John Koetsier, Author at Singular

Yep, you probably need a CMP (consent management platform)

Blame Europe if you like. But the need to have a CMP or consent management platform is likely going to be obvious in multiple geos all over the world in the next few years, including the United States. I was recently wondering what a CMP is and why Google is now requiring mobile publishers to implement a consent management platform.

So I chatted with Achraff-Nour Meski and Gabe Morazan from Sourcepoint in a recent Growth Masterminds podcast.

Hit play and keep scrolling …

So what is a CMP?

Sourcepoint product director Gabe Morazan answered that pretty quickly:

“A CMP is ultimately a way where you can configure and set up signals that your downstream partners, your advertising partners can look for to see if we have the appropriate consent, has the user opted out?” he says. “ And so CMPs basically help you to configure … provide templates … and support some industry frameworks like the IAB TCF.”

(TCF, by the way, is the Transparency and Consent Framework created by the IAB. Do note that the TCF has been controversial among privacy groups, resulting in lawsuits that are not fully complete but will likely require changes in what data you collect and how it is used.)

Long story short:

It’s a way to ensure you’re privacy-compliant when deploying apps and websites. And a way to structure how you ask users for consent, manage their privacy preferences, and communicate those preferences to ad partners … while you just focus on running your app or site.

Usually, they’ll come as an SDK for your product people to implement.

And, like most platforms that handle important but non-core parts of your mobile experience, CMPs will update as the laws and regulations change so that you are the most compliant you can be, generally speaking.

What’s this about Google? Google is requiring a CMP now?

You heard that right.

If you’re running AdSense, Ad Manager, or AdMob, you’ll need to use a Google-certified CMP. That was actually required as of January of this year, so it’s been around for a while, but there’s still some confusion about exactly what to do and who needs to do it.

It’s required, of course, only if you’re going to be serving ads in the EU and the UK. And without it, most ads won’t run on your properties.

So this is only an EU thing, right? Well …

While Google is requiring consent management platforms as a requirement to serve ads in the EU and the UK, there are definitely other places where having a CMP makes sense.

From Sourcepoint client services leader Achraff-Nour Meski:

“The short answer is wherever the law framework exists to regulate the use of personal information you would need to have a CMP regardless of which industry standard you’re using,” he says. “Could be TCF in Europe, could be non-TCF in Europe, could be … CCP in California, GPP across different states, whatever there is a framework protecting the user of personal data.”

(GPP is Global Privacy Platform, another IAB protocol.)

One question I asked: what about consent fatigue?

We’re all tired — I assume — of endlessly making choices on millions of websites for which cookies to eat: all, none, or just essential ones. GDPR has blessed us with that one, and the kind of in-app consent that Google is now requiring is yet another burden.

At some point, there has to be some way of setting up your own global preferences for what you’ll allow and what you won’t, communicating those to your computing devices (of all sizes and form factors) and automating the process.

CMPs are working on that, apparently.

“Brands are starting to look. consistently across all of our apps or websites, how do we streamline this experience so that if you as a user say yes or no, then next time you log in, we’re not gonna ask you,” Morazan says. “We call this authenticated consent. You see this with a lot of CMP platforms out there where they’re tying a consent record to the known user. And so if I log into your website and then I go to my connected TV to look at your content, they already know, well, hey, Gabe is registered … you know their preference.”

I can’t help but think this will require a platform presence, however, from an Apple or a Google, a global personal privacy policy that your computer or phone enforces across all your apps and browsers. Truly smart ones would also indicate things that would change, over time, indicating what types of products or services I’m in the market for … essentially an ecosystem-level Privacy Sandbox-like implementation of Topics API.

But that’s probably just a pipe dream.

Check out the full show …

Check out the full show for much more, including:

00:00 Introduction to Privacy and Consent Management
00:36 Understanding Google’s New Consent Management Platform Requirement
00:51 Expert Insights: The Role and Functionality of CMPs
04:53 Customizing Consent Messages for User Experience
09:09 Global Privacy Control: Simplifying Consent Across Platforms
15:16 The Future of Privacy and Consent Management
18:37 Closing Thoughts and Acknowledgements

Find Growth Masterminds wherever podcasts are distributed, or on YouTube.

SHEIN used 50,000 creatives last year. Here’s how to win with creative in 2024

Fast growth requires a lot of ad creatives and images. Or does it? What’s the best strategy to win with creative in 2024?

One strategy: flood the zone.

In our recent Creatives that Convert webinar, MobileAction’s Tato Mikadze said that SHEIN used over 50,000 creatives last year. That’s a huge number, but perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised. Together, Shein and its fast-fashion rival Temu send about 600,000 packages to the US every single day. And Shein was the 16th-largest U.S. advertiser in Q4 last year in terms of digital spending.

But 50,000 creatives is a lot. And it could be even more right now: a quick search for SHEIN on Meta’s ad library tool results in more than 50,000 results. That level of scale is going to yield results on both a performance and a brand level just based on ubiquity alone, but it’s also a very expensive way to attack the market.

If you don’t have the budget to deploy (never mind test) 50,000 creatives like SHEIN, or spend $2 billion a year like its rival Temu, you’re going to have to adopt a different strategy.

And so the big question for user acquisition pros right now is: how do you win with creative in 2024? That’s one of the questions we asked our panelists:

Paolo Vergani, Director, Creative Production @ Liftoff
Taato Mikadze, Head of Gaming @ MobileAction
Doug Manson, Chief Creative Officer @ Craftsman+
Lisi Gardiner, Director of Product @ Singular

Win with creative in 2024: 3 key changes

Our panelists identified 3 key changes in creative recently:

Videos are getting longer
New triple-page ad experiences
UGC everywhere

Video ads used to be 15 to 30 seconds. Now they’re often between 45 to 60 seconds.

