Author: John Koetsier

John Koetsier is a journalist and analyst. He's a senior contributor at Forbes and hosts our Growth Masterminds podcast as well as the TechFirst podcast. At Singular, he serves as VP, Insights.

iOS user acquisition 2024: 16 top tips

iOS user acquisition is hard, and it’s getting harder. You need some help and smart tips to make it just a little bit easier.

We recently ran a webinar with some super-smart people on iOS user acquisition in 2024. It’s a deep dive on what’s happening, how people are growing, what data you can still get, how SKAN 4 can help, and much more, including the flight to Apple Search Ads, and how ASA can boost both your organic and your SKAN strategies.

Those smart people were:

  • David Vargas, User Acquisition Manager, Splitmetrics
  • Alejandra Ugarte, Sales Engineer, Liftoff
  • Aleksandar Cvetković, Data Scientist, Webelinx Games  Horizontal 
  • Eran Friedman, CTO & co-founder, Singular

So what can you do now to make iOS user acquisition better in 2024? Check out these tips, excerpted from the webinar, and watch the webinar itself on-demand if you have time.

1. ATT opt-in isn’t great

At Singular, we’re currently seeing ATT opt-in rates of around 16% globally at point of install. That goes up slightly over time because many apps don’t ask for tracking permission immediately, but not much.

“About 20% of ad requests have a visible IDFA,” says Alejandra Ugarte, an engineer at Liftoff.

That’s enough to be interesting as a checkpoint for the IDFA data you might be able to see, but it’s severely limiting in terms of all the data marketers — and ad networks — would like to have for measurement and optimization.

2. Only 35% of marketers have transitioned to SKAN 4 so far

When we asked the hundreds of marketers attending the webinar live if they’ve transitioned from SKAN 3 to SKAN 4 yet, the answers weren’t amazing for SKAN 4.

  • Yes: 35%
  • No: 41%
  • Getting started: 24%

65% of marketers, therefore, haven’t fully transitioned to a new iOS use acquisition attribution framework that Apple released in 2022.

Wow.

Of course, there’s reasons for that. Complexity is one. SKAdNetwork’s inherent limitations are another. Big ad platforms’ modeled results are another. The most important reason, however, is that the adtech industry isn’t transitioning to SKAN 4 very fast at all. 

If you look at Singular’s SKAN 4 tracker, adoption is currently around 30%. That means 70% of all postbacks we see for billions of installs, billions of dollars of spend, and trillions of ad clicks … are SKAN 3 or earlier postbacks.

Until that gets solved, marketers just don’t see too much of a point in fussing with SKAN 4.

3. SKAN revenue is always an estimate

While no-one’s fooling themselves that the previous IDFA-based system was always completely and totally 100% accurate, it was at least mostly accurate in principle.

SKAN is always an estimate.

“The first challenge is that you always get an approximation of your revenue at the end of the measurement period,” says Webelinx data scientist Aleksandar Cvetković. “So you never know the ground truth.”

That’s because even if everything in your SKAN set-up and conversion model is perfect, you’re still getting revenue data from buckets: the ranges you set up for your SKAN conversion model. And, in addition to that, you’re also dealing with privacy thresholds or crowd anonymity that will censor some of your data.

4. Data modeling is the future

We’re now fully in the era of approximate truth, or “truthiness” as I call it, for iOS user acquisition. 

Call it the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle of marketing: you never know exactly what reality is, but you can still get a pretty truthy idea of where your results lie, within parameters and at a certain level of certainty.

“SKAN doesn’t provide cohorted revenue or cohorted events,” says Singular CTO Eran Friedman. “So in our reporting we wanted to compensate for that and bring cohorts back  … and we do that using data modeling, which I think is a very important part of the future of measurement because there’s no other option. You have to rely on data statistics and data science to bring those insights back.”

The good news: Singular has become very good at this, and Unified Measurement, which takes in multiple sources of data to unified attribution and measurement, is a major step forward for iOS user acquisition in 2024.

“If you run these through and formalize, and scale very hard across every campaign, across every date, then you can get to really accurate revenue ranges of those cohorts,” says Friedman.

5. Listen to your users to get better data

So if your data is going to be truthy rather than the truth, and if you have to use inexact buckets with ranges rather than actual values for your IAPs, subscription, and in-app advertising revenue, those buckets better be pretty freakishly good.

How do you make them awesome?

By listening to your users.

“You have this continuum of revenue from zero to infinity, but you’re limited by the number of buckets, and then you need to discretize this continuum,” says Cvetković. “And this is where your historical data comes into play: you need to listen to your data to see where your users accumulate in the given time period. And if you see that your users in early days accumulate somewhere on the lower scale, then the idea is to discretize these lower scales, even as low as $0 to $1 maybe, and to be more rough on the higher revenue.”

 

SKAN revenue buckets

 

Translation: if your revenue skews low, add more buckets to the lower range. If your revenue skews high, add more buckets to the higher ranges.

This will give you more fine-grained accuracy for revenue per install that will provide important data for ROI, ROAS, and LTV questions, and enable smarter iOS user acquisition optimization for ad campaigns and partners. 

It’s not granular per se, but it’s more granular where you benefit the most from additional specificity.

6. We now can have different sources of truth depending on channel

Unified Measurement uses multiple data sources to deduplicate marketing conversions from different channels and modes of measurement, but it’s still helpful to have those different measurement methodologies.

Some are just better for specific iOS user acquisition channels than others.

“The idea was to first of all make sure we put all the different data sets together in the same report,” says Friedman. “So you can actually compare between the tracker user level based attributions and the SKAN-based data, and basically the network data everything in the same report, essentially, across other channels. But then we even took it a step further and came up with what we call the unified metrics, the deduplicated numbers showing the installs per campaign per channel that relies on the best source of truth for that specific channel, including, by the way, organic traffic in showing all the organic installs and all the revenue coming from it.”

The result is the best possible measurement: just 1 metric that represents your results. 

(Though of course in Unified Measurement you can see all the underlying data and make your own determinations if you wish.)

7. SKAN 4’s first postback is incredibly important

In SKAN 3, the first postback is unbelievably important because, of course, it’s the only one. But don’t let SKAN 4’s 3 postbacks fool you. The first postback is still incredibly important.

Without it, you won’t get anything else.

“You have to keep in mind that when you receive zero on data from SKAN, you won’t receive second and third postbacks,” says David Vargas, UA manager for SplitMetrics. “So the first postback is more important than ever.”

All that extra data and that extra cohort information that you hope to get from postbacks 2 and 3 depends on postback 1 actually being sent.

8. Keep it simple for SKAN 4

Some UA managers are tempted to go a little crazy in SKAN 4: more campaigns! more data! more events! more postbacks! more everything!

This, however, is a massive mistake.

Don’t fall into that trap.

First of all, it makes everything that much more complex, increasing the likelihood that you’ll dive into SKAN 4 and never surface, eventually giving up as it gets harder and harder. Secondly, however, as any data scientist or statistician can tell you, the more events you add to your conversion models, the more installs you require to get meaningful and predictive results out the back end.

“For example, if you have a subscription app, just focus on paywall views, trial subscriptions, and then model with that data,” says Vargas. “My general advice is to make it simple.”

More data points means more complexity, and more data points requires more total data to both overcome privacy-related data censorship and to achieve statistical reliability.

For iOS user acquisition and SKAN models …

Keep. It. Simple.

That means sticking to the default windows too, says Vargas, and not locking postbacks early.

9. Postbacks 2 and 3 in SKAN 4: Map your minnows, dolphins, and whales

Whales spend a lot, dolphins spend, and minnows might watch some ads. Build those designations into your second and third postbacks in SKAN 4.

“Basically, you can map those three coarse conversion values into those three groups,” says Cvetković.
“And then, from your data, you know how each group behaves in your app. And from this behavior, you can model long-term behavior, revenue, or whatever you’re interested in.”

Now you’re working from what you know to what you don’t know.

10. Only 3% of marketers are 90% confident in their SKAN data

Ouch.

When we surveyed participants about their confidence levels in their SKAN data, only 3% were 90% confident. The rest fell from 70% to 50% to 20%.

