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.
I have never thought I needed to know more about Madrid, or SKAdNetwork, or why it is that gummy bears seem to accumulate in my cat’s sleeping cave, grabbed my phone, opened TikTok, and searched for the answer. That is because I am not 17. Or 23. But for younger people, TikTok is the new Google.
At least according to Jennifer Sudo, managing partner at M&C Saatchi Performance. She recently surveyed 1,000 TikTok users in the U.S. to learn more about how they use TikTok, whether they watch ads, and how brands can reach them.
With 2 billion downloads and well over a billion monthly active users, TikTok is a massive entertainment platform. But it’s much more than that.
About a quarter of US adults under 30 now regularly get news on TikTok, according to the Pew Research Center, and anecdotally from at least one of my kids, TikTok — along with Instagram — are almost the sole sources of news for teens and younger adults. Sudo’s own survey suggests 74% of all TikTok users visit TikTok specifically to learn about the latest news, while 35% say it’s their primary or only news source.
But that’s not all. TikTok isn’t just the new CNN.
TikTok is also the new Google.
“Especially with the younger generations, they’re using TikTok more now than Google to search for content,” Sudo says. “With this new culture of short form video it’s just a lot easier to get information within these short, snackable videos versus going to the website and having to read through long blogs and seeing display banners all over … it’s just so much easier to just get to the point.”
In fact, according to her research, more than half of TikTok users prefer to search on TikTok for things they want, or places they are going.
62% of TikTok users say they are most likely to discover new things on the platform.
Only 8% say they primarily use Google.
That’s potentially problematic for Google, but also for other sites like movie and entertainment events sites, or travel sites like TripAdvisor. If you’re going to a new city, Sudo says, you can simply go to TikTok and easily find the top 5 things to do or places to visit … and thanks to the very nature of TikTok, you get a great 30-60 second preview of what to expect when you get there.
“I’ve done it myself and I find it to be very useful,” she says. “And I think also because I’m a visual person, I would prefer that over seeing maybe pixelated photos on Google … it’s a better experience for some people.”
It doesn’t take a lot of imagination to expand that to makeup, shoes, apparel, perhaps even the best phone to buy or the best restaurants to visit.
What can brands do?
Build a TikTok strategy using great non-ad-like videos (see below for more on this) and hashtag them. Immediate views are nice, but long-tail views when people use TikTok as a search engine are more likely to be high intent and likely to convert.
TikTok is the new Amazon?
If TikTok is the new Google, can it also be the new Amazon? Clearly that’s a stretch, but given that TikTok is owned by Chinese-based ByteDance and China is the home of live commerce, there’s some intriguing potential here.
According to Sudo’s research, 92% of TikTok users have either made a purchase based on an ad they’ve seen on the platform, or are open to doing so.
More than half — 56% — already have. Another 36% say they haven’t yet, but they’re open to doing so. Only 8% aren’t interested.
“I can see it evolving in a way similar to what HSN or QVC was in the nineties, 2000s, and how people would just tune in because they were getting specific deals on products,” Sudo says. “You can bundle things and offer a discount to people, which I think is appealing.”
Given that Insider predicts that American adults will spend almost 20% of their social media time on TikTok in 2024, that’s kind of a big deal. And, if TikTok goes all-in on infrastructure to not only stimulate demand but also fulfill it on-platform, it’s something that not only social and entertainment platforms such as Facebook and Snap need to pay attention to, it’s also something that Amazon needs to be aware of.
The right way to make TikTok ads is to not make ads
Can you imagine an ad agency telling you not to make ads?
Watch the video above and you won’t have to.
“The biggest thing that we tell our clients is to not produce ads,” Sudo says. “Yes, we’re promoting your products and services, but don’t blatantly just promote them … it’s too self-serving: it is not going to resonate with people.”
There’s enough adblindness everywhere that obvious ads get skipped. There’s also enough influencer savvy out there that obvious shills for products that don’t fit get mocked. The magic and the art and the science of modern marketing is to make craft and place promotion that people enjoy, can engage with, and therefore has the opportunity to be persuasive.
But it’s also about where people are in the buying process.
As Sudo says, you can’t just run an ad and expect people to convert.
“You also have to consider where in the funnel they are,” she adds. “And if you need to add content on the platform that touches upon all of those different areas, then I think you’ll have more success … whether it’s immediately or in the future, just by offering up that content.”
Which means … marketing is more than performance advertising
I’m really running the risk of speaking heresy here, but marketing is more than performance advertising.
Yes, performance always matters. Yes, brand is performance and performance is brand, when you get right down to it.
But if you only run performance ads that are designed to satisfy existing demand, you’re massively limiting your potential market. Truly innovative products and services and apps don’t necessarily have a market yet, because we haven’t seen them yet. We don’t yet know that we want them, that we need them, that our lives are incomplete without them.
🙂
So building a marketing and building demand is something that innovative brands understand. And that means operating at various levels of the buying funnel, from awareness to consideration to, yes, action: purchase, sign-up, install … you name it.
Watch or listen to the entire episode for more
Watch or listen to the entire episode to get more insight, including how sometimes TikTok can make the most mundane products go viral, insight on the art of creating content with influencers on TikTok, and how the process of finding influencers to partner with on TikTok — while somewhat solved via influencer marketing platforms — just got harder.
The result is the top ad networks globally, for gaming publishers, for brands, for retention, for return on investment, and — where we can — for regions like APAC, EMEA, North America, and South America. Out of the literally thousands of marketing platforms that are integrated with Singular, we isolated 30 premium partners that made the grade in at least one category. Those 30 premium partners occupy all of the 214 available slots in our various ranking lists, and the 2023 ROI Index reveals which ones achieved the highest number of rankings.
The top 15 all-round networks: all geos, all verticals
Ad networks that grew the most from 2021 to 2022
Marketing partners that gained the most share over the course of the last 12 months
Where Apple Search Ads — which does not use SKAdNetwork for attribution — ranks in comparison to the other ad networks
There are some surprises in this year’s ROI Index. For one, Meta very publicly had challenges adapting to the new measurement realities on iOS, but — very much in line with the company’s recent financial performance — we find that there’s some massive positives lately. Also, several relatively tiny companies, including Moloco, Mistplay, Aarki, and Blind Ferret punch well above their weight class in delivering mobile marketing performance. One of them even tied with Meta and Google and AppLovin (!!!) in a never-before-seen 4-way tie for the most rankings in the 2023 ROI Index.
您可以在 Singular 2023 ROI Index 中期待以下亮点:
全球前15名综合渠道:所有地区,所有垂直领域
从2021年到2022年增长最快的广告渠道
在过去12个月中市场份额增长最多的营销合作伙伴
苹果搜索广告(不使用 SKAdNetwork 进行归因)与其他广告渠道的排名比较
今年的 ROI Index 中有一些令人惊喜的发现。首先,Meta 公开表示在适应新的ios测量方面存在挑战,但与该公司近期的财务表现非常一致,Singular发现最近有一些巨大的积极变化。此外,包括 Moloco、Mistplay、Aarki 和 Blind Ferret 等一些规模相对小的公司,在提供移动营销效果方面表现出了远超他们体量的能力。其中一个公司甚至与 Meta、Google 和 AppLovin(!!!)并列在 2023 ROI Index 中排名最高,形成了前所未见的排名局面。
Mobile advertising in 2023: a preview
We also hit some of the major changes happening in the mobile advertising space for 2023, including:
Massive and ongoing measurement turmoil
iOS ad spend recovery, rebound, and (maybe even) a boomerang effect
What to expect for Android ad spend in late 2023, early 2024
Growth rates in mobile ad spend for 2023 … including some shrinkage
Ad spend allocation shifts from mobile to CTV and retail media
Ongoing challenges with retargeting
Finally, we end the ROI Index with key clues to the future of marketing measurement: how brands and apps will continue to be able to run performant data-driven advertising absent granular, deterministic last-click identifiers, and 4 advertiser imperatives in an age of change.