“We’re seeing how the video length distribution for video is actually moving away from short form videos or anything between like 15 to 30-second videos,” says Liftoff’s Paolo Vergani. “And it’s growing on videos longer than 45 and between 45 and 60.”

That doesn’t mean a fully captive audience. If you’ve personally experienced some of these longer ads, you’ll often see a “Reward Granted” message pop up, letting people know that they’ve won their prize for watching and can soon — if not immediately — exit out. But if they’re interested and captivated by the video … they can stick around.

We’re now also seeing “triple-page ad experiences.”

If you play games, you’ve noticed them. Often it’s a video, followed by a playable, followed by a static call to action.

“These are creatives that give advertisers a way of combining the best aspects of video, interactive, or playables and static ads into a single ad experience,” Vergani says. “These are great because they offer the opportunity to tell a compelling and cohesive story across the entire ad.”

Finally, while UGC is not new, we’re seeing more and more of it. Done right, UGC brings a rawness to ads that can seem more real. It can also help appeal to a specific audience or demographic: people who feel like me in age or sex or ethnicity might tend to use apps or products that I would also like. And of course UGC brings social proof: another tactic to help you win with creative.

Creative in 2024: 1 new metric

We all know the standard metrics to evaluate ads and creative: CTR, CVR, CPC, CPI, CPA, ROI, ROAS, viewability, and so on.

Here’s a new one: TTI.

TTI is time to install.

Time to install isn’t a new metric: it’s something MMPs like Singular have used for years primarily to find outliers that might be indicative of fraud. But TTI has interesting things to tell marketers about how to win with creative as well.

“DraftKings did a deep dive into the impact that their playables were driving,” says Craftsman+’s Doug Manson. “And they uncovered this really interesting metric, which is time to install. And what they found when compared to video and static ads is that they were able to acquire a user 72% faster than typical video or static ads.”

That’s interesting.

It suggests that playable ads drive engagement that spurs immediate action. That’s important, because we’ve all had the experience of installing an app from an ad, going back and continuing whatever we were doing in our game or app, and not going back to actually open the app we just installed for days or weeks. Then you see the app icon there, and you wonder: what is that app again?

That’s not likely to be a great experience for generating not just installs but actual first open, usage, and long-term engagement.

Manson continues:

“You could pretty much run a playable ad in a short amount of time, then spend the money to run a video campaign over three months and get the same amount of users.”

And that suggests efficiency of ad spend, and the ability to turn on the user acquisition spigot quickly when you need to. That’s helpful especially for apps or games that are connecting their growth efforts to specific real-world or in-app events. Events come and go: it won’t be the Super Bowl for months on end.

So speed of acquisition is a competitive advantage, and faster TTI is another way to win with creative in 2024.

Win with creative: generative AI, top-performing formats, and cross-channel creative

As usual in a Singular webinar, we also asked the audience of hundreds of marketers to weigh in with their experience on key factors.

3 things we asked in the Creatives that Convert webinar were:

Are you using generative AI?
What is your top-performing ad format?
Do you use the same creative across channels?

Here are the answers:

Generative AI: 76% using or testing

45% of marketers are using generative AI regularly, according to our webinar participants. Another 31% are just starting to test, and 24% say: not yet.

Top-performing ad format: UGC and short-form video

For 42% of marketers, UGC is their top-performing ad form. And, despite the fact that long-form video is making inroads now, short-form video is still the top-performing creative format for 36%,

Playables, interstitials, and long-form video make up the long tail for this sample of marketers.

Cross-channel creative: mostly yes

To win with creative, do you need to customize all your ads to each individual channel?

For the marketers we surveyed, most use a mix of same creative and custom creative across all channels: 53%.

18% customize their creative per channel, and 29% use the same creative everywhere.

Much more in the full webinar!

There is so much more in the full Creatives that Convert webinar that will help you win with creative in 2024. Grab some coffee or a snack, put up your feet for a moment, and check it out.

What you’ll find:

Top ad formats
What’s working now
Key trends
How to test creative
What generative AI helps with
Generative AI tools to check out
Managing creative at scale
Unobvious metrics to get from each platform
Creative optimization in the privacy era
Top takeaways from each panelist

Gaming DNA: what factors matter most in mobile, console, PC games

Why do gamers like certain games and not others? What ingredients should you sprinkle into your game to attract specific types of players? And, how do the big gaming platforms — mobile, console, and PC — differ from each other? Social gaming platform GameTree thinks it has a few answers in its gaming DNA data, and I recently spent some time with founders Dana Sydorenko and John Uke to learn more.

Hit play, keep scrolling …

Gaming, women, and men

Some of the big insights from gaming DNA is that there isn’t that much difference between men and women in terms of gaming. At least for a while.

“From 16 to somewhere around 30 there is almost no significant difference between the proportion of men and women who say that they play games,” says Sydorenko.” But as we get older, somewhere around like 32, we see big differences and this difference increasing: so men keep playing more games and women start playing less.”

There are some differences, though. Women are less likely to play PC games, more likely to play Xbox or Switch. And across platforms, men tend to gravitate towards sports and action games, Uke says. They also tend to grind more in difficult games.

“Men like to throw themselves at the wall and fail more often and like … hit their heads a lot more,” Uke says.”

(Yeah, we’re kinda dumb like that.)

Gaming DNA reveals a source of toxicity in gaming

It turns out that the reason people play games and what they’re trying to get out of their gaming experience is probably more important than demographics.