 

SKAN data

 

Now, this is a biased sample, of course: it’s literally from participants in a webinar about how to use SKAN. If you’re a SKAN expert, you’re probably not attending.

But still: ouch.

iOS user acquisition isn’t easy under SKAN.

11. Flight to Apple Search Ads

When you’re not confident in your SKAN data, what do you do? 

Well, on iOS in 2024, you flee to Apple Search Ads.

Why?

“Apple Search Ads is the only channel that doesn’t work with SKAN, and that’s a key factor,” says Vargas. “The estimations of growth in Apple Search Ads … are just insane. And for me, it’s not surprising, because at the end of the day, most of the advertisers are reallocating the budget from SKAN channels towards Apple Search Ads just because they can manage the performance. They can get cohort data, much of which they can analyze over time. So they prefer to pay a bit more per install in exchange for getting accurate data, which nowadays is gold, right?”

Apple Search Ads uses Apple Ads Attribution API, not SKAN, and it offers a lot:

  • Campaign ID
  • Ad group ID
  • Geo
  • Download or redownload identifier
  • Date & time of click
  • Keyword matched so your ad was shown
  • Ad ID
  • Broad demographic data
  • Some behavior and interest-based data
  • Detailed performance metrics (impressions, TTR, CPT, CVR)

It’s pretty clear why Apple Search Ads has grown significantly over the past few years.

12. If you’re using ASA, you need keywords with reach

Apple Search Ads has plenty of scalability and lots of traffic for iOS user acquisition, but there are limitations. And those limitations are mostly linked to the keywords you use.

“We still have one main disadvantage in Apple Search Ads, which is the inner limitation of the query system, which is what Apple Search Ads is built on,” says Vargas. “Scalability on Apple Search Ads depends on the search traffic that you use on your search results campaigns … if your keywords don’t have enough popularity, you will face obstacles when it comes to scaling your spend.”

The solution is to pick different keywords … or …

13. Use multiple placements on ASA, including search tab campaigns

If you’re having trouble getting enough scale on Apple Search Ads, try Search Tab campaigns. 70% of App Store users use the search tab, according to Apple, so it provides tremendous reach and scale.

Search Tab campaigns, while they have their own direct performance impact, also boost organic, says Vargas. 

“The results after a few months with the search tab campaigns were just insane,” Vargas says, referencing a specific campaign. “Apart from tripling the impressions, as you can see here, the higher and deeper presence that we caused in the App Store with the Search Tab campaign helped us to increase the search traffic of our brand keywords.  And all these effects created a snowball that decreased the overall cost per lead of the client, which was at the end of the day the main goal of the client.”

It is important to note that Vargas suggests measuring all your campaigns together (Search Tab, Product Page, Today Tab) since doing so will reveal the true impact.

14. Better ASO and better SKAN via Custom Product Pages

You’re probably already using Custom Product Pages for your app, with each one highlighting the key benefits or appeal of your app or game to different audiences with different primary interests.

But it’s critically important to get CPPs right and to do as many as you can, because they’ll boost your conversion rate, and that will both give you better app store optimization (ASO) and improve your SKAN campaigns, thanks to fewer people who visit your app listing but ultimately decide against installing it.

“If you are able to increase your conversion rate on your SKAN campaigns, you can decrease your cost per install. And that means that you need less installs per day and per campaign to get the signals, the data from SKAN.,” says Vargas.

15. ASA for better ASO

Part of the data you get when you run Apple Search Ads is app profile metrics per keyword. That’s a gold mine for your ASO strategy.

If you see that different audience segments, for instance, are connected to a specific set of keywords, and have better TRP and CPI performance, that’s a huge signal about where to focus your app store optimization strategy.

16. Free traffic from in-app events (the social kind)

In-app events mean different things to different people, but the kind we’re talking about here is an actual event. Like a conference or a contest, but virtual, and in your app. 

Example in-app events:

  • Contest in a game
  • Tournament
  • Virtual meet-up in a social app
  • Premiere of a new song or video 
  • Livestream of a new product feature
  • Interactive forum on new features or options

Iit could be anything that you can bill as an in-app event for your app users.

What you get is a free way to create higher reach and impressions on the App Store, because Apple wants to feature these types of events and the apps that host them. If you make them live, you have a good shot at getting featured in your category, or even on the cover of the App Store, Vargas says.

Much more in the full webinar: iOS User Acquisition for 2024

Hey, it’s free and it’s available on-demand. And you can run it in the background, listening to the audio while you get some low-level work or email done.

Check it out right here.

There’s always more context and more content in the full webinar.

5 Jedi mind tricks for insane app retention rates

Everyone wants insane app retention rates. Most people get single digits, grumble, and put more money into the growth slot machine to keep. on. finding. more. new. users.

UA merry-go-round, here we go again and again, round and round, round and round.

Think about it for a second:

  • Would a 10% app retention rate make you smile?
  • Would you blast dangerously through the endorphin roof if your app hit 20%?
  • And would 30% probably give you a heart attack of joy? 

Only one app I’ve come across has a retention rate of 56%, however … and it’s achieved that even in the extremely challenging fitness, health, and wellness space. The app is Welltory, and I recently had a chance to check in with the brand’s VP of strategy, Asya Paloni.

(And no, I can’t pronounce her first name either.)

Hit play, keep scrolling. We’re going to highlight Welltory’s 5 Jedi mind tricks for insane app retention rates below …

I met Paloni backstage at MAU, Mobile Apps Unlocked. We started chatting, and within 3 minutes I knew she needed to be a guest on the Growth Masterminds Podcast. (Well, to be honest, I needed her to be a guest.) Within 3 minutes of listening, I think you will see why.

Why wellness apps have horrible mobile app retention rates

Part of the reason is that the wellness category is notorious for awful app retention rates.

Here’s why:

“The fitness, mobile health and wellness category has atrocious retention rates,” says Paloni. “Typically all of these apps follow the same kind of mechanics: you’re just a regular user, and something happens in your life that makes you say, you know, it’s time to change my life around, I’m gonna download a health app and I’m gonna get super healthy.”

So far so good.

Cue the energetic music, the happy busy part of the movie where the strike team is getting everything ready for the mission, the pleasant anticipation of imminent success.

But wait … there are rapids in the future.

“It’s going to analyze all of my data,” says Paloni. “It’s gonna give me a personalized plan and tell me exactly what I need to do to get in good shape. But then, of course, people download the app, they buy the personalized plan that it gives them … and then they don’t do it.”

Uh oh.

In other words, wellness and fitness is the gym membership of apps. And nothing is more common than people buying a gym membership, then dropping out. On January 2, all the New Year’s resolution newbies hit the gym and no one can find an elliptical machine. On January 31, it’s back to the regular old crowd, and everything’s available.

Why?

“What happens is you’re tired at the end of the day, you know you’re not gonna meet your goals,” says Paloni. “So then you’re not gonna want to open the app because it’s just gonna tell you you’re not doing the things that you’re supposed to be doing and that’s gonna make you feel bad.”

So …

  1. You don’t open the app because it has bad news.
  2. You don’t want to pay for something you don’t use.
  3. Therefore, you churn.
  4. You drop out.
  5. You become just 1 little part of a very big and very depressing statistic about mobile app retention rates.

Welltory’s entire journey, Paloni says, is about how to avoid that. One big key that sounds simple but is too often ignored: people like apps that make them feel good, she says, and they don’t like apps that make them feel bad.

5 Jedi mind tricks for insane mobile app retention rates

So first off, I have to be honest. I’m the person who called them Jedi mind tricks. Paloni definitely doesn’t go around thinking she’s a mind-controlling master of human behavior.

But they are pretty cool.

And, if they deliver retention rates like 56% … they at least seem supernatural.

So here they are …

1. Make magic

Make something magical happen in your app.

“I don’t buy like a bath bomb to make progress in my life, right?” says Paloni. “I buy a bath bomb because it’s magical and it turns my bathtub into a magical spaceship. And I think that’s cool and fun.”

So when Welltory analyzes people’s data, it doesn’t provide raw data or spreadsheets. Instead, it gives you a “beautiful, magical fuel tank that changes color and behavior depending on how your body is feeling.”

