Author: John Koetsier

Looking for ways to defeat the recession?

Every creative marketer occasionally has that agonizing moment when you need something more. Some spark. Some flash-bulb moment. Some burst of inspiration straight from the heavens. Sometimes, during dry spells, it’s more than a moment. Sometimes it’s an hour, or a day. Hopefully, it’s never a week!

The creativity you need for success in growth marketing isn’t just for ads or campaigns or offers. It’s also about new tactics to grow, new strategies for better engagement or monetization. Or maybe new insights into channels that you haven’t yet tapped. Essentially, it’s anything in the realm of marketing.

Congratulations.

Today is that day.

It’s not easy street any more

Let’s be honest: it’s a tough time right now. Budgets are a little iffy. The economy isn’t amazing. Inflation is still slamming people’s paychecks, and the supply chain is still a little kinked up. Add to that signal loss due to privacy changes and angst due to having to learn new methods of targeting, attribution, and optimization, and 2023 might look a little bearish. We need ways to defeat the recession.

We can see that in the data, having recently compiled anonymous and aggregated data from a small subset of Singular customers with 6 billion installs and 2 trillion clicks over the past year. 

And spend is definitely trending down:

Installs are also down. 

It’s important to note that this seems to be a reversion to the pre-Covid mean, which is still on an overall upward trend. But that’s hard to verify right now. What we do know for sure is that the current direction is down.

So let’s beat that bear.

21 tactics in 7 categories: ways to defeat the recession

We’ve gathered 21 tactics from leaders in marketing and mobile growth. My guess is that at least one will spark something in your marketer’s brain. Either it might be interesting in and of itself, or it might just kindle a creative idea that is entirely your own, but was buried too deep down for you to be consciously aware of it.

We’ve bundled these 21 tactics into 7 key challenges in our latest Essential Guide: Defeat the recession. The key challenges include:

1. Challenge 1: Shrinking budgets
2. Challenge 2: Plummeting monetization
3. Challenge 3: Slumping marketing efficiency
4. Challenge 4: Stagnating channels
5. Challenge 5: Sagging conversion rates
6. Challenge 6: Fading retention
7. Challenge 7: Plunging virality

Those tactics come from conversations with some of the top mobile marketers in the world, from growth leaders at companies like Hello Fresh, Flo, FlipaClip, Pixel United, Qiiwi Games, Scopely, and Rovio. 

They’re also from globally-known user acquisition consultants such as Thomas Petit, or leaders at massive megabrands like Bayer, or agencies like Appinventiv. And some are from mobile intelligence companies like Data.ai, or ecosystem technology providers like CleverTap.

Each one just might be a key you need to unlock massive growth in 2023. Alternatively, just one might stimulate an idea that does the same. Either way, you’re a step ahead.

And all together, we hope they are ways to defeat the recession for you and your app.

Get the guide here

Beat the bear and get 21 genius ideas on defeating the recession, all in our new guide.
Download the recession guide here.

Is web3 marketing in a beautiful moment?

It certainly doesn’t feel beautiful. It feels painful, like the pain of Ethereum being down 70% from its one-year high last December of $4,600. Or Bitcoin, down to the $17,000 range from last December’s heights of over $50,000. 

But here’s the thing: the web3 space isn’t defined solely, or even primarily, by the price of cryptocurrency. Rather, it’s defined by a reimagining of the internet based on principles of decentralization, token economics, and publicly available data in the form of blockchain technology. And while — let’s be honest — the jury is still very much out on how successful this particular reframing of the core technologies that have made the internet what it is will be, it’d be hard to argue the impact that many of the ideas behind those principles have had on social platforms, structured communities, games, finance, and platforms.