“There’s just different types of fun that everybody has a different blueprint of,” Uke says. “An easy example that most people can agree with, for example, is Dungeons and Dragons: on one side you have power gamers, on the other, you have actors and more casual people. And even though it’s the same game, there’s no right or wrong way to play.”

Mixing styles of gameplay, however, can make gaming together toxic.

“If you mix them together, they’re gonna hate each other and find each other toxic and not have fun,” he adds. “And that’s actually surprisingly a big insight we’ve had as the biggest source of toxicity in gaming now. It’s not anonymity, it’s not trolling. A lot of it is somebody just having a bad day. But honestly, it’s just the wrong people playing together.”

Which means if you’re going to put groups of people together to game, you have to pay attention to their motivations. Gaming is better with people. It’s more meaningful, and it can last longer. But they have to be the right kind of people for you.

Tinder or Match … for gamers

Because GameTree is a social platform connecting gamers, it asks questions that will help it match the right ones together. Do you like complexity? Are top-notch graphics critical? Do you prefer exploration? OK with grinding, or is it all about instant gratification and excitement?

Interestingly, platforms tend to skew different ways.

Console skews towards grinding
Console also has the strongest lean to dominance: beating others
Mobile and PC both skew to status … feeling better than others
Mobile also leans to achievement
Nintendo Switch, on the other hand, is the least status-focused platform

A side benefit of understanding gamers and what they like isn’t only learning about where different platforms fit in. You also learn a lot about the games themselves.

“We measured the DNA of the players, but based on the people who like a game, it also gives the DNA of the game itself,” Uke says. “For example, there was a big battle between League of Legends and Dota: which one requires more skill? It’s mostly settled now … it’s Dota. But if you look at GameTree’s data, you can see that people who play Dota have higher difficulty scores on what they like. So it basically mathematically proves that Dota is the more difficult game.”

That’s one reason game publishers and studios often want to check GameTree data to profile their (or a competitor’s) games.

Regional and cross-platform gaming

Interestingly, countries and regions play differently on different platforms as well.

“You know this map of Europe when they separate tomato Europe and potato Europe?” Sydorenko asks. “We can create some sort of map like this for a world where it’s like, oh, this is more PC gamers, this is more like PlayStation gamers, and this is more like console gaming.”

Countries may differ in emphasis, but what’s up everywhere is cross-platform gaming. In fact, most gamers play on multiple platforms.

“82% of gamers play on everything,” Sydorenko says. “They play on mobile and they also play on something else … so if you play on desktop and console, you definitely play on mobile.”

(Note: check out Singular’s cross-platform measurement tools.)

Much more in the full episode

If you haven’t subscribed to Growth Masterminds, now is a good time. You can watch it on YouTube or listen on your favorite podcasting platform.

What we talk about:

00:00 Introduction to Gamer Psychology
00:59 Introducing GameTree and its Founders
01:34 Gender Differences in Gaming
03:22 Platform Preferences and Gaming Patterns
04:58 The Importance of Gaming DNA
06:21 The Social Aspect of Gaming
15:30 The Role of Mobile Gaming
22:38 The Future of Gaming: VR and Blockchain 2
6:39 Women in Gaming
31:51 Conclusion

Singular ROI Index 2024: showcasing adtech leaders of the emerging privacy era

What can trillions of ad impressions, billions of clicks, and billions of installs tell you about the mobile ad ecosystem? They can tell you what ad networks are winning in the early stages of the era of privacy. And they can highlight your best bets for installs, conversions, ROAS, and growth.

We are super-pleased to announce the 2024 edition of the Singular ROI Index, where Singular takes trillions of data points and distills it into simple, actionable insight.

2024 ROI Index highlights

More ad networks
31 ad networks and platforms rank in at least 1 category, up from last year
The golden 6
6 ad networks rank in every single ROI Index category, an incredible feat
Big getting bigger
The top 4 advertising platforms all grew share of spend
CTV spend up 46%
Roku, Vizio, TVSquared, LG Ads, Samsung: massive CTV ad growth
Meta finds its mojo
After rocky early innings under ATT and SKAN, Meta got smart
iOS outpacing Android
Ad spend on iOS is growing faster than Android
Moloco does the impossible
Moloco matches Meta, Google, and other major platforms in 1 key metric
TikTok leveling up (even more)
TikTok’s share of spend is starting to reflect its share of time
Regional ad networks disappearing
Global players are winning in regional markets
Appier exploding
Zero rankings last year. 5 rankings in 2024
X: not dead yet
Yes, some advertisers left. But X still ranks in no fewer than 12 categories …
Hello again, Reddit
After a year in the cold, Reddit returns to win an ROI Index placement
ironSource, Unity, Aura: whoa
Can we say juggernaut? Unity won big in the Index
AppLovin: ditto whoa
Ditto last comment …

Get the 2024 edition of the Singular ROI Index

Check out the 2024 edition of the Singular ROI Index.

What you’ll find:

Top ad networks for SKAN performance
- Most customers
- Most installs
- Most spend
Apple Search Ads performance
Growth but challenges
ROI and retention on Android
- Top ad networks globally
- Top ad networks for each region (APAC, EMEA, North America, South America)
Top ad networks on Android
- Most customers
- Most installs
- Most spend
All-round excellence
Ad networks with the most ROI Index category wins

In addition, we’ve added insight from partners such MobileAction, Tinuiti, and SplitMetrics, with insight into growth via Apple Search Ads, CTV ads, the need for sophisticated measurement protocols, and more.

There’s much more to say, but it’s all in the index

I could keep telling you what’s in the Singular ROI Index for 2024.

Or you could just go look at it yourself.