More stress? Red.

Calm? More blues.

Lots of energy? Green, with a lot of fuel in the tank.

The result is a more engaging, interesting — dare I say magical? — experience that helps build higher app retention rates.

2. Hyper personalization

Welltory enables connection to over 1,000 data sources, Paloni says, because stress isn’t just what your Apple Watch can detect from your heart rate and movement. 

It’s also about your job, your relationships, your commute, and much, much more.

So Welltory’s CEO has her Stripe revenue connected to her instance of Welltory.

“When I talk to her and I’m like, Jane, your stress levels are a bit high, I’m a lot more likely to get a positive response if I remind her, ‘Hey, Jane, your stress levels are actually correlated with your Stripe revenue,’” says Paloni. “‘We sent you a correlation. We built you like an entire research paper and sent it to you personally to show you that you need to take care of your stressors.’”

If Slack is the thing that triggers you, Welltory can know that. Or maybe it’s messages in WhatsApp. Once identified, Welltory can help you deal with it, and that hyper-personalization makes the app super-sticky. 

The reason is obvious: the more things connected to an app, the smarter it can be and the stickier it gets.

3. Novelty & little rewards

We are all dopamine addicts. Even an app dedicated to your wellbeing recognizes that and works with it, not against it.

To illustrate the point, Paloni brings up Nir Eyal’s book Hooked:

“He makes a great point that people find products like TikTok and Facebook and Instagram super addicting and they keep coming back because you get a little reward every time,” she says. “You know, you never quite know what you’re gonna get. You’re gonna get some new content, you’re gonna get into an argument with your uncle … you never know!”

People associate that with negative impacts because that’s what we tend to focus on, but the same dynamics can be used for good goals too.

“We were really committed to the idea of showing users something new every time they open the app,” Paloni says. “So even long before generative AI, we built our own janky generative AI, and I swear it aged me like a decade, but our users see something new every time they open the app, and it really worked.”

Novelty and rewards equal occasional hits of dopamine equal higher mobile app retention rates.

4. Make sense in real time

We all have a ton of data inputs, and people who are focusing on their wellbeing have those too. The challenge is that most human brains are not built very well for the purpose of constantly assimilating a flood of data from multiple sources and making it all make sense.

So Welltory tries very hard to provide simple, holistic, and instant insights.

“So people wear a lot of wearables and data trackers, and I really love how wearables are getting more and more accurate,” Paloni says. “I really think that they’re doing a really good job of showing trends and like visualizing people’s data … the challenge for users is that you don’t really know what 10,000 steps means for you … it depends on your age, your fitness level, how quickly you walk those 10,000 steps, how much stress you’ve built up in your cardiovascular system that day.”

One solution in Welltory is a pressure gauge … showing you immediate visible impact of stressors as well as immediate visible impact of activities that calm those stressors away.

“So anytime you open it throughout the day it won’t be like, you walked 10,000 or 12,000 steps,” says Paloni. “It’ll actually infuse all that data with meaning and create holistic sense out of it.”

What that translates into in different apps is hard to say, although I’m sure most publishers could immediately think of applications specific to their apps. One that comes to mind in a game I often play is components in this complex game that I don’t use, which means I get freebies and power-ups that I don’t understand and bonuses for things I don’t do.

In a productivity app, maybe that means I’m never left wondering what I should do next, or never wondering what my current status is.

Whatever it is for your app: make sense in real time.

5. Don’t make your users feel bad

We’ve already teased this one above: don’t make users feel bad if you want high app retention rates.

That means not shaming people, even when there’s somewhat bad news to share.

“If you think about the way that most fitness trackers function, they kind of have a really fixed interface where you open it and you’re like, okay, my steps are here, my heart rate’s here … if you have a really bad day, all of those things are gonna look bad.”

Instead of making people look bad, and then feel bad, and then not open the app, Welltory strikes a balance between showing people the data they need and entertaining them. The justification, of course, is that if people just ignore their wellness data entirely, they’re likely to be less well. In addition, this strategy is more likely to keep people using the app.

There is some nuance here, of course.

Games generally have winning and losing, and combat games will have winners and losers. Elad Levy, who sold a game to Playtika, told me that the art of building a great game is to balance pleasure and frustration.

But that’s a slightly different feeling, and smart game apps will find ways for everyone to feel good about something, even if they’ve just lost a match.

Results: insanely great mobile app retention rates

5% D30 retention might be acceptable for some. 25% or 30%, as I mentioned earlier, might feel like mainlining testosterone (or estrogen!).

Welltory has 56% after 3 years.

That doesn’t mean everyone keeps paying the whole time, Paloni explains.

“Our usage retention rate is about 56% over the course of three years,” she says. “I am talking about usage retention. So a lot of people churn, they unsubscribe, but they keep using the app because we have a really nice freemium thing and then they resubscribe later and we get more and more value out of our cohorts the longer they stay with us.”

That’s impressive.

“Our strategy is to keep them with us for as long as possible, even if they do unsubscribe, because we can always get them to resubscribe later.”

And that makes sense.

Now the question is: how do these 5 Jedi mind tricks for mobile app retention rates apply to your app?

So you’re gonna subscribe now, right?

You really should subscribe to Growth Masterminds. 

And maybe, if you’re a UA or marketing professional, you should be on Growth Masterminds. If so, ping me somewhere and let’s chat!

Mobile quarterly trends: get all the latest data insights in Singular’s new Quarterly Trends Report

Need the latest mobile quarterly trends?

CPI is up, 4 networks whose names you’d probably recognize gained the most new advertisers in the past quarter, and ATT opt-in on iOS dropped. But 6 categories of iOS apps are still over 30% ATT acceptance, and global CPI on Android apps at least — not games — is slightly down.

All of that and much more in Singular’s latest Quarterly Trends Report, which  is now available.

So what’s all included? Way too much, of course … but it is all quickly and easily navigable for just the data you’re most interested in.

Key metrics for user acquisition professionals

  • ATT opt-in by vertical
  • CPI by vertical
  • CPI, CTR, and CVR by country
  • CTR by genre: games
  • CTR by genre: apps
  • IPM by genre: games
  • IPM by genre: apps

 

ATT prompt - mobile quarterly trends

 

Mobile quarterly trends for advertisers looking to optimize their spend

  • Ad networks: top gainers in customers and spend
  • Ad spend growth: top countries
  • Hottest app and game genres by downloads
  • Global spend share distribution: iOS/Android/web
  • Regional spend share distribution: iOS/Android/web

 

android game CPI mobile quarterly trends

 

Useful benchmarks and insight for mobile growth organizations

  • Paid vs organic installs: iOS vs Android
  • Plus partner contributions
    • RevenueCat: subscription trial conversions
    • Fluent: rewards in mobile user acquisition
    • Mistplay: finding IAP spenders

 

CPI CTR CVR by country mobile quarterly trends

 

Clearly, your own marketing and performance data is what matters most, and benchmarks are best left on the bench. But it’s always interesting to see what the bigger picture is, and there’s a pretty big picture here based on:

  • Billions of dollars of ad spend
  • Trillions of ad impressions
  • Billions of app installs

There’s a ton of data plus a ton of mobile quarterly trends insight in the new report, and all of it helps you navigate the $446 billion in global ad spend and $135 billion in annual in-app purchases that we’re seeing in mobile.

Get it all, for free, right here.

Teens and games: what the latest data says

Most teens play games. Most teens play games to be social. And most teens play games on multiple platforms. But there are some significant differences between girls and boys, and between those who identify as gamers and those who do not. And there’s some big differences of opinion on whether games are actually good for teens.

Pew Research recently surveyed 1,453 U.S. teens aged 13 to 17 on their gaming habits across all platforms. 

I was particularly interested in their research because Adjoe just released its 2024 Mobile Games Index, and one of that report’s key findings was shocking: older adults game more. 

This was counterintuitive to me at first, but when you dig a bit deeper, it makes sense.

Adult super gamers?!?

According to the Adjoe data, adults aged 40-49 are the most engaged gamers, with daily sessions averaging 23 minutes: up a third since 2023. 

