, at least 6 other countries are looking at similar legislation:

USA
South Korea
Japan
Australia
India
UK

You can add the Netherlands to that list, as well as Spain, and even U.S. states are getting into the act.

Louisiana reportedly proposed legislation that would have required that Apple allow apps to use alternative payment methods without penalty. Apple was able to squash that particular piece of the law, according to the story that became public, but the fact that a small U.S. state was even considering something like this indicates that the idea is gaining traction in North America.

I talked about the core concepts in the Digital Markets Act that are relevant for app marketplace owners like Apple and Google in 2022. Essentially, large companies designated as “gatekeepers” are being forced to:

Allow third-party interoperability with their services
Allow businesses to promote their services and make sales outside the gatekeeper’s platform
Not prevent consumers from connecting with businesses outside their platforms
And much more …

The upshot will likely be the ability to install apps from wherever you want and use payment methods outside the platform-controlled services.

Apple’s rebuttal, of course, has been the Core Technology Fee, which even for a moderately successful free game with 10 million downloads would incur platform fees of over $400,000 per month. Which, naturally, the EU is investigating as a case of malicious compliance.

Their initial take: not gonna work.

“We have sent preliminary findings to Apple,” says Margrethe Vestager, the EU’s executive VP in charge of competition policy. “Our preliminary position is that Apple does not fully allow steering. Steering is key to ensure that app developers are less dependent on gatekeepers’ app stores and for consumers to be aware of better offers.”

Ultimately, we’ll most likely have a long game of cat and mouse with government legislation, Apple/Google response, then threatened or actual fines … and eventually things will come mostly to rest with a better-if-not-great option for third party app stores on iOS.

And that’s likely to happen in most countries.

Just don’t hold your breath. The wheels of government turn slowly.