The simple reason why no ad network is at 100% SKAN 4 yet (and won’t be for years)

About 4 months ago Reddit announced SKAN 4 support and went all in on the latest version of Apple’s privacy-focused mobile attribution framework. Almost immediately, Reddit’s percentage of SKAdNetwork postbacks hit close to 90% SKAN 4. Fast forward to today and the content-focused social platform is at 95% SKAN 4 … but not 100% SKAN 4.

Super high, right?

But not 100%. Even though they’re agonizingly close.

Why not?

No network can be 100% SKAN 4 (yet)

The simple truth is that no ad network or platform can be 100% SKAN 4, even with their absolute best efforts.

The reason is simple: the requirements for delivering a SKAN 4 postback are not entirely under their control.

In order for a SKAN 4 postback to be issued, at least 2 things need to be true:

Ad network encodes a SKAN 4 click
iOS device is running 16.1 or higher

The first is under an ad network’s control. The second, of course, is not: it’s purely dependent on the people who choose to use services that an ad network is facilitating ads on, and the devices they own.

SKAN 4 won’t reach 100% (at least for years)

As of January of this year, almost 19% of iOS devices were running some operating system pre 16.1, with the lion’s share stuck on iOS 15.8.

Apple provides years of updates for devices, but some just age out, with their hardware unable to support modern software.

For instance, an iPhone 6 that was originally sold on Sept 9, 2015 can be upgraded to iOS 15.8, released in October of 2023. But iOS 15.8 is really just a security fix, and any additional upgrades that arrive for devices this old are likely to be the same.

So 100% of iOS devices will essentially never reach 100%, at least for years. Which means we’re stuck with some percentage of SKAN 3 postbacks for the foreseeable future.

But … it’s not like it matters

20% SKAN 3 is kind of a deal. Or at least it will be when SKAN 4 is fully and truly operational at ecosystem scale. But it won’t stay here forever.

People will keep buying new devices and selling their old ones. Old iPhones will eventually give up the ghost or enter a third or fourth life as remote control or backup. And so the problem will become increasingly less important over time as the percentage of old devices steadily shrinks. We won’t see 100% SKAN 4 for years, but we’ll get close enough to not matter pretty quickly.

Ready for SKAN 4?

We’re starting to see SKAN 4 slowly grow, getting close to the 50% of SKAN postbacks mark as networks like Reddit and Meta start to transition.

If you’re not ready yet, now is the time to get ready.

Here’s everything you need to get started.

You’ll get a summary of the changes, details on how to deal with each of the major changes from SKAN 3 to SKAn 4, and tips for building your SKAN 4 growth strategy.

Tracking cross-platform ROAS for PC, console, mobile marketing

How can you manage performance marketing in a cross-platform scenario?

One really good option is with Singular’s recently announced cross-platform measurement for PC, console, and (of course) mobile. I recently sat down with the product manager and the product marketing manager for PC/console cross-platform measurement, Gali Housman and Kelsey Lee.

Click play and keep scrolling …

The cross-platform measurement gap

If you have cross-platform experiences, you know there’s a measurement gap that needs to be closed. When you’re advertising on the web for a console game or marketing on mobile for a desktop experience, it’s easy to end up with siloed marketing: untrackable campaigns, hard-to-sum-up costs, and ROAS numbers that bear almost no relation to reality.

“So what’s hard is tracking the user,” says Singular product manager Gali Housman. “In order to do marketing well, to get the full ROI at the end and optimize and be able to send the data back to the networks you need to be able to track the users and to attribute the users to the correct source and correct ad network.”

The problems are many, including different devices and different identifiers (if you have any identifiers at all).

But they actually start upstream of your click and conversion data: all the way to what you’re spending on each campaign. Which, of course, is essential to generating a return on ad spend figure that is remotely accurate.

Cost collection and cost aggregation: different challenges

“ROAS is ROAS, but a big aspect of that is cost collection,” says product marketing manager Kelsey Lee. “These web cost partners are complicated: they don’t all just have easy APIs to integrate, like our traditional mobile networks … the integrations are a lot more flexible, so you need to be able to read Google Docs. You need to be able to read email reports. You need to be able to read all of these unique different types of cost integrations and standardize all that data.”

Which means that what should be easy — cost collection and aggregation — actually isn’t. And without that solved, getting ROAS is just not in the cards.

Cross-platform optimization is also harder

Yet another challenge: enabling optimization.

When your ad networks succeed, you want to let them know so they can do more of it. In a cross-platform marketing campaign, that’s not always as easy as it might seem. Not only is connecting a converting user or player to an ad interaction is hard by default, but privacy rights have to be respected.

The solution is a conversion API, Housman says, plus an industry first for MMPs: web postbacks.

“Once you have that, you have the ability to send the data and optimize campaigns accordingly,” Housman says. “It’s a much needed part to the whole tracking and attribution of games.”

The result is a privacy-compliant and cookie-less solution for both web conversions and console conversion: configure it in the Singular user interface, and your ad partners will be able to optimize their campaigns based on the results they generate.

Ultimately: what do you get?

The goal, of course, is good data to accurately measure campaign performance. And that’s exactly what you get, says Housman.

Essentially, it’s exactly what you currently get with mobile.

“If we’re talking to a marketer that’s already familiar with an MMP or specifically Singular, they can expect the full Singular solution,” Housman says. “They can expect all the benefits of our solution, of our cost aggregation, data standardization, ETL, postbacks, attribution, all of including customization to come along.”

That includes integrations with all the partners you need and full ROI.

Not a brand-new solution

While the solution as a whole is new and just launched, components have been around used for years. As we mentioned in the product announcement, one client has already used parts of this solution for over 2 years to track over $100 million in revenue: it’s been a key component in their transition from a single-platform publisher to a publisher with solutions on mobile and desktop and console.

Which brings up interesting options if you want to measure cross-platform player value.