Kids, on the other hand, spent less time in games: 0-19 year-olds, who were the most engaged in 2023, spent less time playing than any other age group: under 21 minutes.

The Adjoe data is compelling, not least because it’s based on a huge amount of data: 95 million interactions with popular mobile games from more 27 million users in about 6,000 Android apps. (Clearly ATT and Apple’s other privacy initiatives have made it harder to gather data from iOS users.)

The difference, of course, is that the Adjoe data is about gamers because it’s based on a self-selected audience of gamers. The Pew data is a representative sample of kids: gamers and non-gamers. Plus the Adjoe data contains a lot of pre-teens, which is an entirely different demographic.

But both datasets are interesting and valuable in different ways.

Shocker: teens love games on most platforms

So it’s no shock: 85% of U.S. teens say they play video games. Not quite half, 41%, say they play games daily, and about that same percentage identify as “gamers.”

While 97% of boys play games and 85% of girls play games, boys are about 50% more likely to identify as gamers. 62% of boys identify as gamers, versus 40% of girls. 

 

who plays games

 

(Interestingly, we saw something related in a Growth Masterminds episode recently on gaming: a reluctance to label those who just play games on mobile — as opposed to console or desktop — as gamers.)

Boys are also much more likely than girls to play daily:

  • 61% of boys play daily
    • 36% multiple times daily
  • 22% of girls play daily
    • 11% multiple times daily

What platforms do they play on?

Pretty much every single platform. Interestingly, while console and phone lead, virtual reality headsets have surprisingly wide distribution: more than I would have expected.

  • Console: 73%
  • Phone: 70%
  • Computer: 49%
  • Tablet: 33%
  • VR: 24%

The one device that girls are more likely to play games on than boys is probably not a surprise: their phones. 79% of girls play games on their phones compared to 61% of boys; on all other platforms boys tend to play more games than girls.

Teens, games, and friends: gaming is social

It probably shouldn’t be surprising to us in these days of declining “third spaces,” but games are intensely social, especially for teens. (Homes and schools/offices are 2 primary spaces we live in; malls, theaters, parks, and coffee shops used to be more prominent third spaces to meet and be social.)

Socializing with others is a key part of the video game experience, says Pew. 89% of teens who play games do it with others, and almost half have made a friend online because of a video game.

Only 11% play games entirely alone.

Teens who identify as gamers are the most likely to play games socially: 98% of them say they play games with others, and 68% have made at least 1 friend online. This is legit a thing: it’s fairly common to see posts about gamer friends finally meeting IRL … in this case, two young men met for the first time after playing Xbox for 20 years together, with 1 serving as the other’s best man at his wedding.

 

teens and games IRL

 

It’s not just about IRL either: teen gamers “stand out” for their use of Discord and Twitch, Pew says. 44% of teen gamers use Discord, while 30% use Twitch.

Teens generally think they spend the right amount of time gaming

From personal experience, parents are likely to disagree, but most teams say they spend about the right amount of time gaming. Only 13% said they spent too much time gaming, though boys are almost 4X more likely than girls to worry about that.

  • 58%: right amount
  • 14%: too little
  • 13%: too much

Close to 4 out of 10 teens say they’ve cut back their video game playing time at least once in their lives.

 

4 out of 10 teens say they’ve cut back their video game playing time at least once

 

That’s a relevant finding right now as parents are joining a wave of lawsuits alleging that games like NBA 2K, Grand Theft Auto, and Roblox are causing “brain damage, a stroke, and seizures,” in at least 1 case. These lawsuits are targeting big gaming developers with deep pockets like Microsoft, Nintendo, Sony, Roblox, and Epic Games, Bloomberg says.

Many teens, however, say that games are good for them:

  • 56%: Improve problem-solving skills
  • 47%: Help their friendships
  • 41%: Show them how to work with others
  • 32%: Boost their mental health

A negative that teens do admit, however, is that games aren’t great for the amount of sleep they get: 41% say they’ve gamed too much and slept too little. And teens who say they play too much are most likely to also say they get too little sleep and spend too little time on homework.

Also, 43% of teens who play games say they’ve been harassed or bullied while playing, including 8% who were sent unwanted sexual images. 80% of teens agree that bullying while playing games is a problem.

Why teens play games: not just fun

We generally play games to have fun, so it’s not a shock that 87% say fun or entertainment is a core reason they play games. But 72% also say that spending time with others is important.

Competition is another big reason — especially for those who identify as gamers — and learning new things is a factor for 50% of teens who play games.

Judging by the Adjoe data, adults play games at similar if not higher levels than teens, though I suspect much more on phones than consoles or computers. 

Growing games: the next few years

Games jumped massively in engagement and use during COVID, dropped somewhat in 2022, and rebounded in the past year, according to Adjoe. At Singular, we’re seeing similar things, although some app categories like entertainment, medical/health/fitness, and sports are growing faster. 

And former Unity CEO John Riccitiello says that generative AI will double or triple the size of the gaming industry in the coming years.

We’ll see: coming phones and consoles and computers will have AI-specific chips that can run complex LLMs and other AI features. 

Of course, when games start having truly intelligent NPCs powered by technology like GPT-4o, we’re also going to have even more interesting discussions on how healthy and how engaging games will be … and what a game is … and why people game.

Unified measurement for iOS mobile attribution is better than friendly fairies

How can you get a single, de-duplicated, and accurate view of user acquisition activity on iOS devices? It’s much harder than it appears. And it doesn’t actually require magic. But it is necessary for the most efficient iOS mobile attribution.

Hit play, then keep scrolling …

What you really want from iOS mobile attribution

What you really want from iOS mobile attribution is not hard to figure out. It’s pretty much what you used to have pre-ATT. 

“You want to see in a single place: just show me how many installs are every channel driving? What’s my ROAS for every channel?” says Singular VP of Product Evyatar Ram. “And 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 … it’s painful.”

This is of course the challenge that SKAN was supposed to solve, post-ATT. And it does, to a degree, but not completely. 

Because SKAN on its own is not enough. 

Because sometimes, the friendly fairy lies. Or … omits some information.

SKAN is a friendly fairy (or: explain it to me like I’m 5 years old)

We recently had an excellent question in our 2024 iOS Acquisition Deep Dive webinar from an anonymous attendee:

“How would you explain SKAN to a 5 year old haha? I still find it a bit complicated.”

 

iOS mobile attribution

 

So I asked GPT-4 how SKAN does iOS mobile attribution. And here’s what the AI-powered magic 8 ball said:

SKAN is like a friendly fairy that makes a secret mark in a magic notebook every time an ad works.

 

skan iOS mobile attribution

 

So SKAN is a magic database (notebook) and a friendly fairy: OK, got it. That’s mostly accurate, actually. But naturally it leaves out a lot of detail, just like SKAN drops a lot of data.

And that’s the challenge.

Unfortunately, the iOS mobile attribution magic database isn’t complete

We all know that sometimes, the friendly fairy doesn’t tell the whole truth. 

The friendly fairy knows that if she makes a secret mark in the magic notebook every single time a kid sees the sign and comes to the store, eventually the toy store owner might figure out which mark belongs to which kid … and privacy is gone.

Which is why privacy thresholds in SKAN 3 and crowd anonymity in SKAN 4 ensure you’ll never get all the postbacks from all your installs. 

So what you get from SKAN is reliable but incomplete. It’s deterministic, but censored and not granular: decoupled from actual devices and people.

It works with a lot of data science help from Singular’s SKAN Advanced Analytics, but there are still discrepancies compared to other forms of measurement.

Plus, every time you measure you get different answers

The challenge is familiar to all iOS UA managers, and it makes iOS mobile attribution tough.

Consider getting 100 installs for your app from a marketing campaign in 1 week.

  • SKAN postbacks tell you you have 83 new users
  • Your ad partner’s dashboard says they drove 123 new users
  • Your MMP tracked data sees 92
  • Your internal user data tells you without a shadow of a doubt that you have 157 new users in the last week, which you realize includes both organic and paid user acquisition

But you have an open question: how many installs did your paid marketing campaign actually deliver?