So I recently took some time to chat with 3 people who are inventing the future of mobile games who are heavily invested in the emerging web3 ethos:

• Quinn Campbell, the VP Growth at Sky Mavis, makers of Axie Infinity, with almost 3 million daily players, $3.6 billion traded on-platform, and an Axie that was sold for $820,000
• Dan Reynolds from First Light Games, who are in the late stages of making a “free-to-play, Web3, mobile gaming, battle royale tour de badass”
• Jon Hook, CMO of PlayEmber, a web3 monetization platform that has driven 100 million downloads and new users who have signed for for 100,000 new wallets so far

A beautiful moment of a bear market

A key question: where are we in the evolution of web3 games, web3 experiences, web3 communities, web3 growth, and, crucially, what will the emerging web3 growth marketing stack look like?

According to these experts, a bear market is just what the web3 space needed.

“I think we’re in this kind of beautiful moment of a bear market,” Quinn Campbell says. “We’re actually able to build every day in a way that only a bear market truly affords … there’s definitely a shakedown going on, but the projects that are able to really survey and build through this bear are going to be the foundation of the next decade of NFT gaming, and of web3 as well.”

In other words, bye-bye yield farmers.

Bye-bye insta-DeFi protocols pumped by clueless influencers.

Bye-bye 50,000 new NFT collections every day produced by MidJourney or Stable Diffusion and named via a random name generator.

“Now you’re starting to see these game studios go back to their roots of creating a fun, sticky core gameplay first, and then just sprinkling some web3 magic on top of it,” says Campbell.

Web3 growth marketing: traditional or brand-new?

Something I’ve struggled with during the bull run of both crypto and web3 is the super-hyped marketing tones using newer platforms like Discord and Telegram. 

Generally, the hook has been: join our Telegram or Discord to get early access or free tokens or some other benefit, and the reality was that tens of thousands of people (bots?) jumped on the offer, boosting vanity stats — “there are 3 million people in our Telegram channel” — and grabbing early rewards.

But … not really engaging over the long term.

And, then inevitably, the incredible uselessness of over-crowded channels blasted with everything from newbie questions to random spammy pitches to NewUser2398 just joined to the very occasional authentic company updates, which essentially forced me to get off of virtually every Telegram channel I joined.

The signal to noise ratio was just too low.

So how do you do web3 growth marketing that works? Do Discord and Telegram really work? Are there other channels?

Jon Hook says we don’t have to throw out all our existing marketing knowledge when entering the web3 space.

“I think it comes back to just the basics that we all know when you are making a game: who are you targeting and what is their motivation?” he says. “You’ve definitely got like some of the early adopters of web3 — web3 degens — they know all about NFTs and tokens and staking … and they expect Discord, right? That’s their community, that’s their friendship base, that’s how they interact.”

But also, Hook says, there are those people that just love mobile games and have happened to find a new web3 game. And they’re just playing it because they like playing it.

“If you’re gonna onboard these normies, well, where are they?” he adds. “Do they know what Discord is?”

Probably not. And very likely, the normies are on Facebook or Snap or TikTok, and ad campaigns aimed at those platforms stand a good chance of success. But when you’re dealing with a mix of “degens” and normies, formulating a coherent marketing strategy is more challenging.

Essentially, the upshot is: no-one really knows what the ultimate, definitive answer is, says Dan Reynolds of First Light Games.

That’s challenging, because they’re just about to release their first big web3 game, and there’s no playbook. There is a playbook for traditional mobile games: soft-launch, fine-tune, spend on the traditional channels, optimize your campaigns, engage and retain your new players, users, or customers, and essentially rinse and repeat according to the size of your budget.

But what’s the playbook for web3 growth marketing?

“The challenge that we face right now is to try and strike that balance between tapping into this world of web3 speculators, but also aiming to take the game mainstream around the world,” Reynolds says. “So one thing that we are focused very much on right now is to do what we know we are good at, which is creating a good game that’s gonna be enjoyable … whilst using as much of the blockchain technology as possible and staying in the loop with everything new that is coming out.”

Web3 growth marketing: a new challenge that traditional mobile games don’t face

While the success rate of new games and apps tells you all you need to know about how hard marketing traditional mobile games really is, there’s additional challenges in the web3 space.

One of them: the sheer diversity of personas to target.