“Clients can also track the user across different devices,” Housman says. “So they can track the user across several devices and then see the lifetime value and the revenue that they get for this user across all of the devices they use.”

Sometimes we talk about our own things on Growth Masterminds. But most of the time we’re talking to global experts in marketing, advertising, and mobile to highlight growth gems and insights you can use today.

Subscribe on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or just about anywhere podcasts are distributed.

17 things advertisers can learn about Reddit thanks to its IPO documents

Reddit is going public, which is great news for early investors, who might just be able to finally cash out on a startup that was born in 2005. But it’s also great news for advertisers, because filing an IPO prospectus means Reddit has to provide a fairly honest insider’s view about how the platform works and what they plan to do in the near future. That means Reddit is releasing a massive amount of data about how its ads are working, how it sees advertising, and what new ad units, experiences, and measurement capabilities it plans to release.

But there’s more.

A coming IPO also means that as a company that has yet to turn a profit after 18+ years of operation, Reddit needs to double down on boosting revenue. No one wants to IPO and then immediately lay an egg, not boost revenue in the first few years as a public company, and go below water on their open-day valuation.

For a primarily ad revenue-driven platform, that means putting its best foot forward for advertisers and — likely — getting more advertiser-friendly over the coming years. (Interestingly, Reddit is already showing some positive results that show up in the 2024 Singular ROI Index, due to be released shortly. We’re seeing revenue growth and better ranking.)

Thanks to the Reddit IPO, we’re getting a big dump of data we didn’t have before. Here’s what I found in the Reddit IPO prospectus that is interesting to advertisers …

1. Reddit daily average users

We knew Reddit had a decent number of users, though it didn’t compare with the big billion+ user platforms like Meta or Youtube or WeChat or TikTok.

Here are the latest Reddit user statistics:

73 million DAU
73 million average daily active uniques, or DAUq

Clearly, Reddit has a long way to go to get in the company of other major platforms.

By comparison Meta is massively bigger. Even Snap is multiples of Reddit.

Meta: 2.11 billion DAUs, 3.07 billion MAUs
Snap: 375 million DAUs

2. Reddit weekly average users

The numbers look a bit better for Reddit on weekly average users. Reddit calculates weekly average unique users as users it can measure with a unique identifier, either on the website or the app. As bots are discovered, they’re removed from this number.

Reddit has:

267 million average weekly active uniques

That’s growing significantly in the U.S., and less so in the rest of the world.

“In the three months ended December 31, 2023, global WAUq grew 29% compared to the prior year period, driven by 39% growth in WAUq in the United States and 20% growth in WAUq in the rest of world.”

3. Average revenue per user

Reddit does not monetize nearly as well as Meta, which captures almost $70 in value for users in North America. That’s almost 13X better than Reddit.

Reddit’s average revenue per user:

ARPU of $3.42 (global)
ARPU of $5.51 (USA)

By comparison:

Meta ARPU for all apps combined: $10.10 (global)
Meta ARPU for Facebook only $13.12 (global)
Meta ARPU for Facebook only $68.44 (U.S. and Canada)

On the plus side, Reddit monetizes better than Snap, which is generally around $3/user/year.

4. Size of the global advertising market, according to Reddit

It’s always interesting to see how ad networks and major advertising platforms view the world.

Reddit says the ad ecosystem is a:

$1 trillion total addressable advertising market in 2023
$1.4 trillion total addressable advertising market in 2027

Note: this is the total addressable market globally from advertising, but excludes China and Russia.

Reddit also cites S&P Global Market Intelligence in saying that a significant and highly monetizable segment of that is the search advertising market, which is projected to hit $750 billion by 2027. Reddit hopes to capture more of this as a result of its recently announced new partnership with Google (providing LLM training data in exchange for better search ranking).

5. Reddit advertising: triple appeal

Speaking of search marketing, Reddit thinks there are 3 main drivers of advertising effectiveness on the platform:

Context
“Reddit [is] a unique platform for advertisers due to our intentional, authentic, trusted nature and our strength in contextual and interest-based advertising …”
Search
“Whether users come to Reddit through a third-party search engine or if they initiate their search on Reddit, our users often have high intent …”
Recommendations
“Every second an average of two users asked for a recommendation, each yielding an average of 14 personalized responses.”

It will be interesting to see if Reddit can convert #2 and #3 into higher multiples of revenue, since the platform isn’t generally the first stop on a search journey.

6. Long sessions

One good thing about future potential advertising opportunities is that people who use Reddit spend a long time on Reddit. And, the longer they’ve been active on Reddit, the longer their individual sessions become.

New user: 20 minutes/day
5-year user: 35 minutes/day
7-year user: 45 minutes/day

7. Reddit is pivoting towards video

Reddit is increasingly seeing video usage as the TikTok-ization of social and algorithmic media continues, and that should create a video advertising opportunity on the platform.

“In December 2023, we experienced approximately 35% growth in the number of videos watched for 10 seconds or more and an approximately 16% increase in daily active video viewers compared to December 2022.”

Currently, there are no pre-roll or mid-roll ads in videos on Reddit.

Expect that to change in 2024 or 2025.

8. Using AI to boosting engagement

Reddit is using AI to understand what drives user engagement and to re-engineer what posts it shows.

The result: almost a third more engagement.

“We re-trained our New Home Feed ranking with significantly more data and user signals. In the three months ended December 31, 2023 compared to the three months ended June 30, 2023, we observed an increase of over 30% in “Good Visits,” defined as a user consuming a post for more than 30 seconds.”

9. Reddit has a relatively unique audience

Some advertising channels provide the opportunity to connect with people you can also easily get via other networks, and are therefore less valuable. In contrast, Reddit thinks it’s a fairly unique platform for finding prospects, customers, or users that you can’t get elsewhere.