Today we’re officially launching the Singular ROI Index 2023 to showcase the best ad networks of the emerging era of privacy. It’s the first dynamic Singular ROI Index, allowing you to slice and dice the data by platform, region, vertical, and measurement type, and you can access it right here, right now.
Why does it matter?
Everyone knows advertising is getting harder
Everyone knows “tracking” is going away
Everyone knows marketing measurement is getting tougher
So the key question for advertisers is this: which ad networks, platforms, and partners in the emerging privacy era of SKAN on iOS and (soon) Privacy Sandbox on Android will still be able to help growth marketers drive performance-oriented campaigns?
Data in the ROI Index
To answer that question, we analyzed hundreds of gigabytes of data representing:
Trillions of ad impressions
Over 100 billion clicks
Over $10 billion in ad spend
Billions of app installs
The result is the top ad networks globally, for gaming publishers, for brands, for retention, for return on investment, and — where we can — for regions like APAC, EMEA, North America, and South America. Out of the literally thousands of marketing platforms that are integrated with Singular, we isolated 30 premium partners that made the grade in at least one category. Those 30 premium partners occupy all of the 214 available slots in our various ranking lists, and the 2023 ROI Index reveals which ones achieved the highest number of rankings.
What you can expect in Singular’s 2023 ROI Index
We also provide highlights for:
The top 15 all-round networks: all geos, all verticals
Ad networks that grew the most from 2021 to 2022
Marketing partners that gained the most share over the course of the last 12 months
Where Apple Search Ads — which does not use SKAdNetwork for attribution — ranks in comparison to the other ad networks
There are some surprises in this year’s ROI Index. For one, Meta very publicly had challenges adapting to the new measurement realities on iOS, but — very much in line with the company’s recent financial performance — we find that there’s some massive positives lately. Also, several relatively tiny companies, including Moloco, Mistplay, Aarki, and Blind Ferret punch well above their weight class in delivering mobile marketing performance. One of them even tied with Meta and Google and AppLovin (!!!) in a never-before-seen 4-way tie for the most rankings in the 2023 ROI Index.
Mobile advertising in 2023: a preview
We also hit some of the major changes happening in the mobile advertising space for 2023, including:
Massive and ongoing measurement turmoil
iOS ad spend recovery, rebound, and (maybe even) a boomerang effect
What to expect for Android ad spend in late 2023, early 2024
Growth rates in mobile ad spend for 2023 … including some shrinkage
Ad spend allocation shifts from mobile to CTV and retail media
Ongoing challenges with retargeting
Finally, we end the ROI Index with key clues to the future of marketing measurement: how brands and apps will continue to be able to run performant data-driven advertising absent granular, deterministic last-click identifiers, and 4 advertiser imperatives in an age of change.
Multiple mobile marketing experts have told me in the past few weeks that fewer than 30% of the community truly understands how to use SKAdNetwork as the foundation of high-performance growth marketing. And now we’re beginning to transition from SKAN 3 to SKAN 4: a more capable but also much more complex beast.
What data you can expect in your Singular dashboard
Why you need the SKAN 4 transition guide
There is no magic bullet coming that will bring back the IDFA. Your opt-in rate is not likely to be higher than 20%. Using fingerprinting presents risks for your app, isn’t deterministic, is likely to become less and less useful as Apple shuts down data leakage from mobile requests, and only works for a small percentage of partners anyways, not including the big self-attribution networks.
Like it or not, privacy is here to stay.
Certainly on iOS, and soon on Android.
So the key is to get good at conversion models that return useful data, at advertising strategies that maximize crowd anonymity and therefore data delivery, and use tools like Singular’s SKAN Advanced Analytics that provide hybrid measurement capabilities to maximize your ability to optimize campaigns, calculate LTV and ROAS, model missing data, and assemble missing cohorts.
In other words, lean in to the changes.
What you’ll find in the new SKAN 4 transition guide from Singular
In this free guide, you’ll find:
5 major updates in the SKAN 3 to SKAN 4 transition
6 things to do to prepare for transitioning from SKAN 3 to SKAN 4
4 significant strategic decisions to make when building your SKAN 4 plan
And, a quick overview of the data you can expect from SKAN 4
You’ll also get the inside track on how to maximize data return from SKAdNetwork in the new era of Crowd Anonymity, which replaces Privacy Thresholds. You’ll get some insight on how to use each of the 3 potential postbacks you can get from SKAN 4, and advice on how to correlate coarse conversion models with fine conversion models so that whatever data you get back will be coherent and make sense.
You’ll still need to experiment with conversion models to find the right one that works for you, of course. And you’ll be able to choose from revenue models, ad monetization models, combined revenue models, conversion events models, engagement models, funnel models, and mixed models, including conversion events and revenue, engagement and revenue, and funnel and revenue. (Note: it may take some time for all models to be made SKAN 4 compatible.)
Download it to accelerate your transition and ability to succeed at iOS mobile marketing. But you might need more help, and that’s completely fine. Schedule some time with an associate on our team to get personalized insight for your specific situation, vertical, and app. Our goal is to provide everything you need to succeed.
Bad ads are killing the mobile advertising industry.
Actually, let me clarify. It’s not the ads. Often a video ad is fun, even interesting. Many times a playable ad has some elements of enjoyment. The mobile ads don’t suck, per se. But what really does suck is the mobile ad units: the infrastructure around the ads that creates a bad advertising user experience.
Last night.
In my favorite mobile game.
“Watch this ad to get a free reward.”
OK … fine.
Tap.
Ugggghhh … that was a mistake.
First there’s the video. 20 seconds if you’re lucky. 30 seconds most commonly, sometimes 45 second videos now. Then there’s the mini playable ad that follows the video. On your first tap to play the playable, however, it doesn’t play. Rather, the mobile ad unit “misinterprets” my tap to play the playable ad as an intention to download the app and throws up an SKOverlay screen with a button to download the app. Tap away from the button to dismiss it and get back to the playable. Play it for a few moments, waiting for the X to get out of the ad. Occasionally it shows up quickly. Sometimes it shows up, but with a progress circle that needs to complete a circuit of the X before it’s clickable. Sometimes it takes a while to show up, while my optimistic but foolishly early taps merely summon additional SKOverlay screens. Sometimes SKOverlay just shows up absent any human taps. Sometimes the ad crashes the game — happened to me last week — and you don’t get the reward you’ve suffered for. Sometimes there’s a continue button that you hope continues the fun little game you’re playing, but actually halts it and dumps you into an app store experience. Usually, after a long time, the X is clickable, if you can fit your thumb in that tiny space at the extreme top right corner of your screen. Miss, and SKOverlay comes right back up like that “buddy” at the bar who’s trying to borrow money from you. Better not have a big phone case with thick or high edges, or you’ll need a stylus or a pinky or a small-handed friend to get the X. Finally you get the X, get your reward, and get back to your game.