“I think what’s so inherently different about trying to grow and then manage that scale of community of a web3 game versus web 2 is just the sheer variety of users or players or archetypes that you have in your ecosystem,” Campbell says. “We have like 11 or 12 different player archetypes that we’ve identified within Axie … and only about half of them actually play the game.”

Those 11 or 12 different personas include:

• hardcore PvP battlers
• eSports players
• People just playing for fun
• Land owners
• SLP earners (SLP is smooth love potion, which is an ERC-20 token you can earn in Axie Infinity)
• There are also scholars in the game
• And others who do nothing but participate in governance discussions around the coming Axie Infinity DAO (decentralized autonomous organization)

Plus, there are content creators. Community tooling developers. And even more.

All of this is fascinating and exciting and bodes well for the formation of not just a game but a community, if not a micro-society with a significant amount of complexity, an economy, and defined acceptable social practice, but it does have a downside for game and app publishers.

“There’s absolutely no way to argue that that person is any less valuable to us than somebody actually playing the game every day or vice versa,” says Campbell. “And so it even makes it hard to actually come up with entirely new LTV equations and figure out who we’re really buying and what to optimize for at the end of the day.”

Layer in ATT and Privacy Sandbox for Android on top of that, with limited models for recording conversion values and limited capability for measuring cohort value and activity over time, and the scale of the challenge becomes clear.

So much more in this Web3 growth marketing podcast

There’s so much more in this podcast.

Subscribe to the Growth Masterminds podcast if you like listening to podcasts, or subscribe to our YouTube channel to get notifications when we post new videos with growth experts.

We also chat about:

• Interconnectivity in games via web3 mechanisms
• Portability of assets from game to game
• Digital ownership
• In-game or in-app monetary policy with token economics
• Wallet relationship management
• Web3 marketing stack
• Attribution in web3 marketing
• Bringing the next billion people onto the blockchain

Also: we get each expert’s best advice for those new to the web3 space about how to get engaged, how to learn, and how to start experimenting with potential web3 tie-ins for your existing apps or new ones.

Why are mobile marketers swiping right on web-to-app and app-to-web marketing now more than ever? 

Lots of reasons.

Maybe you’re looking for data you can’t get in a mobile app. Maybe you’re picking up new mobile app users on the cheap via the web. Or maybe there are just different and incremental audiences in each of the app and web channels. For whatever reason, the vast majority of mobile-first marketers are now looking at, doing, and optimizing multi-channel ways for people to access their services and experiences. 

Singular recently hosted a webinar with some of the top experts on web-to-app and app-to-web marketing to get their insights on strategy, optimization, data collection, and tactics for doing web-to-app (and app-to-web) successfully:

• LinkedIn: Kristin Kado, Sr. Manager, Paid Social Lead, Labs 
• DraftKings: Josh Nadler, Product Manager II, Ads & Attribution | SEO
• Liftoff: Brian Hedrick, Product Manager, Brands
• Tinuiti: Liz Emery, VP, Mobile + Adtech
• Singular: Victor Savath, VP Solutions Consulting

Here are 17 things I learned while hosting the webinar:

1. Most mobile marketers are multi-platform

30% of the marketers on the webinar offer only a mobile app. 1% offer only a web app. But 58% offer both mobile and web, making web-to-app and app-to-web solutions critical. And, interestingly, 12% of the marketers we surveyed had web, app, and other platforms on which they serve clients, deliver games, or sell products. 

That could be a console game, a desktop app, a connected TV app, or something on a VR platform.

Whatever it is, 69% of the marketers who showed up offer their services on more platforms than just mobile apps, which means understanding how their customers, users, or players engage on all 3 is critical.

2. Web-to-app sounds simple. It’s not.

Web to app sounds very simple. Pass users along via a deep link or deferred deep link, encode a variable that allows you to measure how many people follow that path, and you’re off to the races.

But marketers and product leaders have a lot of decisions to make: optimal user flows, methodologies, CTAs (calls to action), measuring cross-channel and cross-device journeys, combining data from a website with data from an app, and more.