When the company looked at Reddit users’ participation on other social networks:

32% were not active on Facebook
37% were not active on Instagram
73% were not active on Snapchat
41% were not active on TikTok
53% were not active on X

Some of those stats are likely easy to achieve for other networks, such as the one about X, or former Twitter. But the Reddit audience is definitely different than the TikTok or Snapchat audience.

10. Reddit has a lot of first-party data

Like most major platforms, Reddit enjoys a huge trove of first-party content. Redditors accessing that content build a massive amount of first-party data about likes, interests, preferences, and more.

100,000 subreddits
500 subreddits with more than 1 million members
Over 1 billion posts
Over 16 billion comments

That offers a significant opportunity in the era of privacy …

Reddit says it is a privacy-first platform, unlike other social networks that tracks user activity all over the web or mobile apps.

“The foundation of our ad performance is based on context and interest instead of tracking users based on personally identifiable information. This is unique in the digital advertising marketplace; our lack of reliance on third-party data makes our offering more resilient to the loss of signal that other platforms rely upon as well as forthcoming changes to the internet ecosystem.”

The pitch to advertisers here is that Reddit’s trove of first-party data will allow it to target well, and that ability won’t degrade due to the changing privacy landscape.

12. Multiple possible advertiser objectives

For current advertising opportunities, Reddit says advertisers can aim for multiple objectives in ad campaigns:

Video view reach
View view impressions
Specific down-stream actions
- App installs
- Midstream clicks
- Conversions

All of that is fairly standard. But more is coming …

13. New ad types coming on Reddit

Reddit currently only offers ad placements in the standard feed. Potential new ad placements in the post-IPO period that the company is already looking at include:

Ads in comment threads
Ads in search results
Ads in videos

This is interesting. As a long-time Reddit user, I know that a significant percentage of user time is spent in comments. Being able to monetize that better would be big. Also, Reddit is looking to create uniquely Reddit-type ads, which could be interesting:

“We plan to expand our ad formats in ways that allow advertisers to creatively talk to communities and share more information (e.g., product-level creative; games).”

14. New ad measurement capabilities coming

To boost ARPU, Reddit needs a better and more optimizable ad experience. To do that, Reddit needs to boost measurability of the ads on its platform.

Things Reddit is looking at include:

More tools for conversion tracking
- Including a Conversion API
On-property-brand and conversion-lift testing
More measurement pixel, toolkit adoption, and data capture options

Getting a Conversion API is a big deal as third-party cookies go away and ATT/Privacy Sandbox dominates mobile. It’s increasingly popular for big platforms and big clients.

15. Better ad tools coming

Just like every other ad-funded platform, Reddit is looking to boost the quality and capability of the tools it provides for advertisers:

That probably includes automated optimization tools like Google App Campaigns and a decreased focus on manual optimization.

“Through easier onboarding, setup, campaign management, and optimization, we expect to scale our service model through diverse service channels matched to client needs – from managed service models, to hybrid, to enabling advertisers to activate with little to no sales team assistance (i.e., unmanaged). This simplifies core manual optimization tasks needed for more outcomes and better performance.”

We’ll have to see how this goes. TikTok in particular has demonstrated how improving ad tools year-by-year makes it easier for advertisers to spend on the platform. Can Reddit duplicate this feat?

16. Large client and agency focus

Every platform wants the biggest spenders. Reddit will need them post-IPO to grow …

“We are also deepening our relationships with large agencies through solutions that enable enterprise operations across large clients.”

17. More $$$

This one’s not in the Reddit prospectus, but one of the impacts of going public successfully is raising a significant amount of capital which can then be used to help grow the business.

If Reddit deploys it to both grow its user base and its ad experiences and tooling, that could kickstart better opportunities for advertisers on the platform.

AI marketing: 99% of marketers using AI tools on a daily basis

A new survey of 1,200 marketers in the U.S., UK, Netherlands, and Germany suggests that almost every single marketer uses AI every single day. 99% use AI in some way every day, while 91% are using AI for their jobs daily. And 75% of marketers are optimistic that AI marketing tools will create new jobs as well as unlock new opportunities for growth.

Interestingly, generative AI, the noisiest and most-hyped application of artificial intelligence at the moment, is the least valued. 57% say that AI marketing tools enhance optimization, 53% say automation is the best use, and 50% look to AI marketing tools for predictive analytics.

49% say that generative AI tools enhance their working lives.

But the study, commissioned by Iterable, suggests there are still challenges.

Essentially half of marketers find AI intimidating, and 54% say the existence of AI marketing tools is heightening expectations from managers. And most feel they don’t have all the skills and knowledge they need to use AI effectively.

49%: AI is intimidating
54%: AI increases expectations
89%: AI requires new skills, which is somewhat concerning
29%: AI requires new skills, which is extremely concerning

Not surprisingly, less than half of marketers have been trained on AI marketing skills.

That fully accords with my personal experience, which is based on personal dabbling with OpenAI, Creative Diffusion, MidJourney, Dall-E, and multiple other tools, but no formal training. (Of course, so many of the new AI tools have become available so recently that it’s almost impossible for training developers and programs to keep pace.)

AI marketing: what’s happening?

There’s obviously a lot going on in generative AI and marketing. Here’s just a few of the recent developments that we’ve talked about on the Singular blog:

AI marketing and ROI

One place where there isn’t clarity among marketers, however, is whether AI marketing tools are generating a positive return on investment. Or how they will do so in the future.

I’d assume that increased efficiency in what you’re already doing and increased capacity to do more things than you previously could are both indicative of positive ROI, but the survey focused on where AI will most likely benefit marketing organizations.