“Fix your effing X button,” Adam Jaffe, founder and CEO of Mega Studio recently wrote. “This is why people hate ads in games. Sure it can make a bit of extra money, but the UX is so unbelievably horrible that it’s often not worth it for the game dev in terms of retention.”
If the people in the industry who benefit from ad monetization are fed up with the mobile ad experience, how must the users, players, and customers feel?
How long can the mobile advertising industry keep enraging the people it depends on for its very existence?
It’s the tragedy of the mobile advertising commons
The tragedy of the traditional commons is overgrazing on public land: each farmer benefits individually by adding more of his or her cows to the shared grasslands, but each additional resource-consuming animal added to the aggregated herd also decreases the overall value to the community by exhausting a shared resource.
In mobile advertising, each individual ad network benefits by being increasingly more aggressive at capturing attention and racking up stats (like click-through rate by spawning a SKOverlay). But the industry as a whole suffers from the mobile ads arms race we’re currently seeing.
And since the primary victim is users — the people advertisers want to reach — the mobile advertising ecosystem is engaging in a fool’s game of mutual assured destruction.
“The click through arms race is not slowing down at all,” Tomas Yacachury, senior partnerships lead at Kayzen, said recently on LinkedIn. “When do you think we will reach a détente? 50% CTR? Unskippable ads? And how much will the user experience suffer in the process?”
Yacachury noted that he recently received ads from an ad network saying they’ve “reduced the exit X sizing to keep users more engaged with your ad content.”
The result: click-through rates jumped through the roof.
What used to be 2-5% CTR is now hitting 10%, 15%, or even 24%. I’ve personally endured rewarded ad units that spawned 3 to 5 individual SKOverlay takeovers.
Clickthrough rates on the rise, via Tomas Yacachury
Let’s be honest here. Reducing the X sizing or repeatedly opening up a download interface is not actually keeping users more engaged with ad content. It’s locking them in a mobile ad jail cell against their will, where the only escape is force-quitting their game and losing both current progress and promised reward.
This should not be a shock to anyone reading this post. Since everyone in the industry is a user as well as a brand, or advertiser, or measurement provider, we all personally know exactly what that feels like (not good) and we know exactly what that translates to (anger).
Plus, CTR is starting to be a completely meaningless metric, as INCRMTAL founder and CEO Maor Sadra recently said in response to Jaffe’s post:
“‘This user really loved this ad. Look at how many times they clicked it? Let’s target them with a lot more ads now,’ said every optimization algorithm of every ad network that uses SKAD overlay …”
Exactly …
Bad ads: the mobile ad industry is playing with fire
The problem is not only that we’re destroying a once-useful metric in CTR and ruining a once-mutually-beneficial ad unit, the rewarded ad.
The problem is also this user anger that we’re creating.
That anger will never be directed at the ad network, which is largely though not completely invisible in the mobile ad experience. Instead, that anger is most likely either going to be directed to the app in which the ad unit was shown, or the app that is being advertised.
The first is bad for publishers; the second is bad for advertisers.
And since most in the mobile industry are both, it’s doubly bad for all.
Plus, it’s much more significant than specific user anger at a specific ad, which is bad for specific publishers and specific advertisers. It’s becoming a generalized anger and general annoyance with ads, which is bad for the entire ecosystem. The great thing about the commons is that it’s a general resource available to all for the good of all.
Destroy it, and that value disappears.
Which then becomes a major industry-wide problem.
“As someone who leads a gaming ad network, the sentiment expressed here by creators makes me sad,” Steve Webb, VP of Revenue – Advertising for Unity said in response to Jaffe’s post. “It isn’t sustainable for the industry and reminds me of when web advertising had to fix pop-ups/browser takeovers. I’m not going to single any network out, we’ve all rendered experiences that have undermined game play.”
The industry is already adapting, of course.
Public anger at advertising is already so bad that some app publishers are weaponizing it. Ads for Dream Games’ app Royal Match, for example, promise “no ads.” More power to them, but it makes for a fairly meta experience:
an advertiser
running an ad
in an app
that promises another app
with no ads …
And of course, that’s not a viable solution for every app.
And on the metrics side, advertisers have been pushing metrics that they care about deeper down the funnel for years, looking to in-app first-party-measurable actions such as engagement and revenue. That’s going to accelerate, and that’s exactly what Singular helps measure with next-generation mobile attribution and SKAN Advanced Analytics.
But there’s still huge value in upper funnel metrics such as clickthrough rates and watch time and actions taken during playable ads. Knowing what resonates with people even if it’s prior to any in-app behavior can provide relevant and helpful insight to mobile advertisers trying to hit the right note to go viral.
It’s time for publishers and advertisers to demand better
Most ad networks are going to do whatever they can to look better to their customers: advertisers.
And let’s be honest: ad networks are essentially forced to do this. If they don’t adopt tactics that maximize available metrics of engagement and action, their metrics will look worse in comparison to competing ad networks. And that means less-savvy ad buyers will walk away for the bright lights and shiny metrics of perhaps less scrupulous ad partners. It’s literally an arms race on all sides.
This is why advertisers who are buying ads and publishers who are running ads need to demand better.
Because it’s in both of your best interest.
If you’re a publisher, you might think you’re getting more revenue when aggressive ads theoretically capture more user intent, or theoretically drive more user behavior. But what’s the cost in your own app, your own reputation, your own retention? And what’s the cost when users no longer agree to watch rewarded ads, knowing that they offer a horrible experience?
Since that cost is hard to measure or attribute to a specific ad, or a specific number of bad ads, it’s easy to gloss over the problem.
That would be a mistake.
Panel of one: bad ads have caused me to play certain games less. And I don’t think I’m alone in that.
If you’re an advertiser, you’re not doing your app any favors with ads running in aggressive ways that make potential users or customers angry. When I have a bad mobile ad experience for your app, I’m less likely to want it, like it, download it, use it. Bad ads are bad for apps that serve them, and apps that buy them.
Demand better ad experiences. You’re paying for them, after all.
Maybe part of the answer is more metrics, not fewer.
“If only SKOverlay had its own click telemetry and close button,” says Alasdair Presney, former director of product strategy for AdColony and now part of the Blockchain Game Alliance. “Then all ads would have everything they needed to function, courtesy of the Apple operating system.”
In other words, instead of just firing a click every time they appear, if marketers — and publishers — had access to metrics about how many times SKOverlayers were called and how many times they were dismissed, they’d know exactly how many times an ad network unnecessarily hijacked a user’s entire mobile screen.
Link that number to actual, verifiable installs driven, and you’ve got a pretty complete picture.
Fixing mobile ads
The problem is obvious to all, but there’s no silver bullet.
Smart advertisers need to demand ad units that treat potential customers and users and players with respect. Smart publishers need to demand ads that treat existing customers and users and players with respect.
Both need to ignore the tempting prospect of big numbers and fancy metrics that are ultimately both empty and destructive. And ad networks need to educate their customers about the ways CTR and last-click attribution can be manipulated.
I get it. I really, really get it. You want insights, you want actionable data, you want next best action, right now. You don’t really care about marketing ETL, or frankly, about any particular how. You know the why (growth) and you need the what (increase this, decrease that, change something else), but the mechanics of how is sort of someone else’s problem.
Engineers.
Analysts.
Data scientists (who sometimes feel like data janitors), and all the other truly technical people on whom we rely.
The purpose of this post is simple: to convince you that the how matters, that continuous marketing ETL is the how you want, and that choosing the right how is immensely, massively, hugely in your favor.