There’s a lot to engage with here to make a web-to-app customer journey seamless and effective … and to be able to measure and optimize against it in the future.

3. People are omnichannel

People don’t confine themselves to just one device or just one channel.

“Consumers are omnichannel,” says Liz Emery. “So, if you’re an app marketer and you are not using omnichannel tactics and things like web inventory, hitting people at every stage of the funnel, you’re kind of already behind the curve.”

If you’re in a retail vertical, people might like shopping on the web while, perhaps, purchasing via app. Or the other way around, and a thousand other combinations. Any which way they come, marketers need to be ready.

4. We often have cross-screen context

Watching streaming media on a big screen on the wall? Chances are a small screen isn’t far from your hand, and chances are that might be used for a quick search regarding an ad.

“80% of us experience TV and experience our mobile devices in a cross-screen context,” says Brian Hedrick. “I’m watching something on our Apple TV and I see an ad: I’m researching something, I’m looking at Twitter, we’re all in this cross-screen environment.”

Designing user flows without that context might result in non-optimal conversion rates.

“Cross-device action is virtually inevitable in today’s fragmented world,” says LinkedIn’s Kristin Kado. “We’re all so busy and we’re constantly pushing from one screen or device to another rather seamlessly.”

5. Design for you

Understanding your audience is massive. And guess what: in some ways, they might just be a lot like you.

“We as marketers just can’t forget that we’re customers too and we need to enact our strategies not just based on what we know works from the data we have on hand, but from our own personal experiences too,” says Kado.

That means eating your own dogfood, noticing when you get annoyed by inconveniences or extra steps or lack of awareness of user context in your own designed flows, and fixing them.

“We need to be more strategic in how we think about our experiences as consumers and apply that to our consumers themselves,” Kado says.

6. Adopt new forms of measurement, including MMM, for web to app journeys

Web to app can be measured, and there are solutions for cross-device measurement and cross-platform journeys. But it’s not always as perfect as you’d like it to be. And there are some cases where no tracking-based technology will work, like the connected TV ad that someone sees while streaming Peacock that stimulates a Google search that culminates in an app install.

There’s an air gap there which blocks tracking.

Enter media mix modeling.

“One of the models that we’re really leaning in heavily now on is MMM or media mix modeling,” says Kado. “It’s really powerful because, at the end of the day, it’s going to help paint that picture of proper attribution from channel to platform and from web to app.”

Because MMM measures based on the correlation of costs and inputs and efforts to outputs and effects and conversions, it’s not dependent on a direct tracking technology. 

“There’s nothing … that’s going to beautifully connect the dots from web to app in a way that there are no challenges to overcome between web and app measurement,” says DraftKings’ Josh Nadler.

(See how Singular is supporting MMM.)

7. Develop and test hypotheses to reduce drop-off

There’s a lot of complexity in web-to-app, and even more when you add app-to-web, or connected TV to app, or other platforms as well. Simplify the insanity by developing a plan to check your assumptions and test your data connections.

One key goal: minimizing drop-off from platform A to platform B.

“If you do have a web flow setup, you have these goals that you want to accomplish, and you have hypotheses around what is impacting your conversion rate, my recommendation to your teams would be to be testing those hypotheses, iterate over time, with the goal of lowering that drop-off, minimizing that drop off as you go,” says Singular’s Victor Savath.

Whenever you add stages in a marketing funnel, you’re going to have leakage. Minimizing it by designing, testing, and optimizing it is critical.

8. Cost is a huge reason why marketers do web-to-app user acquisition

You simply get cheaper ads on the web, in many cases, than in-app. And that’s a huge reason to do web to app acquisition.

Almost half of the marketers on the webinar said that one of the key reasons they do web to app is cost of acquisition. It’s the single most important reason, and I’ve typically heard mobile marketing experts say that web ads in their verticals are 50% cheaper than in-app ads.

That’s a powerful incentive … if they convert into highly engaged players, customers, or users.

9. Incremental audiences: the second-biggest reason to do web to app

Adding 1 more mobile ad network to your existing stable of 25 might just be like putting 1 more fishing pole into a stream that already has 200 in it: it may not generate incremental interest.