The real-world impact is considerable:

“The impact is it’s really hard to be a marketer these days,” says Singular product marketing manager Kelsey Lee. “They can’t trust their channel performance because they’re looking at all of these different attribution decisions, and each decision makes the performance look different based on different methodologies.”

The good news is that now you actually can know, thanks to Unified Measurement from Singular, which we announced about a month ago and is simplifying life for customers every day. 

I spent some time with Evyatar and Kelsey Lee to get more details. 

(Scroll up to watch the whole episode, or just subscribe to Growth Masterminds.)

The solution: Unified Measurement is deduplicated and accurate

What you really want in iOS mobile attribution is one source of usable data that is accurate and unified. So what Unified Measurement does is combine multiple sources of insight into one number, with full transparency into the other analytics.

Ultimately, by combining SKAN Advanced Analytics and multiple measurement sources, Singular has been able to provide:

  • Cohort capabilities: providing insights into post-install performance up to D35
  • Side-by-side comparisons: allowing marketers to analyze SKAdNetwork data, tracker data, and unified metrics simultaneously
  • Full SKAN conversion payloads: maximizing SKAN utility for data collection by not stealing half of your potential values
  • Accurate deduplication of sources driving your app installs

Beta testers of Unified Measurement, including companies running significant ad budgets, have reported substantial improvements in their campaign performance. Reductions in effective cost per install, revenue reallocation, and more accurate partner reporting are just some of the benefits witnessed by users of Unified Measurement.

“Unified measurement is a way to get a single duplicated and accurate view of your UA activity on iOS,” Evyatar Ram says. “Essentially what it does is it combines SKAdNetwork data together with tracker data in a way that is de-duplicated and accurate, so you know the real number of installs that are driven from every channel and you know your actual number of installs.”

And not just installs, he adds.

Unified Measurement is for installs and revenue cohorts and also in-app events.

As Singular CEO Gadi Eliashiv reported when announcing Unified Measurement, it’s making a big difference for clients doing UA on iOS. Each client is different of course, with different spend profiles and different ad partners, so each sees different results.

What we’ve heard from customers includes stats like these:

  • 57% reduction in eCPI
  • 31% reallocation from organic to paid
  • 17% more accurate partner reporting
  • 88% higher SKAN revenue
  • 19% reduction in double-counted revenue
  • 109% increase in attributed installs
  • 43% boost in D14 ROI

Each number is from a different customer, and what you see when you try Unified Measurement will vary as well depending on your unique circumstances.

The outcome: better decisions

Ultimately, you collect data to make better decisions, and that’s what Unified Measurement is designed to deliver.

“It’s not complicated,” says Ram. “You want to see the channel, you want to see the campaign, you want to see the installs, and you want to see the post-install cohorted performance: what happened after day 1, day 3, day 7, day 14 … and I think kind of our North Star was to get you back there.”

The result, he says: better decisions, and empowering UA managers to do their jobs much more effectively.

Take a test drive?

Unified Measurement has been live for months. If you’d like to experience it for yourself, book a demo and a Singular representative would be happy to show you how it works.

Marketers and AI: get started, and future-proof your skillset

If “marketers and AI” were in a relationship, their Facebook status would probably be “it’s complicated.”

Why?

According to a recent survey of 1,200 marketers, only 37% see AI as becoming an integral part of their overall skillset as a marketer. In spite of that, 9 in 10 expressed concern that “I will have to learn how to use AI to maintain my value as a marketer.”

4 out of those 10 were “very concerned.”

And yet, at the very same time, according to the same survey, 91% of marketers surveyed are currently using AI on a daily basis, both professionally and personally.

So yeah: it’s complicated. And there’s way too much fear and FOMO.

Marketers and AI: what marketers think

So how do marketers feel about AI?

Marketers have a lot of ideas about AI, many of them positive. And most of them are already using AI both in their jobs and in their personal lives. But some are worried about job loss just as much as warehouse workers looking at automation, or short-order cooks seeing Flippy, the hamburger-making robot.

The data highlights on marketers and AI:

  • 91% of marketers are already using AI in their jobs
  • 69% say AI is creating new job opportunities
  • 67% say AI is a transformative tech revolution
  • 49% say AI will help them do better work
  • 47% say AI will make them more efficient
  • 45% say AI will boost their skills
  • 31% say AI will replace workers and take jobs

While there are thousands of AI tools, apparently there aren’t enough. Or at least enough of the right kind.

Here’s what marketers want more of:

  • 57% want more optimization-focused AI that will automatically recommend campaign improvements
  • 53% want more automation (I’m not sure if these include any of the 31% that say AI will take jobs)
  • 50% want more predictions for customers or users who are most likely to convert
  • 49% want more generative AI … probably safe and connected to brand standards

All of which makes sense, but the hard part is the integrations between all the different systems using AI to create a seamless whole. 

AI and marketing: where’s it going?

Search for “prompt engineer” on LinkedIn and you’ll find more than a few jobs pop up. And according to this Time article, prompt engineering pays up to $335,000. My guess is there’s literally 1 job in the world that advertised that salary, and it’s more tied to training AI than generating output from AI.

But increasingly we’re seeing job postings that explicitly tie marketers and AI together

I recently saw one for an “AI Marketing Artist.”

The role was about generating and testing pieces of content weekly, including images and video. Applications needed to be able to create art in AI tools like Leonardo.ai, Midjourney, and Dalle-3. The interesting thing: old-school skills like Photoshop and After Effects, plus ideally some knowledge of coding in Unity, were also important.

So clearly, AI skills and AI familiarity are a plus, but you might not be able to just get a job pulling a virtual slot machine handle on a bunch of AI tools and throwing the results over the wall at your boss or internal customer. 

There’s more to it: polishing, finishing, adjusting.

Increasingly what you need is comfort and knowledge of how to use AI tools to help create content, build art, manage and optimize campaigns, segment users and customers, and help with communications and alerts. For example, it’s easy to create crappy content using an AI-generated text tool. Scalenut can create an instant SEO-optimized article on pretty much any topic you might imagine, but out of the box it will suck. It will likely contain duplicate, simplistic content, and it might actually contain errors.

It takes more skill and time to carefully edit that post, add a human voice, fix any errors, and intelligently add what’s missing. But by doing so, you can create a higher volume of fairly good quality content. You’re mixing generative AI with a human voice and human intelligence.

In a similar way, it’s also easy to create art that’s cool but can’t really be used in marketing via AI. It’s harder to add generative AI to a creative workflow that adapts the AI output into something that fits your needs precisely.

Increasingly, marketing is about finding that balance.

AI as table stakes, and increasing FOMO

AI in marketing is also increasingly about AI as table stakes. 

Ultimately, for many of us, the volume of output we need to generate will only go up, and AI will be essential for us to maintain the level of production that we’re required to deliver. Plus, we continually hear FOMO-generating comments like “you’re missing the party if you haven’t joined the conversation around AI in marketing.

The key is to not panic.

AI is all around you, and you’re using it already for many things, including Singular.

In fact, there’s AI tools that you use, and there’s AI tools that use you. Dark AI, for instance, artificial intelligence working behind the scenes at big ad platforms makes targeting, delivery, and optimization decisions for ad campaigns. It’s there and it’s working, but not in a transparent way. The reality is that marketers will never see most of the inputs or direct outputs of the decisions dark AI makes on their behalf, but it’s using your dollars, your assets, and your copy — in sometimes mixed up and generative ways — to get better at figuring out customer behavior.

But AI is also embedded in the tools you use everyday that are modeling SKAN conversions, suggesting the next message to send to users, and optimizing your live ops.

Marketers and AI: how to get started

If you’re not actively using AI, it’s easy and cheap to get started.

It’s about picking the right tools and adapting your processes, but you don’t have to dive into the deep end all at once. You don’t have to immediately toss out your basic in-app user/player segmentation tool to one that uses AI to learn about each individual user and personalizes offers to them.

That might be where you end up, but an easier starting step is to subscribe to OpenAI and use GPT-4 as the starting point for some of your next emails, or to suggest a recipe. Or, if you’re more into art and design, jump over to Dream Studio, load up your account with $10, and start making art. 