As in: makes your life better. Gets you the atta-boys. Saves your company money. Provides better-fresher-cleaner-more-accurate data. Saves you from mistakes. Spares you embarrassment. Wins you the promotion. And — probably even more importantly — makes your developers and data scientists not hate you. (This is good because it sucks to be hated, but it’s also good because people help people they don’t hate. And you need their help. You really, really do.)
Marketing ETL: 30 seconds on why it matters
As much as you’ve tried to avoid learning it, you sort of know by osmosis that ETL stands for Extract, Transform, and Load. It’s about taking data out of one place, doing something unsexy but apparently tremendously important to it, and putting it in another place.
Kinda simple, right?
Sure.
To get the best possible marketing results, you need a lot of data. Specifically, you need:
Input data: costs, campaigns
Delivery data: impressions, clicks, engagement
Conversion data: installs, conversions, and more
User level where legal/ethical/available
Aggregated data from multiple sources
That means you’re engaging with many different systems, including your own analytics and live ops solutions, SKAdNetwork, Privacy Sandbox on Android in the future, but especially ad and marketing partners: the ad networks you are spending money on.
And that’s not as easy as it might sound.
Why?
Here’s just one example that marketing ETL systems have to deal with: the tables and fields associated with Facebook Ads. In pointy-head language, it’s an ERD, an Entity Relationship Diagram. You don’t have to know a lot about data to see that there’s a lot of entities here with a lot of relationships (thanks FiveTran for the image):
Guess what?
That’s just one of your dozens of marketing partners. There’s also Google. There’s Twitter, TikTok, Snap, ironSource, Liftoff, Moloco, AppLovin, and thousands of other potential ad partners you might want to try. However, it’s not just about the number of marketing partners. In many cases, the schemas aren’t well-defined or documented. In others, you can’t even access them without special permission.
Getting all this data in your BI systems is hard. If you want all the raw data you can ingest to generate all the best insights on what’s working (or not), you need to centralize it, make it consumable, make it actionable, make it accessible.
Obviously, getting this data from a marketing analytics provider like Singular is much preferable to getting it all on your own. Because Singular has done all the work and made it easy. Because you need all of this even if you just want to fully test a new partner.
So ETL is the answer?
Sure … but not just any ETL. Because marketing data is not just any data.
Marketing data isn’t like other data, and traditional solutions won’t cut it. Here’s why …
Marketing data is hard. Really hard.
To get all the data you really need into your BI system via APIs or exports — even from Singular — your developers and data scientists must:
Build pipelines that use multiple endpoints to get aggregated data
Generate an endpoint and ingestion protocol for user-level data
Most marketing analytics providers, including mobile measurement partners, support daily exports, and most MMPs also make data available via real-time postbacks.
Exports are easiest, but if you choose exports, there’s always a chance they could be late or partial, because ad partners have issues (everyone has issues). If you choose postbacks, you have to ingest them. Postbacks are good because they are real-time, but they’re bad because if you have an issue (repeat: everyone has issues) and your systems hiccup and your endpoint goes down, you lose data and it never comes back. Oh, and by the way, building real-time solutions is expensive and hard. You need massive scale or the ability to dynamically scale, because one day nothing is happening and the next day Apple features you, your big paid campaign hits, and a TikTok influencer hypes you up.
But your systems have infinite scale and never go down, right?
Since developers and data scientists hate losing data — and so do you, because your job performance depends on accurate, timely, and complete data — they end up writing code for both exports and postbacks.
That sucks because it’s extra work.
For exports, you’ve got some manual set-up to start, after which you hope that it’s set-and-forget. But you’re still on the hook for loading the data, transforming it, and ensuring reliability.
And just to make APIs work, you have to:
Set up automated processes
Access data points
Download data
Load data
Transform data into your preferred formats
Save it locally
Here’s the bad news: all of that is the easy part.
Postbacks are harder, not only because they require real-time processing and 100% uptime, but also because there are so many new metrics and new APIs all the time, especially recently thanks to SKAdNetwork and — now in public beta — Privacy Sandbox on Android.
Every time something changes, data breaks for you as a marketer. Your BI breaks. Your models break. Your decision-making capability breaks. And now you have to go back to your developers and data scientists, get their attention, take them off whatever they’re working on right now, and beg them to change API calls, adjust ingestion code, rewrite transformation code.
Sorry to be the bearer of (even more) bad news, but one of the key reasons why marketing data is not like other data is that each adtech vendor’s schema is extremely prone to change:
New versions
New hierarchies
New metrics
New ad types
You know that mobile and adtech are two of the fastest-changing spaces. Put them together, and the impact is exponential. In a very real sense, you’re not just navigating a data maze, you’re a real-life Maze Runner navigating a moving puzzle. And making changes to a system based on APIs/exports/postbacks requires significant ongoing changes to code, new ways to JOIN data, and more developer time.
After you’ve done all this work and your data scientists and developers have quit in disgust but you’re happy because you have the data you need, you start to wonder: should I use the aggregated data in the exports, or the user-level data in the postbacks? Or should I combine them both in some fancy way to shine a light on the darker corners of my apps’ performance?
(And guess what: there’s no easy or straightforward way to make this happen: no guarantees that your real-time data connects easily with your export data. For example, joining SKAdNetwork data with marketing campaign data is non-trivial at best, extremely hard at worst.)
At this point, you may start questioning your life choices along with your data team.
And … we haven’t even talked about cost data yet, or campaign delivery data, or in-app events and engagements, all of which you really do need along with your aggregated clicks and conversion data and whatever user-level data is available from your partners.
So … what you really need is a fully managed marketing ETL which understands all the schemas from all your partners out of the box. One in which you can simply select the new fields, alter the destination table, and — hit the Easy button — you’re done. This hugely simplifies both your initial set-up tasks and massively reduces your on-going maintenance costs.
But you need to know: traditional ETL simply won’t cut it.
Because there’s another reason marketing data isn’t like other data …
But wait, it gets better (or, why you need marketing ETL)
All this time and for all this massive (and ongoing) scope of work, you’ve probably been making a completely understandable but also completely devastating mistake: assuming the data your API calls and exports are getting from your 37 different ad partners is correct.
Oops.
Much of the time, the data is not correct.
That’s not really your ad partners’ fault, and actually, not even really their problem. It’s a function of the real world.
If you build an API for getting data and are managing it, you will need to pick a time when you’ll trigger a call for the data. Not shockingly, you’d like to pick a time just before you will use it, because you want the freshest and most complete data. That all makes sense on your side, but it bears no relationship whatsoever to your partners’ plans, needs, technologies, and timetables.
There are many variables involved:
When the underlying data is populated
When each partner says August 31st turns into September 1st (is it at 9 PM your local time, 3 PM, or 1 AM for you?)
Is it US or U.S. or USA?
Is “adset” the same as “adgroup” … or not?
When Singular has finished pulling the data
When Singular has finished processing the data
When Singular has finished enriching the data
And even that is just the beginning. It’s also possible that:
There’s an error in the partner data
There’s fraud penalties and/or rebates that will eventually change the data
There are data delays from one or more regions which will be updated tomorrow
There are additional fees for services after the fact from one or more of your partners
Ad networks are going to continuously update their data based on their ongoing best sense of what reality is, and that means fraudulent publishers might be kicked out of a supply side platform, impacting clicks and conversions for days or weeks in the past. Or bugs might be discovered, impacting data reliability for weeks or months into the past. (That’s never happened before, right?) If they change something retroactively, you’ve got a problem. The data that you pulled was up-to-date and presumed accurate at the time you pulled it, but now reality looks different.