(Note: it very well might, if it’s a niche network with access to niche audiences. But chances are slim.)

But web inventory might just hit different audiences, and that’s why 37% of mobile marketers said that accessing incremental audiences was a key reason they ran web to app ads.

10. The web can offer better onboarding than the App Store or Google Play

Your app listing is probably amazing. And you’ve probably invested significantly in app store optimization to continually make it better and better at converting views into app installs.

But you simply can’t do some things in your app listing, which is why 33% of marketers told us that providing a better onboarding experience was a key reason for them to do web to app.

One example:

I personally recently converted on a marketing campaign that included a web-based component with a long-form video. I’m talking something like 15 minutes of a personal story from a satisfied customer that walked me through the entire brand promise (and execution of that promise).

Good luck doing that in Google Play or the App Store.

Sometimes, you might be able to do better onboarding on a web landing page.

11. You can ask for data on the web

In a typical app-to-app scenario, you show an in-app ad to a prospective customer or user. If they tap on it and hit the App Store or Google Play, then install your app, you’ve achieved your goal. But you’ve also done it entirely in the context of the mobile operating system that your customer chose, which means you’re subject to the rules of the road on that particular platform.

If that doesn’t work for you, the web allows you to set your own rules — within the bounds of local law and regulation — and ask your potential user, player, or customer for data that they are willing to share with you.

And, in fact, 19% of marketers said that asking for customer data was a key reason to go web to app. Another 14% said “side-stepping platform rules” was another key reason.

12. Web and app teams need to play nice with each other

If you want to make web-to-app mobile user acquisition work, your web team and your app team have to sync up on both the product side (to get measurement technology set up) and the marketing side (to align on costs, revenues, ROI, and ROAS) and the data side (to connect all the dots).

“The domains are different, the systems that they own might be different, the coding language to build these systems are often different,” Nadler says. “But what needs to persist is uniformity and lockstep of those web and native teams working together so that your customers, whether they’re coming in through web or they’re coming in through app, they expect and see the same experience.”

The customer experience is paramount.

Also important: connecting the data so that marketers on both sides have the visibility they need to know if they’re succeeding and/or improving.

13. Web or app … start with people first

The technology matters. The platform matters. The UX and UI matter.

But ultimately, it’s about understanding your audience.

“It always starts with audience targeting and audience comprehension,” says Kado. “The more you understand the audience, not just who they are statistically or where they are, but what their mindset is right now, a year from now, five years from now, whatever best fits with your product, the better you’re going to be at setting up those full-funnel strategies and meeting your acquisition goals.”

Once you’ve built that and have a good understanding of awareness, consideration, intent, acquisition, and conversion, you can really build the funnel experience and refine both your strategies and your creative, she adds.

Technology is important. But mobile marketers need to be marketers first.

14. Cheap is good, but …

Just because web-to-app acquisition might be cheaper than app-to-app acquisition doesn’t mean it’s a slam dunk win all the time. 

“You might see cheaper CPMs on web inventory but if it’s not equal or higher quality or incremental placement, it’s still going to get back down to what your CPA goals are and that’s going to be your go/no-go 10 times out of 10 when it’s direct response marketing,” DraftKings’ Nadler says. “No matter what you’re doing or where you’re buying media, if it’s not backing out to your CPA goals, you’re not going to spend.”

Cheap is good, but your web traffic also has to convert.

15. Get first-party data on the web

We touched on it above: 19% of marketers said that asking for customer data was a key reason to go web to app. Since you can, get critical first-party data when appropriate.

“Consent is the keyword here,” Nadler says. “[Web to app] provides you another opportunity to get the data that you need in a consent-based way.”

That could be an email address for a coupon code. That could be a mobile number to SMS when appropriate. Or it could be creating a full account and a link to log into it in-app.

The key is to do what you can to ensure you have first-party relationships with your users, players, or customers as much as possible, with no intermediaries in between.

16. Multiplatform users have higher retention rates

Everyone needs higher engagement and retention. 