50% say ROI will come from better customer service — think users or players in a mobile app — while 47% say more effective analytics will be where AI marketing tools generate ROI. Slightly lower numbers see other areas of analytics as top priorities as well: predictive analytics for revenue and forecasting.

What marketers want from AI

According to the 1,200 marketers surveyed, 39% of marketers want AI marketing tools to enhance their creativity. 37% want AI to do part of their jobs so they have “more free time for fulfilling tasks,” and 37% want to feel tech savvy.

Almost a third are looking for AI to reduce their stress levels as well.

What pretty much everyone agrees is that we haven’t tapped AI’s full potential yet.

“While many marketers have embraced AI, they haven’t yet tapped its full potential. AI offers an incredible opportunity to liberate marketers from operational minutiae and tasks like data analysis and content creation,” said Adriana Gil Miner, Chief Marketing Officer of Iterable. “This frees them up to focus on creativity and crafting unique experiences that bring joy to customers. AI isn’t just about automation; it’s about elevation, unleashing creativity, and amplifying brand voices.

I buy some of that, but not all of it.

Muddling in the data sometimes feels like drudgery (ok, almost always) but often brings eureka! moments when you find something unexpected. AI marketing tools can do that too, but not always. And you do have to double-check AI’s answers in data as well as text, since AI hallucinations are not yet a thing of the past.

Also, for writing — yeah, that thing I’m doing right now — AI-created content can be pretty basic, a bit meh, and fairly surface. That said, it can be a great starting point for the addition of human insights, creativity, and tone.

Miner agrees:

“The future of marketing lies not in replacing human ingenuity, but in using AI to empower it.”

At least, that’s what I’m telling the Terminator. And any AI marketing tools I use.

And myself, of course.

SKAN 4 network adoption update: Meta blasts off (again)

When will the mobile adtech ecosystem fully support SKAN 4? It might just be sooner than we’ve come to think, as SKAN 4 network adoption came within kissing distance of 50% last week. The big news: Meta is back to play.

Appropriately enough, the SKAN 4 high-water mark was on Valentine’s Day.

It has been so long since SKAN 4 was released on October 24, 2022. That’s 484 days ago, and we still haven’t seen SKAN 4 network adoption hit the 50% mark and keep growing. But we came close on February 14, 2024, when 43% of the SKAdNetwork postbacks received by Singular were SKAN 4, and 57% were SKAN 3.

SKAdNetwork postbacks 2/14/2024: 43% SKAN 4, 57% SKAN 3

That’s kind of a big deal. It’s the closest I’ve ever seen SKAN 4 get to a majority of iOS postbacks. Plus, there was yet another pleasant surprise when I checked the SKAN 4 adoption dashboard this morning: a Meta explosion.

SKAN 4 network adoption: steady progress

I’ll get to the Meta explosion in a second, but first we nearly have a SKAN 4 record in Reddit: almost 100% percent SKAN 4 postbacks. Over the past 7 days, the postbacks from Reddit hit the 98% mark: extremely impressive.

As of this week, the leading networks for SKAN 4 adoption are:

Reddit: 98%
The Trade Desk: 87%
Dataseat: 84%
Unity: 81%
Jampp: 78%
Twitter: 76%
Smadex: 68%
Mintegral: 68%
Persona.ly: 67%
Remerge: 62%
Appier: 59%
AppLovin: 50%
Moloco: 46%
Liftoff: 45%
Meta: 42%
Google: 22%

Getting a SKAN 4 postback: device matters

As a reminder, here’s what it takes to get a SKAN 4 postback: you need an iOS device running 16.1 or higher, and the relevant ad network needs to encode a SKAN 4 click. What that means is that getting to 100% SKAN 4 is probably not going to happen for a long time.

One big reason has nothing to do with SKAN 4 network adoption and everything to do with iOS system updates on older devices. According to data I downloaded from Statcounter, 18.43% of iOS devices are running pre iOS 16.1 operating systems as of January 2024.

In 2021 Apple said there were more than 1 billion iPhones in use. In February of 2023, Apple said it has more than 2 billion active devices globally, which includes products such as Apple Watches and Macs. And on February 1 of this year, CEO Tim Cook said that Apple’s “installed base of active devices has now surpassed 2.2 billion.”

Most of those are likely to be iPhones. If 1.5 billion of them actually are, then 276 million iPhones are not eligible to issue SKAN 4 postbacks.

Of course, we can debate how much that matters: most people with old devices might not be actively adding new apps. That’s true, but while many with older phones are likely to be adults or seniors, some of the older devices are hand-me-downs in the pockets of kids and teens. And young people are avid downloaders of new apps.

SKAN 4 network adoption and Meta

Meta has been a big part of the SKAN 4 network adoption story.

SKAN 4 adoption hit a high-water mark of 32% in August of 2023 before the SKAN 4 CV reset bug hit. That had a MAJOR impact on Meta, which had jumped from a tiny percentage of SKAN 4 postbacks all the way to majority SKAN 4: 52% SKAN 4 postbacks in July of 2023. After the bug, all that SKAN 4 exuberance evaporated, and Meta dropped back down to single digit of SKAN 4 postback percentages.

Now it’s February 2024. That traumatic experience behind Meta, it looks like the company could be prepped to dive in again.

Right now, Meta is at 42% SKAN 4 postbacks: a huge surge from the sub-10% range it had been in for months.

The big jump actually started very quickly in late January:

On January 24, someone flipped a switch at Meta. On January 27, SKAN 4 postbacks hit the 41% mark. On January 31, they peaked at 49%, after which they’ve jumped around a little, settling at 42% yesterday.