Not shockingly, coordination and remediation of all this is a massive and messy ongoing process and challenge.
Why you need continuous ETL, not just ETL
There is, of course, a way to fix this mess, avoid the hassle, and experience a degree of sanity and zen calm in your working life. (A degree. Don’t get greedy.) A way of getting all the data you need, ensuring it’s usable, and ensuring it gets where it’s needed.
Getting the data you need from a marketing analytics provider is good and important. Getting it via ETL is good and important.
But basic ETL and traditional ETL — even from a marketing analytics vendor or MMP — is insufficient.
What you really need is continuous ETL built specifically for marketing professionals, built specifically with adtech vendors in mind.
There are 6 “alls” here that matter.
ETL from Singular gets:
All your user-level data
All your aggregated data
All your cost data
From all your marketing partners
Plus all your in-app conversion and engagement insights for enrichment …
And — very importantly — all updates to historical data
Singular’s marketing ETL then effortlessly deposits all of this into your BI systems, ready for you to use. But Singular ETL doesn’t just load all of this data as if it’s an old-school CSV export: get all new data, enrich all new data, load all new data.
Marketing data pipeline tasks
Singular Marketing ETL
Legacy ETL
Get the data Implement all the APIs Ingest all the data (even by scraping if needed)
✅
✅
Normalize the data Normalize and standardize all the data from all the ad networks, including Aggregate data User-level data SKAN data And much more …
✅
❌
Manage timing When to pull the data from each source When to push data to desired destinations
✅
❌
Enrich and correct Monitor, correct, and enrich data from all your adtech sources in near real time
✅
❌
Update retroactive data Ensure changed data from up to 30 days in the past gets updated seamlessly and comprehensively.
✅
❌
Singular’s continuous ETL keeps updating older data too. This is critically important: if something in your costs or conversions changes from 3 days ago or 3 weeks ago, that change is reflected in your most-up-to-date data. Even when you’re regularly getting data throughout the day, continuous ETL ensures you’re always getting the most up-to-date data for today and yesterday (and up to 30 days into the past). Even better, Singular is also meticulous about ETL visibility: communicating the status of the ETL data. Which means that you always know how up-to-date your data is, whether there are any issues, if there’s missing components, and so on.
Singular takes care of this automatically.
In other words: it just works.
Even if — due to bugs or changes to marketing event definitions — historical data needs to change, continuous ETL can re-propagate that through your systems. This is a huge time-saver and headache eraser. It is a load of your team’s mind, and therefore a load off yours.
If you don’t have continuous ETL, you literally will have bad data.
Your “single source of truth” isn’t actually true. And the decisions you make based on that bad data will be less optimal than they could be if you knew the truth. Meaning, of course, you’ll waste money. You’ll overspend or underspend. You’ll misallocate budget between partners.
Ultimately, you won’t act as intelligently as you probably should have.
Marketing ETL from Singular will literally save your team
So … we’ve established that if you want all your marketing data in your marketing BI, you need ETL. And that you specifically need marketing ETL. And you really need continuous ETL to keep everything up to date.
Getting this will literally save your team.
And maybe you too.
Remember that Entity Relationship Diagram showing the tables and fields in the Facebook Ads architecture? Here’s another one for Apple Search Ads.
If you get an off-the-shelf ETL that is not a marketing ETL specifically, you have to think about each of these ERDs from each of your partners.
(You may think: actually, not me: I’m a marketer. But someone on your team does. Someone in development and data science. And every moment they spend implementing this — and updating it when, inevitably, a partner changes a few fields — is a moment they are not spending helping you build a better app or improve your growth insights and tactics.)
And they’ll still come to you, because they’re engineers or data scientists, and they probably don’t know what each field in Snap or Twitter or Moloco data means, and how they correlate with each other, so they’ll ask you. This is incredibly specialized knowledge, different for each vendor, and only understood by a few who combine a performance marketer’s knowledge with developer’s mindset. Remember: most ETL products that are not specifically marketing ETL products are off the shelf. Pret-a-porter. One-size-fits-all. They support only a few sources: maybe 200 to 300, with only about 50 of those in martech and adtech. (Singular supports literally thousands.) They don’t normalize across what Meta and Google and Snap and TikTok and LinkedIn report so you can compare apples to apples. They don’t standardize naming and tables and fields so that everything fits and just makes sense.
All the burden of getting it right is on you.
(And your data analyst. And your engineers.)
One of the results is that while generic ETL tools are generally very good at the E and the L (the Extract and the Load), the Transform part is kind of missing in action. And guess who gets to supplement the tools to add that critical functionality back in?
You and your team.
(Often at extra cost with extra tools.)
Plus, typical ETL tools are incentivized and priced to push as much raw data to you as possible. And the cloud vendors are perfectly aligned with that: more data, more rows, more storage … and a lot more transformation, normalization, and standardization on your own dime and your own time.
All of which …
Shouldn’t be anyone on your team’s day job, and so
Inevitably gets fouled up in one way or another, and
Requires maintenance on an ongoing basis
Impairs your marketing data and therefore your growth capacity
Distracts from your core mission
Continuous marketing ETL from a company specifically focused on marketing analytics is the answer
Simply by virtue of doing what it has done over the past decade, Singular has developed a unique and differentiated functionality: marketing ETL.
Marketers are our customers. We’re already integrated with thousands of ad partners and marketing platforms, and we already ingest all the data they produce when running your campaigns. We already extract it all to present it to marketers, and we already transform all of it in the Singular pipeline to ensure that all the currencies, the dates, the formats, the structures, the naming conventions, the enrichment, and the modeling is standardized across all of them.
Singular doesn’t offer a generic ETL:
Get data from X location
Do Y transformation to it
Deposit the data in Z location
Singular offers marketing ETL, with exactly what you need, in exactly the way you need it. With all that data from dozens of tables and hundreds of fields multiplied by thousands of partners neatly packaged, simplified, and ready for your BI systems. And with all updates from every one of the partners managed seamlessly. And with progression built into all your data loads, ensuring that at every given moment you have the absolute best possible data to feed your growth models.
Your engineers, developers, and data scientists will get this.
But you get this too, right?
As a marketer, you depend on your team to get your job done. You depend on the insights they deliver: the data that informs your decisions.
The more time they can afford to spend on productive work and the less time they have to waste on data janitor duties, the better they can do their jobs.
And that means you can do yours better too.
How to get marketing ETL from Singular
Talk to us.
We have dozens of massive clients already using our marketing ETL product and saving time and money with it. We’d be happy to chat with you, learn your needs, your processes, and your goals, and share how marketing ETL from Singular can help.
Google just launched Privacy Sandbox on Android in beta, and it feels like the Titanic set sail. Or the first space shuttle took off. Or the first rocket succeeded in nailing a vertical landing. Because it’s that big of a deal, even though it’s just, really, a very initial step.
Privacy Sandbox on Android is the yang to Apple’s yin: App Tracking Transparency. And it’s finally getting close to reality.
The privacy era of mobile
“Over the past year, we’ve worked closely with the industry to gather feedback and begin testing these new technologies,” Google privacy VP Anthony Chavez wrote today on The Keyword. “Today, we’re entering the next phase of this initiative, rolling out the first Beta for the Privacy Sandbox on Android to eligible devices. With the Beta, users and developers will be able to experience and evaluate these new solutions in the real world.”