While it’s correlation not causation, LinkedIn’s Kristin Kado says that multiplatform users have higher retention rates than web only or app only users.

“We’re a multi-screen society and our marketing campaign should reflect that,” Kado says. “Statistically, we know that users who have an app and a web presence have a higher retention rate. So that’s a really important nugget to hold on to.”

It makes sense: more engagement on more platforms indicates both more usage and more commitment. Whatever you can do to enhance this is only going to be beneficial long term.

17. SKAN 4 will help with web to app

SKAN 4 will bring its own challenges, no doubt. But it will help on iOS with web to app marketing campaigns.

“With iOS 16, there’s still a lot to be unpacked, a lot of understanding and adoption from the larger landscape,” says Singular’s Savath. “But with SKAN 4, there’s support for web ads to mobile app install measurement. And that’s compelling because you have web ads that have more streamlined conversion rates.”

Streamlining is critical, because each step in a marketing process or funnel runs the risk of losing people and reducing conversion rates. SKAN 4 will offer more granular insights into web to app measurement without that risk.

So much more in the full webinar

Yes, there is actually more in the full webinar, and yes, it’s still worth watching and enjoying. Panelists Liz Emery from Tinuity, Kristin Kado from LinkedIn, Josh Nadler from DraftKings, Brian Hedrick from Liftoff, and Victor Savath from Singular offer many more insights into how to drive web-to-app and app-to-web marketing strategies.

They also answer audience questions live, driving more insight. And finally, each sums up their own best takeaways on web to app user acquisition.
Check it out right here.

Don’t get too excited. Don’t stop your SKAN 4 preparations (and yes, Singular’s latest SDK is out and SKAdNetwork 4.0 ready). But Google just teased a due date for Privacy Sandbox for Android, and that’s something to prepare for as well.

Not quite as good as Christmas, but hey: that’s why they call it work.

Like predicted due dates for most newborns, the arrival time frame is not very precise. Privacy Sandbox for Android will start rolling out “early next year,” we’re told:

“Beginning early next year we plan to roll out the initial Privacy Sandbox Beta to Android 13 mobile devices, so that developers can take the next steps in testing these new solutions.”

That probably doesn’t mean January. It likely means February or March, while April would be stretching the definition of “early next year” perhaps just a bit too much. So while there’s no huge urgency to be Privacy Sandbox ready tomorrow — and this is just an initial release, remember — this is a wakeup call that the upheaval we’ve seen on the iOS side of the mobile advertising ecosystem will at some point be joined by additional change on the Android side.

What will you have to do with Privacy Sandbox for Android in 2023?

Full arrival and industry-wide implementation is not happening in 2023.

Google provided an initial 2-year timeline on the deprecation of the GAID back in February of this year, and if Google manages to stick with that, we’re looking at a full implementation of Privacy Sandbox for Android in early 2024. But if we take delays on the deprecation of the third-party cookie as a sign, it could be later.

And, as we’ve seen with SKAdNetwork, arrival of the tech doesn’t mean instant adoption.

But that doesn’t mean there’s nothing to be done.

For starters, be in the know and be aware of what’s happening. Check out resources like …

• Our deep dive into the initial Google announcement 
• 7 things you need to know about PSA
• How Google sees the MMP role evolving
• How Privacy Sandbox for Android assigns credit for clicks and conversions
• An early look at integration challenges
• How Topics API will work
• How the SDK Runtime will work
• How FLEDGE — Privacy Sandbox’s method of doing retargeting — will function
• And more …

But it’s not just about Android. You also need to prep on iOS.

That might sound insane, but Android has been filling a gap for iOS marketers for some time now: creative optimization, targeting insight, campaign optimization, channel selection. When marketers couldn’t get data from iOS, some turned to an Android-first strategy with which they inform — though not clone — their iOS strategy.

That is eventually going away, and that has implications.