It’s easy and it’s cheap to play.

And playing is how humans learn best, with minimal downside or risk.

Ultimately, it is important to bring AI in your personal and professional workflows. Let’s face it, there’s going to be an increased expectation with AI-powered tools (if there isn’t already). When we can produce more output — or higher quality output — there’s going to be an expectation that we do so.

Ultimately, to really make a difference in your role, you’ll need both marketing-specific AI tools that fit into your tech stack and new processes to make good use of them.

But developing a first-hand appreciation for what AI tools can do in your specific marketing role is a great starting point before you start making 4-figure or 6-figure buying decisions.

The key is ROI

The key is boosting ROI: both from you and from the marketing organization that you’re part of. Only by doing that increasingly over time do you future-proof yourself and your skill-set.

Testing personal tools yourself is critical to doing that, because you need to have a realistic sense of what AI can and can’t accomplish before you make the much bigger buying decisions around software platforms and tools.

AI is powerful, and generative AI is amazing. But both are still incredibly fallible, and building them into your processes with deep knowledge of that borne from experience is critical to using them appropriately.

14 reasons your game isn’t growing, straight from the gunslinger of game growth

You’ve invested so much but your game isn’t growing. Why? What is the problem? Why are all the dollars you’re spending not moving the needle? Why are all your product development efforts not translating into increased engagement and retention?

I recently spent some time with the gunslinger of game growth. She’s worked with 40+ gaming studios over the last few years including EA, Rovio, Gameloft, DoubleDown, Netflix Games, and TutoToons. (Not a bad resume!) She runs the Shamsco gaming growth consultancy and is the instructor in a mobile gaming growth masterclass.

Her name is Sara El Bachri, and she just chatted with me on Singular’s Growth Masterminds podcast. If you built a game and it’s awesome, but it’s not growing like you want it to, it’s just possible that this episode of Growth Masterminds holds the answer.

As usual, hit play, keep scrolling:

Why your game isn’t growing

So, what are the most common blockers to growing games profitably? In her work with over 40 gaming studios, Sara El Bachri has seen at least 14 different reasons why growth has stalled and a game isn’t growing.

Here they are, in the order she shared them in the podcast. 

Subscribe, watch, or listen to the whole episode for all the details and all the context.

1. You are understaffed

This is particularly an issue in smaller gaming studios, but it can happen in larger ones as well. Sometimes, your game isn’t growing just because you haven’t invested in a growth expert, and you’re expecting developers or product managers to magically morph into user acquisition pros.

2. You need an outsider’s view

We all build blinders based on where we are and what we do. Sometimes those blinders cause us to miss opportunities and fail to see problems. 

That’s 1 reason a big studio spending $50,000 a day on Facebook brought El Bachri in. 

“We think we’re doing a good job,” they told her. “But we’d just like you to audit the activity and tell us what you see.”

That takes some level of humility that not all studios or managers have. And it doesn’t require finding a big problem to make an experienced doublecheck worthwhile: when you’re spending $18.25 million a year on just one channel alone, a few percent improvement can easily be worth $500,000.

3. You need to fix targeting

Targeting sounds simple, but very clearly, the devil’s in the details. For instance, it makes logical sense to target campaigns to only a single country, especially when they have different languages.

But that’s not always the case when your game isn’t growing:

“Something very simple that not a lot of UA managers do is, for example, how you group the different countries together,” El Bachri told me. “I can say instead of running Germany alone in a campaign, France alone … grouping them could potentially lead to better performance.”

Interesting!

4. Your performance suddenly dropped

Sad fact of performance marketing: sometimes things just go sideways. The algo doesn’t like you anymore, you reach a local maximum, your target needs refreshing, your creative is fatigued … something is wrong.

But what is it?

This is where a fresh set of eyes can come in, look at things from different angles, see performance with unbiased eyes, and give you a new set of ideas to play with.

5. Your junior employees need training

Maybe you do have UA professionals, unlike the problem in #1. But maybe they’re young in their career and need some insight and guidance so that their training isn’t all at the cost of your wasted budget.

Getting a veteran in who has been there and done that can save 6 or even 7 figures over time.

6. You don’t communicate well

Sometimes your problem is obvious to outsiders and the solution is simple once you see it yourself. But simple is not equivalent to easy, and poor communication can be hard to fix.

Especially in gaming, where big brands are often built in an acquisitive, accretive way that plants the seeds of trouble.

“I find that in a lot of especially big gaming studios where they have hundreds of employees scattered around different offices around the world, there’s a big issue in communication that I see between the teams.”

You might chat a lot with people in your Barcelona office, but the L.A. crew? Or the Helsinki team? What about those crazy rebels in Malta?

Fitting this all together is hard, even if diagnosing the problem is fairly easy for an outsider. But the cost can be competing campaigns that are actively costing you opportunities … and be the main reason why your game isn’t growing.

7. Your growth teams don’t talk to your product teams or your live ops teams

Siloed teams that don’t cooperate is one specific type of communication problem.

Growth can’t do its job well if it’s not well-connected to product and live ops. Product will align features and builds around what’s working if they understand the growth challenges, and live ops can provide great insight for growth teams on who to target and what kind of messaging might attract the highest-value players.

8. You have internal politics

“Every single person working in a gaming company needs to have the will to help,” El Bachri says.

If KPIs and incentives aren’t aligned, though, people will be working towards different goals that may not be compatible with overall success.

9. You lack collaboration

Even if you communicate, you’re aligned, and you don’t have politics, it doesn’t mean your team is actually working together both efficiently and effectively.

There is more juice to squeeze when you do. Even when you’re doing something like deciding on creative direction for your new ad campaign:

“When I coach and I help clients and gaming studios build their creative processes, one of the most important parts of that is to have people from the different teams collaborate together,” El Bachri says. “You have the UA manager, you have someone from product that knows the product best, and then you have someone from creative. So basically brainstorming altogether makes the creative better, more efficient.”

Even if it’s not technically “my job” to help make creative for ads.

10. You lack a creative process

Sometimes you just want to put the creative people in a box, shake it around, open it up, and have wonderful, amazing, performant images, copy, and ideas pop out.

But while that’s something that might work on a bespoke level, it doesn’t scale.

“You’d be surprised how many big gaming studios don’t have an efficient UA creative process,” El Bachri says. “Why? Because there are so many people involved. Also, a lot of times you need someone to come in to organize … and to lead.”

A creative process is about reliably and efficiently generating industry-beating creative time and time again. Without process, you’re down to luck and individual talent, and if you don’t have a complete rockstar on the team who just hits it out of the park every single time, you’re going to eventually fall flat on your face.

Which means: your game isn’t growing.

11. You’re not testing enough on-store assets

One of the biggest issues Sara sees is that studios don’t test enough app store assets, which kills a ton of opportunity to be more efficient at user acquisition.

The top 5% of best-performing studios make at least 18 changes per year to their app listings in Google Play and the App Store, she says. The bottom 5% make only 1 change per year.

“You don’t need to test assets that take a lot of time to produce, but it could be small changes on app icons or screenshots or that could actually make a big difference,” El Bachri adds.

12. You don’t have a testing plan

This is something we saw recently in our Growth Masterminds episode with Russell Ovans on his new book on game analytics: a lack of a real testing plan.

If your game isn’t growing, you’re probably testing a lot of different things. But testing is complex. It’s easy to do wrong. It’s easy to get answers which lead you in precisely the wrong direction.

Building a reasonable testing plan will help you avoid those pitfalls.

13. You don’t educate your internal team about UA

ASO managers can’t test new assets they don’t have. 

Sara tells the story of an ASO manager who hadn’t changed an app store listing for one of her games for over a year. (Yeah, I was shocked too.) The problem wasn’t the ASO manager per se: it’s that she couldn’t convince the creative team to prioritize her requests.

“There is a big lack of education in the industry on the nuances and all of the layers of complexity of growth,” El Bachri says. 

So she had to come in and explain to the entire team how important it is to test, and how creative changes will impact both bottom line revenue and top line profitability.