We’ve been entering the vendor-driven privacy era on mobile ever since Apple created the IDFA. (Yes, even though the IDFA became the poster child for violations of privacy, it was better than an eternal, unchangeable device identifier, the UDID.) Apple’s launch of App Tracking Transparency for user choice and provision of SKAdNetwork for attribution was the next major step, but it impacts only half of the mobile operating system duopoly and only 27.6% of operational global smartphones.
Android is the big kahuna, globally.
And rolling out a privacy solution that in some ways goes farther than Apple’s ATT is a big, big deal.
Check out Singular resources on Privacy Sandbox on Android:
Participating in the Privacy Sandbox for Android beta
The initial roll-out will be very slow and very small. Select Android phone owners who have updated to Android 13 will get notifications if they’d like to participate. App publishers can also choose to opt in by using the new Privacy Sandbox APIs.
Both app marketers and people can back out of participating in the beta test at any time, but those that persist — especially marketers — will learn valuable lessons.
Google has been super-collaborative with the industry in designing Privacy Sandbox for Android, and there’s a lot to be excited about in the implementation, with tools and capabilities that outpace even Apple’s enhanced SKAN 4. That said, there’s a huge amount of complexity and change to anticipate over the next year and a half as the industry works through this, and there’s very likely significant additional changes that Google will need to make to Privacy Sandbox as the industry plays with its new measurement, attribution, targeting, and audiences toys.
There will also be significant loss.
As we’ve seen on iOS, losing the key identifier that the entire mobile advertising ecosystem was built around was a monumental shift that probably 70% of marketers have not yet fully recovered from.
We are going to see similar challenges with Privacy Sandbox on Android.
Keys to success with Privacy Sandbox on Android
The keys to success are several.
One, get up to speed with the tech as soon as possible. We’ve seen that early adopters on iOS made significant strategic gains on competitors by learning SKAdNetwork quicker. Two, use the right tools. I’ve seen multiple examples of companies that almost completely paused iOS user acquisition efforts due to measurement insanity — $500 CPIs — when not using the right tools. Once they started working with Singular’s SKAdNetwork attribution and specifically Singular’s SKAN Advanced Analytics, hidden or missing data re-appeared and conversion models improved … and profitable growth could resume.
We’re likely to see similar scenarios on Android.
Privacy Sandbox vs SKAdNetwork
One thing is clear: Google is positioning Privacy Sandbox as better than SKAdNetwork for both people and marketers, calling App Tracking Transparency a “blunt approach:”
“Our goal with the Privacy Sandbox is to enhance user privacy while providing businesses with the tools to succeed online,” Chavez says. “Blunt approaches that don’t provide viable alternatives harm app developers, and they don’t work for user privacy either, leading to less private ways of tracking users like device fingerprinting.”
In other words, Google wants to protect user privacy, but it also wants to protect the mobile marketing industry.
Deprecating the GAID will certainly do the former. And the set of holistic tools that Google has built into Privacy Sandbox for Android around targeting, audiences, retargeting, measurement, and attribution certainly promise to do the latter. But there’s a lot to work on in terms of targeting granularity, just to name one thing, and other aspects of Privacy Sandbox.
Creative optimization is simultaneously the single most important thing a marketer can focus on and the single hardest thing to get right. We repeatedly see research that suggests creative accounts for between 40-60% of advertising effectiveness, which means we need to focus on it just as much as we agonize over SKAN, top channels, and getting the right data.
That’s why we recently held a webinar with experts on creative optimization:
Melanie Whisler, digital marketing analyst for DraftKings
Pedro Zaborowsky, user acquisition lead for SciPlay
Noa Eckstein, head of business operations for Luna
Saadi Muslu, who leads marketing for Singular
Peter Fodor, founder & CEO, AppAgent
That webinar is available on-demand: check it out at the link above.
But we also had multiple questions during the session that we couldn’t quite answer during the scheduled time. And we held some polls on creative optimization that we’d like to share. Plus, I couldn’t share all of this without highlighting some of the best insights on creative optimization for 2023 from our panelists.
So keep scrolling for:
Nuggets from the panel on advertising, brand vs. performance, and metrics
Poll results on generative AI and number of creatives marketers make
Answers to attendees’ questions
Creative optimization 2023: a few nuggets from the panel
There are a lot of advertisers in the mobile marketing space, which means you have a ton of competition. How much competition? Perhaps as many as 120,000 to 150,000 companies, according to data Peter Fodor shared:
“There are about 34,000 advertisers on the App Store, while on Android, it’s almost triple that number.”
– Peter Fodor, AppAgent
Of course, there’s likely a lot of crossover between the advertisers on both platforms.
Perhaps partially as a result of that competition, people are testing more creatives than ever before in an attempt to find the perfect blend of color, image, text, and action that drives conversions and revenue. Another driver for more creative testing: device-ID based targeting effectiveness is down as a result of ATT, meaning creative has to shoulder more of the targeting load.
“The average number of creatives being tested per app, per month, is increasing 14% year-over-year.”
– Noa Eckstein, Luna
There’s always a question between the brand and the performance side of the house: should we push brand, or should we focus exclusively on the app we’re promoting and the offer we’re presenting? The answer from creative optimization tests that SciPlay ran recently appears to be clear: brand improves performance.
Pedro Zaborowsky, a user acquisition lead for SciPlay, tested this by showing various ads showcasing their logo, not showing their logo, or using their logo in a dynamic, moving way.
“We did see an improvement showing a kinetic [moving] logo. It improved the retention rate of the users by more than 10% … we did run a survey after it to see the recognition of the brand, and it was clear cut that this was the best ad.”
– Pedro Zaborowsky, SciPlay
But marketers can lose the benefit of presenting brand in their attempts at creative optimization if they don’t do so consistently, as DraftKings has found.
“Brand awareness, as Pedro alluded to, is typically the first touchpoint to drive knowledge affinity and that product knowledge. But if your brand identity is different in your user acquisition creatives, it’s going to be exponentially less effective because you’re going to cause friction and confusion between those touchpoints.”
– Melanie Whisler, DraftKings
And everyone always wants to know which metrics other marketers are using, focused on, and driving business decisions with. The bad news: you can’t just pick one and stick with it. You have to at least capture all the metrics, because you don’t know which part of the performance story each one might tell you at different times and for different purposes.
I asked Singular’s Saadi Muslu which KPIs marketers should monitor. And she didn’t come back with an easy button, unfortunately.
“The answer is going to be all of them, really … it’s about having full-funnel metrics. So, first of all, depending on your campaign’s objective, you may want to be looking at different KPIs. If it’s a brand campaign, you’re going to focus more on views, impressions, clicks, and click through rate. But if it’s a performance campaign … your KPIs will be focused on more post-install events, LTV, ROAS. So maybe it’s a bit of a cop-out answer, but being able to account for both virality and then understanding the business results that an asset is driving is key.”
– Saadi Muslu, Singular
Getting all the data, which Singular’s creative analytics tools allow you to do, then lets you diagnose issues as well, such as understanding why ROAS might be strong but impressions are low.
Creative optimization poll results: number of creatives, and generative AI
We asked participants to share how many creatives they make per app. Most marketers make about 100 per app per month, but some make over 1,000. No-one was making over 10,000 per app!