If you’re not good at SKAdNetwork yet, it is fast becoming a competitive imperative to figure it out. And with SKAN 4 now here and slowly working its way through the complexities of the supply, demand, and exchange components of the mobile adtech ecosystem, there’s never been a more important time to buckle down and make it happen. SKAN can be predictive, it can enable optimization, and it can drive profitable growth, but you need the right technology to model missing data to enable it.

(You are not alone here: Singular can help.)

Ultimately, what you’re doing is preparing for a future without device identifiers. And that requires a different approach.

Now is a good time to begin your hybrid measurement journey

We’ve said that hybrid measurement is the future of marketing measurement. 

In a nutshell, it’s a simple recognition that due to SKAdNetwork, Privacy Sandbox for Android, GDPR, California Consumer Privacy Act, deprecation of the third-party cookie and more, there are fewer tracking-based attribution signals to power marketing measurement. Without them, we have to use platform technologies like SKAdNetwork and Privacy Sandbox for Android (and for web).

But since these technologies drive privacy via strategic data obfuscation or censorship, marketers have to bolster platform-derived signals with additional data: spend, delivery, privacy-safe granular data, revenue, first-party data, and more. In addition, marketers need to add methodologies to the last-click attribution models that have largely driven mobile marketing spend — and much non-mobile digital spend as well — over the past decade.

That’s MMM and others, potentially.

Now is a good time to open Pandora’s box and see inside. The view, I think, is simultaneously daunting and reassuring. Daunting because change is hard, and because we’re going to be replacing perceived certainty with known fuzziness. Reassuring because life (and work, and optimization, and measurement, and growth) will go on, truthiness will supplant supposed “truth” in marketing measurement, and we’ll ultimately get better global measurement than a last-click, last-touch winner-takes-all measurement methodology.

We literally know last-click doesn’t make a ton of sense, but we’ve used it for lack of anything better.

Now, there’s the opportunity for better.

And, conveniently or inconveniently, the necessity as well.

Media mix modeling or marketing mix modeling is a sea change in the once-cozy world of mobile attribution. Arising from the ashes of device identifier-centric marketing measurement, MMM takes the opposite approach. Rather than track the digital footsteps of people seeing and clicking on ads, MMM looks at top-of-funnel marketing inputs and the bottom-of-funnel conversions, and attempts to draw causal connections between the two.

It’s the hot new thing in mobile marketing: 75% of mobile marketers are either doing MMM, thinking about doing MMM, or actively preparing to do MMM right now, according to the (admittedly somewhat biased) attendees of our recent MMM webinar.

And it has the huge benefit of being completely privacy safe, requiring no user, customer, or player information to function.

But how does it work?

And what do you need to get started?

Answering those questions is precisely why Singular is releasing a Media Mix Modeling kickstarter guide. Download it today to ignite your team’s path to understanding MMM and what it might be able to do for you.

The Singular media mix modeling guide

The Singular media mix modeling guide shares actionable insights in 6 key areas:

1. What is MMM?
2. Why is everyone talking about MMM right now?
3. What do I need to get started with MMM?
4. Key tips: making MMM work for you
5. Setting expectations: what MMM will not do
6. Getting started: where to begin

It includes insights from Meta’s head of marketing science, Igor Skokan, Tinuiti’s VP of mobile and adtech Liz Emery, RocketShip HQ’s Shamanth Rao, and Singular co-founder and CTO Eran Friedman. 

The bad news: media mix modeling, or marketing mix modeling as some refer to it, is not a silver bullet. 

Guess what: neither was IDFA. Nor is GAID, or SKAdNetwork, or Privacy Sandbox for Android, or any other attribution technology and methodology.

The good news: using it well for what it’s designed to do has literally saved mobile marketing companies — not just big old CPG brands — hundreds of thousands of dollars by identifying incremental spend versus just another fishing pole in the same stream as all your other poles. Marketing mix modeling can also illuminate the impact of hard-to-track channels such as CTV/streaming, and offline marketing.

Get started: grab the guide

Hopping on the media mix modeling train isn’t a one-stop journey. It’s going to take some time, some effort, and a significant amount of clean, usable data. Singular’s guide won’t do all of that for you.