14. You don’t have enough generalists who see the big picture

It’s pretty clear from many of Sara El Bachri’s reasons why your game isn’t growing that part of the problem is siloed professionals in narrow disciplines who aren’t seeing the big picture. Or understanding their role in the entire team’s success. 

Which in an odd way makes me (a generalist) happy: generalists are valuable because they see the whole picture, and can take steps to get everyone aligned.

Game isn’t growing? So much more in the full podcast

If you haven’t subscribed to Growth Masterminds yet, take this as a sign that the universe is telling you to stop procrastinating.
Subscribe, watch, or listen to the whole episode for all the details and all the context. And, of course, to get all the other episodes and all the insight from every single guest!

Why TikTok is mostly OK despite offering IAPs on the web

Yesterday TechCrunch reported that “TikTok may be routing around the App Store to save money on commissions,” and as such, could be in trouble with Apple for offering in-app purchases (IAPs) on the web. But that’s only partially true.

Here’s why …

Buy on the web, IAPs on the web

The “discovery” is that TikTok offers a web store where people can buy coins, which would then be used in-app in order to boost your videos or tip other creators. 

TikTok IAPs web

 

That is true: such a web store exists, and I’ve visited it, and it does indeed offer a discount off the price of coins available in-app of 25% … a number which is very coincidentally almost the amount that TikTok would pay Apple in commission for in-app purchases, minus some additional transaction fees that TikTok would incur when processing payments itself.

buy TikTok coins on the web

You can buy as few as 70 coins, but with the “Custom” option, you can buy up to 500,000 coins for $5,300 U.S. at once. This is clearly targeted at the big influencer marketing studios that are looking to boost many videos hard, not so much individual creators who just want to give their videos a little shot in the arm.

App Store Guidelines problem?

Once upon a time, back in the day, IAPs on the web was definitely not OK, and Apple was very religious about this: purchases for use that might be used in-app needed to be actually purchased in the app.

This was Fortnite’s original sin in 2020:

“Epic Games … started allowing Fortnite payments by web. Click the link in Fortnite, go to Epic’s site, buy the skin, go back to the app, and BOOM … no 30% cut for Apple. Apple booted the app from the App Store, and Epic sued.”

However, since then there’s been many legal and regulatory changes. 

One, granted by Apple way back in 2021 as a way to settle a developer lawsuit, was an update to App store guidelines that allows app publishers to inform users/players/customers of alternative payment methods outside of their app. That was reaffirmed in 2023 in one of the antitrust cases Epic Games brought against Apple. And other lawsuits and regulations such as the EU’s Digital Markets Act have pushed Apple to allow more payment freedom as well.

So external payments have been live for some time now, with significant downsides that I highlighted.

But wait, there’s more: TikTok is not just an app

But there’s something significantly different about IAPs on the web — a mobile app on iOS and Android pointing users to an e-commerce site — compared to a multiplatform service, not just a mobile app, enabling e-commerce wherever it does business.

And that’s what TikTok is: it’s also available on the web.

TikTok on the web

As such TikTok has every right to ask users to make payments on the web.

And Apple’s own guidelines confirm this in guideline 3.1.3(b) Multiplatform Services:

“Apps that operate across multiple platforms may allow users to access content, subscriptions, or features they have acquired in your app on other platforms or your web site, including consumable items in multi-platform games.”

Which seems to indicate that all is well.

But wait, there’s 1 little caveat

So all is good and Apple and TikTok are now best buds, despite Apple losing IAP revenue? Perhaps not quite exactly.

Because what I copied above from guideline 3.1.3(b) about Multiplatform Services isn’t the entire guideline. There’s just a little bit more:

“ … provided those items are also available as in-app purchases within the app.”

Hmmm …

Yes, you can buy coins inside the iOS app. But last time I checked, the most you can buy is 16,500 for about $350 … about 6% as much as you can get on the web. Remember, you can order 500,000 coins for $5,300 in TikTok’s web store.

500000 TikTok coin purchase on the web

So Apple could conceivably talk to TikTok and say that this condition is not met.

At which point TikTok could come to Apple and say that the base “item” here is a coin, and coins are indeed available on the the web and in the iOS app, and therefore the App Store guideline has been fully and completely fulfilled, and the exact number available on each platform is irrelevant. 

At which point it gets more challenging.

(Or TikTok could make a 500,000-coin IAP available in the iOS app, if they chose. In December of 2022, Apple increased the maximum in-app payment price to $9,999.99.)

Summing up

TikTok is a multiplatform service, not just a mobile app, and as such is fully within its right to offer products for purchase on the open web, or IAPs on the web, if you like. Things might get a little sticky with Apple, but TikTok at least has a case that it is fully in compliance with App Store guidelines.

And besides … could Apple really kick one of the biggest services on the planet off the App Store?

I guess anything is possible.

I’ve previously written about how direct to consumer (D2C) can work for mobile games, and you can get the summary in this Growth Masterminds episode:

Google and modern marketing measurement: the measurement tripod

Google sees modern marketing measurement as a tripod. The 3 legs of the measurement stool, as Mountain View sees it, are attribution, incrementality, and marketing mix modeling (MMM).

Google just released a 44-page report titled the Modern Measurement Playbook, sharing how it sees the future of paid media attribution and analytics. Since Google is the world’s largest adtech company by revenue — $307 billion for 2023 — and probably the single biggest ad partner for Singular customers by spend, it’s worth understanding how Google looks at marketing measurement in general, and paid media attribution in particular.

Google’s modern marketing measurement tripod has 3 legs:

  1. Attribution
    Micro focus: Assigning credit for conversions
  2. Incrementality measurement
    Meso focus: Determining impact of marketing
  3. Marketing mix modeling (MMM)
    Macro focus: Understanding all factors for revenue

3 forms of modern marketing measurement

The key is understanding how all of these measurement methodologies interact.

Attribution is the most immediate and it’s the one performance mobile marketers and user acquisition managers are most familiar with. There’s a click or a view, and then something happens: an install, a re-install, an engagement, a conversion. The click or view connects action and reaction, or input and output, and you have near-instant signal.

That signal, of course, is changing thanks to privacy, but SKAN and eventually Privacy Sandbox will still provide an attribution signal of varying levels of value.

Incrementality measurement doesn’t capture the immediate causal impact of clicks or views, and that is both its biggest weakness and greatest strength. It’s a weakness, from the perspective of those who want a direct connection in time and space between a marketing stimulus and a consumer response. It’s a strength, from the perspective of those who point out that just because an ad impression or click occurred at some point on the customer journey, other factors were at play. And the conversion may have happened in any case without the ad view or click.

At its best, incrementality measurement tells you the additional value of ad spend and media sources by comparing what happens for specific sets of people or geos who are exposed to marketing campaigns versus those who were not. Ultimately, incrementality measurement should reveal what you got for all your marketing effort and energy that you would not otherwise have achieved.

Media mix modeling is the longest-range, broadest-scope, and highest-level measurement methodology that Google incorporates into its tripod theory of modern marketing measurement. MMM takes into account all marketing efforts including paid ad campaigns and non-paid organic efforts, but it doesn’t stop there. 

None of your marketing efforts happen in a vacuum. Everything around — world events, weather, competitor activity, economic and financial changes — impacts sales and revenue.

Modern marketing measurement: putting them all together?

Google suggests the way forward is using all 3 modern marketing measurement tools together, where attribution gives you real-time data, MMM provides a macro view of everything, and incrementality ensures you only pay for marketing that works (and partners who are effective).

The big question for a digital marketer, however, is whether you need all 3.

At some level, scope and scale provide insight on which tools you need in your bag.

A startup just beginning with modest scale will certainly waste its time with old-school MMM and is likely to find that sophisticated incrementality testing is out of scope. (Simple incrementality testing, however, like just turning the money tap off for a few weeks here and there, is not, and should be done from time to time.)

Even relatively large mobile gaming and app studios may be likely to find that traditional MMM is too big of a beast. (Note: Google suggests the time scale of MMM projects is “usually two years.” Singular offers MMM for mobile marketers that requires less … though it is 100% true that the longer you have data for, the better MMM works.) At this level, however, incrementality is a key way of discovering which ad partners are truly delivering value.