We also asked if marketers were planning to use generative AI for either copy or image creation for their ads in 2023. Almost half said yes, while a third were not planning to — I wonder if they’ll change their mind at some point in the year — and just over a fifth of marketers said they were testing.
And now: the answers to attendee questions
We always try to leave time to answer attendee questions during our webinars. Occasionally, we fail. Here are questions attendees asked during the creative optimization webinar that we’re answering now …
1. Any advice for playable ads that have good installs but bad ROI?
The answer is alignment, but in 2 different ways.
First, you can try aligning the ads more with the app, so that they show representative gameplay. This will almost certainly increase ROI, though possible at the cost of completions and/or impressions. However, the real challenge might be that the activity people saw in the ads was more interesting than what you have in your actual app. In that scenario, try to make your app more like your ad, because you’ve just discovered something about consumer preferences.
Does this seem insane?
I recently chatted with a marketer who did exactly this … and saw massive success.
2. Would you recommend sticking with one outsourcing studio or switching between different ones?
One studio is easier for communication and they get familiar with your app and previous hits and misses, but multiple studios bring new, fresh ideas.
I would recommend multiple, and they might be for very different purposes.
As SciPlay’s Pedro Zaborowsky said during the webinar:
“I do think that in-house and outsourcing, they don’t need to be against each other, they should be side by side. At least for us, it makes very much sense to have them both for different needs, and that’s what the focus needs to be on. I think that outsourcing is super important when you want to have different talents, different artists adding their inputs on the creative that’s super different. We need to remember that maybe the outsourcer you’re working with is also working with a competitor, and you can also be exposed to some ideas that a competitor has seen very much success without knowing that for sure, but the artist is working on both sides. So it can also apply to one another. So, this is one thing that’s very good for outsourcing.”
I think the same applies to the one studio or multiple question.
3. Have you tested localized versus culturalized assets – did it make a significant difference to add things like local voiceover, text style etc. than to just translate the advertising text on videos?
Performance is one thing. Brand risk is another.
I recently chatted with a marketer who said that a green hat on a character’s head was interpreted, in one geo, as a sign of infidelity.
So you need local insight to avoid stepping on landmines you don’t even know exist.
And from SciPlay’s Pedro Zaborowsky:
“I think on the test that we did it was clear that it made an impact to localize the content instead of just running English in the same slots type.”
So: yes.
4. Related to brand lift, can you double down on achieving stellar campaign performance working with recognizable IPs?
Absolutely.
One of your first tasks as a marketer is to overcome strangeness or “other” resistance. Recognizable IP does that out of the box, and can result in dramatically lower acquisition costs in addition to much more organic growth.
5. UA and ASO: what are the touchpoints? What are the processes in your companies? When and how often (and why) do you communicate?
UA and ASO have to be connected.
While your app listing page is probably not going to change from day to day as you test new creative, losing people on the app listing page is one of the biggest leaks in your funnel. And dramatically different messaging and design run the risk of losing the momentum that a successful ad experience has created.
From AppAgent’s Peter Fodor:
“We also see that companies are paying much more attention to consistency between the communication on top of the funnel, such as ads and store, but also connecting that to the product experience, the first-time user experience, but also social media, in order to create a consistent image, to speak the same language to their audience.”
6. Are there any creative libraries for specific platforms? Like Facebook’s ad library?
Facebook’s ad library is super-helpful. While not every other platform has similar functionality, any apps that are being marketed at scale will also be marketed on Facebook, so it can be useful elsewhere also.
Alternatively, check out an ad intelligence service.
7. What is the best time to do proper A/B testing? Soft launch or when UA scaling is started? Any recommendations for this?
I would hate to commit millions of dollars to a hard launch with untested ad creative.
8. Is there a basic metric that works on a sliding scale with the number of creatives needed for a single app?
Sadly, no.
You will know how many creatives you need for your app when you test and achieve (or fail to achieve) success.
Check out the full webinar
Check out the full webinar on creative optimization in 2023. Trust me, it’s worth it. The webinar is available for free in Singular’s resources section.
How do you pick an MMP in 2023? Are there major differences between MMPs? Do you even need a mobile measurement partner in the age of SKAN and (soon) Privacy Sandbox on Android? I recently chatted with UA expert and consultant Matej Lancaric about the evolving role of MMPs and things to look for when you need one.
First off, the reasons to get an MMP haven’t really changed in the last few years.
“You need to have an MMP to be able to diversify user acquisition,” Matej says. “If you want to run UA campaigns outside of Facebook and Google … you want to start Unity, you want to start AppLovin, even TikTok, you need an attribution link. And then, obviously, you need to be able to actually evaluate the different UA channels.”
(Here’s a fairly full list of 17 items that covers most of what an MMP does, plus a checklist of things to look for.)
Each marketing channel is different
Each UA channel is different, with different quality of traffic, different audiences, different retention profiles, and different LTV curves, Lancaric says. An MMP helps you evaluate each one for your unique app and customize the best marketing mix to maximize your marketing dollars. And while it used to be the case that new apps only used 1 or 2 marketing channels in the first months of marketing, he says that’s not true anymore.
“Time has changed, and due to quality fluctuations and benchmarking purposes, it’s necessary to introduce more networks early in the retention stage,” Lancaric wrote in a recent post on who needs a mobile measurement partner, and how to pick an MMP.
Picking an MMP early is increasingly necessary in the age of SKAdNetwork, where we’re about to transition from SKAN 3 to SKAN 4. SKAN is complicated, and version 4 is tougher to understand, implement, and optimize than version 3. An MMP like Singular offers tools to build your conversion models — and even automatically optimize them — and then presents the resulting data as simpler, aggregated, actionable insight.
That’s important for small teams with limited dedicated data science and BI teams. But it’s also important for larger teams with more complex revenue models.
Top-notch SKAN support is critical when you pick an MMP
“What is really important for me is to be able to set up a conversion schema that allows you to track IAP revenue and also ad revenue in 1 conversion schema,” Lancaric says. “That’s really critical for me at least, because I work with games that have in-app revenue and ads revenue and sometimes it’s 70-30 skewed towards in-app, but when it’s 50-50, that’s when the magic happens.”
A strong SKAdNetwork implementation is critical, but poor model creation and limited subsequent data collection makes modern user acquisition on iOS almost impossible: advertising optimization requires accurate data.
LTV predictions based on the first 24 hours of data points is a basic requirement, and you can’t get that data in sufficient detail from the UA channels themselves.
Speaking of SKAN, how many mobile marketers really understand how to set it up, run it, and optimize campaigns based on it?
“Maybe 30%, maybe even a lower percentage are actually able to understand what’s happening,” Lancaric says. “And sometimes even I don’t know what, I don’t understand … SKAN 4.0 is gonna be a lot of fun.”
The challenge, of course, if you can’t figure out SKAN is that you end up shifting ad budget to Android where you still have GAID for a limited time. That sounds good at first, but there’s a problem. There are twice as many app downloads on Android as on iOS globally, which is encouraging, but a huge percentage of the actual in-app revenue is on iOS, thanks to its prominence in richer countries. In Q1 2022, that was $1.80 spent on iOS for every $1 spent on Android according to Data.ai. In Q3 it was even more tilted to iOS with almost two thirds of all in-app purchases happening on iPhone — $21.2 billion vs $10.4 billion — according to SensorTower.
Unless you only monetize via ads, and you don’t mind joining more app publishers chasing less revenue on Android, no-one wants to miss out on the rich opportunities on iOS.