This is a major move, given that Meta is a major platform: one of the 3 most important companies globally for the mobile app install ads market. It’s a sign of renewed confidence in SKAN 4, and a willingness to adopt Apple’s technology for attribution despite the fact that Meta has developed its own new modeled measurement capabilities.

SKAN 4 adoption: good for marketers

Ultimately, more networks adopting SKAN 4 is good for marketers. It’s more data for longer periods than SKAN 3, and it’s more privacy-safe than former alternatives.

In addition, seeing more SKAN 4 network adoption will hopefully simplify attribution for app install campaigns. While the world is never going to get as simple as it was in pre-ATT days for iOS attribution, forever muddling between SKAN 3 and SKAN 4 worlds is not an ideal state.

If you’re looking to make the jump, there’s help available. Check out the Singular SKAN 4 strategy guide, which is all about how to transition from SKAN 3 to SKAN 4.

Plus, you can always check industry SKAN 4 adoption right here.

Great new book >> Game Analytics: Retention and monetization in free-to-play mobile games

Ever wish someone had written the book on everything you need to know to make mobile app businesses run profitably? Wish no more … it has been done. I recently chatted with software engineer and computer scientist Russell Ovans about his new book: Game Analytics: Retention and monetization in free-to-play mobile games, currently available on Amazon.

It’s a great primer for anyone new to the industry, and deep enough to offer even veterans deep insights into mobile game analytics.

Click play, then keep scrolling:

Falling into game analytics

The best careers are accidental. Ovans fell into social gaming in the Farmville era of games on Facebook after a venture into making day trading software pivoted unexpectedly into building a Family Feud app that went massively viral. (Yes: not all pivots are obvious!)

But the timing was … interesting.

“Facebook was the biggest gaming platform in the world,” Ovans said. “And they didn’t want to be.”

Ovans ended up selling that company to Real Networks, the early pioneer in streaming, and went off to teach at a university, start a brewery, and find other ways to light a stack of cash on fire. But years later he had a chance to join East Side Games, makers of Star Trek, The Office, and Trailer Park Boys games, as director of analytics.

One challenge: now everything in gaming and game analytics was different. He read Eric Seufert’s Freemium Economics, learning from it, but wanted more detail about how to actually do everything. And that was the genesis of Game Analytics: Retention and monetization in free-to-play mobile games.

“My book is kind of like the 300-page addendum to Freemium Economics that says, oh, by the way, this is how you calculate and build a retention curve, which is kind of the foundational piece, right?” says Ovans. “And then from there you can look at the flip side, which is the monetization curve, and from that, the monetization curve, you can then predict ROAS from early signals and and away you go, you’re off to the races.”

The Game Analytics book itself

The book is super-comprehensive and includes code samples, SQL, visuals in Tableau, example tables of data and much more to make it a super hands-on manual to game analytics, monetization, and testing.

Typical chapters include:

Retention metrics
Monetization metrics
Dashboards
The retention curve
Predicting DAU
The monetization curve
A/B testing and analytics
Optimized pricing
Predicting ROAS from early signals
And much, much more …

All of it comes with code samples and walks you through how to actually do all the things game analytics analysts need to do. And it also comes with the deep insights that only those who have been there and done that — and thought deeply about it, and brought a significantly analytical and scientific approach to it — can deliver.

Take A/B testing, for example.

A/B testing is something that everyone tells you to do and everyone knows is a good idea, but much fewer actually know how to do properly to generate useful results that will have a positive impact.

“A lot of people just don’t know what they’re doing,” Ovans says. “There’s a real deficit in our industry about how to do it correctly and in particular, what kind of tests you can actually do in a reasonable amount of time and have enough power in the calculation. So I go into great detail about how, before you run a test, what it is exactly you’re measuring, what’s the difference that you’re looking to detect as being significant, and thus these are the number of people that need to be in your test and control group in order to be reasonably sure.”

Ovans speaks from experience.

At one point he ran A/B tests on introducing banners ads into Trailer Park Boys. The initial test said adding the ads would not impact churn and retention, so they added the ad units. Unfortunately, the roll-out was not smooth and they had to turn it off. 6 months later Ovans re-ran the tests — after learning more about statistics and A/B testing — and determined that his initial tests had not included enough players in the sample size to be significant.

The new tests concluded rather definitively that Trailer Park Boys should not add banner ads: they would impact churn. From failure came wisdom … and someone else’s expensive lessons are the cheapest way to learn.

Other learnings: pricing in-app purchases

The book isn’t just about game analytics. It’s also full of practical insights on key things like pricing.

One example: a chapter that gives an overview of iOS and Android pricing for in-app purchases. It turns out that letting Google or Apple just morph your IAP pricing for the U.S. into currency converted values for other countries is a big mistake.

The key insight here: not all markets conform to normalized exchange rates, which will affect potential revenues. Mexico became profitable for one of Ovan’s games after he learned this lesson and reduced pricing to levels that were acceptable in the region.

Rather than straight conversions, you need to take into account purchasing power: how many hours of labor are necessary to buy a particular commodity. Another factor: Value-added taxes, which in many countries are pre-built into prices, unlike the U.S. or Canada.

And yet another gotcha: while the iOS App Store will adjust your pricing over time as currency conversions change, Google Play will not. The result over time can become quite significant, and it’ll have a major impact on your in-game economy and therefore profitability.

Highly recommended

There are plenty of uses for a book like this. One is to give it to the newbies on the team to get them up to speed. Another is to discreetly check on all the stuff that your imposter syndrome tells you that you ought to already know but somehow missed. And yet another is to use it as a resource to quickly find a method or code snippet that will come in handy.

I gotta say: I recommend Ovan’s books for all those purposes.