That said, there are many who don’t dive this deep into all the elements of modern marketing measurement.

Ultimately, it’s at your discretion. And a function of how much time, budget, and resources you have to invest in optimizing your marketing investments. Use the ones that make sense, but make sure you understand both the strengths and the limitations of each to avoid over-correcting course when you get results that don’t match your preconceptions.

If you do use all or several of these, Google suggests using each to calibrate the others. One way is to set the bounds as sanity checks on attribution methods.

As Google says:

“For digital click-based channels, in-house attribution typically represents a generous view of that strategy’s contribution (i.e. the upper-bound), and incrementality represents the most conservative view (i.e. the lower-bound). Your MMM’s assessment should fall within the range of these bounds.”

When you put them all together, your marketing plans set the strategy and allocate budgets for various channels, separate out goals for performance versus brand channels, and enable in-channel optimization. 

There’s a universe in which you have all the resources and time you need to create the ultimate modern marketing measurement machine for your specific company and marketing mix. 

Unfortunately, it may not be this universe.

Marketing maturity for you is to adopt the thinking, processes, and tools that make sense for your specific situation.

What Singular is delivering, starting first with iOS, is Unified Measurement. Unified Measurement is a recognition of the fact that while attribution is just 1 leg of the tripod, in itself it contains a world of diversity in methodologies, signals, and strategies. Unified Measurement brings those together, but it doesn’t stop there. Attribution at its best is very good, and Singular’s new Unified iOS Report is indeed now the gold standard in attribution, but there’s more needed.

Incrementality matters. Marketing mix modeling matters.

The insights you can derive from those methodologies have plenty to say about which partners and channels you should use, and can feed into a better marketing strategy. That’s why you can already tap into those capabilities as a Singular customer in a super user-friendly way: Singular is working to incorporate the insights they deliver into Unified Measurement.

An interesting insight from Google highlights how critical the attribution stage is:

“Regardless of the maturity stage or the number of tools you are using, when it comes to optimizing campaigns and tactics, attribution will be the best tool to prioritize since it allows you to monitor relative changes in the performance of your chosen KPI in real time.”

Ultimately, being able to pair that with higher-level methodologies provides insurance that your attribution results accurately reflect reality … especially the parts that are invisible to today’s tracking and measurement methods, like multistage customer journeys that are influenced by offline or disconnected events you will never see.

Much more in the report

If you are using incrementality or MMM, it’s worth checking out the entire Google report, which offers insight on using those methodologies to help you set bids, understand the true value of paid media (which can be greater or lower than attribution tools alone suggest), set hypotheses to test, and more.

There’s also tons of detailed examples of how to use the methodologies together.

Ultimately, it’s a fairly strong overview of modern marketing measurement. That’s not just about what to do as granular signals fade. It’s also about what should always have been paired with direct attribution data.

How to drive organic social downloads even if you’re a total noob

You see social killing it. You know billions of people are there. You see random silly things go viral, products explode, and apps go nuts, and you wonder … why isn’t that us? Have no fear: there’s a strategy to drive organic social downloads, even if you’re a total noob.

(You know the drill: hit play, keep scrolling …)

A social shopping community

Mys Tyler (think: Ms. Tyler, not My Styler) is a social shopping community, currently at about 650,000 women, built on the premise that a lot of us hate shopping. But a few of us love it, and if those of us who hate shopping can find someone who looks like us and shares our style, maybe magic can happen.

As in: she shares stuff, women like it, they buy it, and they get what looks good on their body type. 

“We all have to get dressed every single day, whether we like shopping for clothes or not,” says Sara Neill, CEO and founder of Mys Tyler. “If we match the people who love shopping with the rest of the people in the world that have their same dimensions, then they can do the job of shopping for us.”

There’s a huge benefit for retailers here as well as anti-shoppers: whereas 40% of fashion that’s bought online is returned, Neill says, only 5% of what Mys Tyler members buy meets the same fate. That’s huge for profitability and it’s way more efficient for shoppers. (How many things have you intended to return only to nope out of actually doing it?)

Mys Tyler has grown quickly and fairly cheaply via Facebook and Instagram (plus other non-social strategies; keep reading to the end) but that’s led to its user base skewing older. Not necessarily a problem, but if you want to attract younger shoppers, you probably need to go to TikTok.

And therein lies the problem: what if you get the ‘gram, know Facebook, understand adtech, but aren’t particularly familiar with how TikTok works and why things go viral there?

Noobs welcome: how to drive organic social downloads

The simple answer: find people who do. 

So Neill started an internship program with a twist: she’d introduce not 1 but 10 interns to building an app-based business, and the interns would help build and execute Mys Tyler’s TikTok strategy. (Part of the reason for the go big or go home strategy: a lucky mistake: overspending on the internship job ad led to 500 candidates, many of them top quality.)

“We started going through and we only wanted one, but there were so many great people that were coming through and so we ended up interviewing 20 people and then we thought, you know what, let’s change the scope of this internship and rather it being one person that works with us, let’s make it more like a 10 week course,” Niell told me.

So the interns spent an hour a week learning about product prioritization, affiliate marketing, customer journey mapping, social media marketing. Each of them took over the company’s Instagram account for a day, for example.

Essentially, they got a mini-MBA in running a mobile business.

In return, Niell asked them to build TikTok creative and campaigns for Mys Tyler, which the company would then boost with some cash. The goal: organic social downloads, or cheap paid ones, via boosting.

Organic social via Spark Ads

“So your job for next week is to each of you create something for TikTok,” she told the interns. “It can be you doing a selfie video or if you don’t feel comfortable being on camera, it could also just be scrolling through the app and like doing a voiceover or typing over it. So whatever you feel comfortable with, just create something and then we’ll load them all up next week.”

In the process, she taught the interns how to set up a campaign, what an adset is, how to target, and so on.

The type of ad she chose was TikTok’s Spark Ads, which are native ads on influencers’ own pages. The benefit for Mys Tyler was real, organic, authentic content. The benefit for the interns was that all the likes, follows, shares, and comments happened on their own TikTok accounts.

“So they get the likes, they get the comments, they get all this like engagement, but three seconds in, it has the call to action to download Mys Tyler,” Niell says. “And so what’s great about that for us is because now it’s creative with their profile picture, their name. So it’s really organic content that has a call to action to download our app.”

Then Mys Tyler put some money behind them.

Just like ads you design and build yourself, not all hit it out of the park. But one got over a million watches, which was super-exciting for the intern, and very beneficial for Mys Tyler. And it wasn’t just about views. Mys Tyler’s CAC dropped significantly as well.

“At the beginning we had a cost per install of $2.93, and by the end we were down to $0.76 cost per install,” Neill says.

The key was getting a lot of creative: creative fatigues quickly on TikTok, she adds.

One more thing: paid PR

There was another strategy that Mys Tyler used to drive significant downloads, and it’s one I hadn’t heard before from a mobile marketer or executive: paid PR.

Here’s Neill’s 50-second explanation:

Essentially, it’s paid editorial: you pitch Vogue or Women’s Health on a topic, set a cost per click, and if they’re interested enough, they’ll write about it. They’re incentivized to get people to click, Neill adds, so there are plenty of links in the story.

Just one drove 5,000 downloads all by itself. But the key is they weren’t just downloads. Because people had read an editorial piece on the app, how it works, and what it does, they were invested enough to actually sign up and create accounts in Mys Tyler:

“We had over 5,000 people download the app and create an account, like go all the way through the funnel from that,” Neill says. “They were really high engagement people because they’ve read a whole article about it. They really understand your business. They’re not just like, what’s this app? It looks like it could be appealing … I’ll give it two seconds of thought and then give up on it. So that has been incredible for us.”

The installs are great, and the sign-ups are even better, but there’s an additional bonus: media you can leverage wherever you want.

For example, since the Buzzfeed article said “this app is the closest thing you’ll find to a personal stylist,” that became part of a Meta ad.

Plus, they’re helpful for your investor deck if you’re raising money.

Much more in the full podcast

As usual, there’s much more in our full discussion.
Check out the full video above or on our YouTube account, or subscribe to our podcast wherever podcasts are found.