That means understanding SKAN — or at least working with an MMP that does — is critical.
But it isn’t just about capability and features. They matter, they’re critical, and you can’t drive optimal results without them, but price also matters.
“I’m looking at pricing always,” Lancaric says. “You mentioned smaller teams, so that’s really, really important for a lot of companies … some companies just can’t afford to pay $25K a month for an MMP.”
Part of the pricing equation is whether everything is included or everything is additional, such as different packages to see spend, mitigate fraud, manage spikes in downloads and revenue, or add reporting capability. The worst thing for any team — especially in smaller companies — is to hear that there’s a $5,000 overage for the month which is now due.
Hidden costs, Lancaric says, are one of the biggest red flags to be aware of when you pick an MMP, meaning it’s one of the key questions to ask in the buying process.
Finally, a key part to consider when you pick an MMP is to be aware that we’re in a transition. The industry is moving from deterministic device identifiers that drove traffic and cohort valuation based on last-click attribution to modeled versions of reality based on privacy-safe indicators such as SKAN, Privacy Sandbox, first-party data, in-app activity, and cost and campaign data
“We are already halfway to the times when you can’t really measure everything very precisely,” Lancaric says. “So it’s gonna be very much skewed towards the blended approach: trying to build some LTV predictions and being able to run incrementality tests.”
That’s a critical piece of the next decade of marketing measurement. I like to call it building up “truthiness” by adding bits and pieces of data from various sources and modeling what is no longer visible while double-checking your models based on first-party in-app data. Singular CEO Gadi Eliashive calls it hybrid measurement and the future of marketing analytics.
As always, there’s much more in our full conversation. Check out the full video or podcast for all the insights.
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Finding it tough growing apps in a recession? No wonder: a whole generation of mobile marketers have cut their teeth on app growth in the grand old times of (nearly) free money from venture capitalists. While huge budgets (and reliable deterministic measurement on both major platforms) are really, really nice, those times are over.
So how do you grow when growth is hard?
You become a cockroach app.
Growing apps in a recession requires building cockroach apps that can survive the nuclear (economic) apocalypse when nothing else does. How? By focusing on the fundamentals, says Tynker chief growth officer Lomit Patel.
“If you look at the past 5, 6, 7 years, there was such an over-index emphasis on growth at all costs, right?” Patel, who is the former VP for growth at IMVU and led direct marketing at Roku, told me recently in a Growth Masterminds episode. “It was really cheap to get money at that time, especially in startups. So it was really about just buying your way to growing as quickly as possible.”
That’s all changing in a world in which Google has laid off 12,000 people, Microsoft 10,000, Amazon 18,000, and venture capital investment is down 53% year over year.
What are the critical keys to growth now?
Balancing acquisition with engagement, monetization, and retention, Patel says.
Growing apps in a recession: return to the fundamentals of growth
Balance is the new acquisition.
“Now it’s really coming down to the fundamentals of not buying all costs, but really getting the balance around how you acquire users and how you retain, engage, and monetize … and getting the full balance around the entire user funnel,” Patel says. “A heavy emphasis now is really coming down to retention … how do you retain your best users?”
That’s tough.
As we all know, we have maybe 50 or 100 apps. Some have literally hundreds. But the number we use on any given day is probably less than the number of fingers and toes we own — and maybe less than just our fingers alone. That means every single app is in a zero-sum, red ocean, high-stakes competition with every other app for a diminishing and perishable commodity: human attention.
Good luck, marketers.
In addition, there’s added pressure on getting user acquisition right — thanks to lower budgets — at exactly the same time as App Tracking Transparency is taking data away on iOS (and Privacy Sandbox soon will on Android). Which means that although you now need to know the projected lifetime value (LTV) of your new users with better certainty than ever before, you have less data to actually do so.
4 keys to growing apps in a recession (with minimal budget)
Patel sees 4 necessary responses to the challenge of growing with minimal budgets:
Predicting value more effectively
Diversifying revenue more aggressively
Growing organically, not just via paid user acquisition
Boosting engagement and retention of users you already have
The first key is critical, especially under SKAN 3 but also under SKAN 4: getting an early understanding of new user cohort value.
“One of the things that we were able to do at IMVU was to try and identify early signals, and look at what were those early signals that you could depend on to try and build up a productive lifetime value model,” Patel says. “And then — whatever that model was — pump back a different signal to the mobile measurement partners.”
“So instead of relying on registrations and revenue, you come up with your own formula of a signal and optimize to that … and that’s even more important right now.”
This, of course, is a core part of Singular’s SKAN Advanced Analytics: modeling for missing data to get the best possible — and earliest possible — optimization signals. Without modeling on iOS, you have too little data to accurately adjust course.
The second key to growing apps in a recession is nice to have at any point, but is critical during uncertain economic periods: revenue diversification. As we saw in a recent Singular webinar, 90% of non-gaming in-app revenue is now subscriptions: great if you can get it and more stable than individual purchases, but potentially iffy when people might be looking to save money. Building revenue from a combination of purchases and subscriptions and advertising diversifies your risk from any one of them.
The third is organic growth: always appealing because it seems “free.” (Which, of course, it is not: you typically need huge investments in having a great product to grow both organically and sustainably.)
Think product-led growth: particularly important when paid acquisition is harder than ever. A cool new idea could go viral, but only a solid product and a great user experience will successfully capitalize on that buzz to form the foundation for long-term revenue growth.
The fourth key to growing apps in a recession is boosting engagement, which will increase both retention and monetization. One thing that can help: AI-driven personalization.
“Increasing engagement and retention, I would say, really comes down to increasing your ability to leverage AI and automation for personalization, to increase the way you can personalize the experiences within your app,” Patel says.
Verticals that grow in recessions
Any app or any business can grow under tough circumstances, of course. But it helps to be in verticals that are relatively recession-proof.
Entertainment is one, Patel says: people still need to have fun and enjoy themselves, although they may look for less expensive ways to do so. Another is gaming, for much the same reason. If people cut back on going out or traveling, gaming is still a relatively inexpensive way to spend time, have fun, and experience the much-needed thrill of winning.
“People will still need to figure out how to keep their mind active and not go brain dead and depressed with whatever’s going around,” Patel says.
Another recession-proof vertical?
Education.
We’re not going to stop educating our kids during an economic downturn, and we’re going to take advantage of opportunities to upskill both ourselves and them in order to take advantage of whatever opportunities remain available.
Still, the biggest challenge remains data
The biggest challenge to growing apps in a recession, however, doesn’t have much to do with the actual recession. It remains data loss due to SKAdNetwork. That’s nothing new, and it’s something that is going to improve with SKAN 4, but it remains the core issue for many marketers on iOS.
And that’s where brand — yes, brand — can help performance marketers.
“At Tinker we call it a first-time user experience … and that first-time user experience actually starts even before somebody gets to your app,” Patel says. “What’s the experience in the App Store or first ad … people tend to over-index on certain pieces rather than the entire journey.”
That first experience could be organic too, and increasingly is as apps invest in search engine optimization and influencer marketing. Which is fundamentally different than paid acquisition, because I feel in control of what I come across organically, versus feeling “marketed to” when I see an ad. An organic first experience, when positive, is a very powerful driver of behavior.
“So what I will say is, really focus on the entire journey to really set the right precedent,” Patel says. “Before someone even gets into your app — and once they get into your app — try to remove as much friction as possible.”
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