But it will highlight where to start, how to begin, and offer some expert tips on how to set up media mix modeling that you can trust to provide valuable insights. And it will show how MMM is a key part of the the hybrid measurement strategy that will be the foundation of marketing measurement in the age of privacy.

Perhaps even more valuable, Singular’s MMM guide will share what you should NOT expect media mix modeling to do: what it is not designed for, and what it will not deliver. That will help you not only level-set expectations for your team, but also help you define use-cases that make sense for different teams and different roles in your organization.
Get the free guide today.

The Twitter that Elon Musk bought is almost entirely ad-supported. That ad revenue — $5 billion in full-year 2021 — is now at risk due to advertiser angst at Musk, his pace of change, and missing human talent. But could Musk make it all back with a subscription product and change Twitter from a primarily ad-supported business to a primarily subscription-driven social media site?

Let’s run the numbers …

We’ll base them on the last quarter we have good public data for, Q2 2022. (There’s some value in looking at full-year 2021 data, but the numbers are not clean due to a one-time $810 million shareholder lawsuit settlement.)

Those Q2 numbers:

• Monetizable users: 237,800,000
• Revenue: $1,180,000,000
• Costs: $1,520,000,000
• ARPU: $4.96

Scenario 1, subscriptions only: 1 in 4 current Twitter users becomes a paying subscriber

Hold your disbelief for a moment, but Musk needs 64 million subscribers at an average of $8/month to say Sayonara to ad revenue.

Let’s start with Q2 revenue of about $1.2 billion, which requires just under 50 million subscribers.

That’s 20% of the 238 million monetizable userbase as of now. There’s other users, but Twitter has either considered them so occasional or so fake as to not be worth advertisers’ dollars. In aggregate, the monetizable users generated quarterly revenue of $1.2 billion, meaning that each monetizable Twitter account has an average revenue per user of just under $5/quarter.

But there’s another problem.

Costs for the quarter were high.

And in fact, historically Twitter’s costs have always been high: the company was founded in 2006 but made its first profit for the fiscal year 2018, and was not profitable last year (although that included a one-time litigation-related net charge of $765.7 million).

In Q2 2022, the last quarter we’ll have publicly verifiable information for, Twitter had quarterly costs of just under $5.6 billion, meaning a daily shortfall of over $6 million dollars. But Elon Musk recently tweeted that Twitter was losing $4 million per day, so perhaps the previous management had already found some efficiencies.

Regarding Twitter’s reduction in force, unfortunately there is no choice when the company is losing over $4M/day.

Everyone exited was offered 3 months of severance, which is 50% more than legally required.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 4, 2022

That adds $360 million worth of expense that Twitter subscribers would have to make up, in this scenario. Which adds 15 million more people at $8/month, for a total subscriber base on just over 64 million.

Still suspending your disbelief?

I know: it’s hard. YouTube, for example, just hit 80 million music and premium subscribers, but that’s for a company that is an absolute juggernaut in terms of users. About 2.6 billion people use YouTube at least monthly, and as I’ve researched previously, people who use YouTube often spend a long time on YouTube. Global annual revenue estimates for YouTube are in the $30 billion range, about 6X Twitter’s revenue.

So could an Elon Musk-led Twitter do it?

Is it possible for Twitter to go from almost no subscription revenue (there’s almost no public information about uptake so far, but Twitter said the revenue was not material in a 2021 earnings update) to a massive billions-of-dollars subscription giant basically overnight?

It’s hard to imagine, especially as some are exiting Twitter (or loudly threatening — on Twitter —  to exit). But maybe there are other scenarios. 

Scenario 2, subscriptions + ads: 1 in 10 Twitter users subscribes

A much more likely scenario is that Musk works to beef up Twitter’s subscription revenue while at the same time keeping ads. Twitter users who subscribe get half the ads, he’s suggested, while presumably the others keep the full ad load.

That’s a smart plan because it doesn’t put the burden of funding the entire enterprise on a small fraction of the users: everyone contributes. Some with cash, some with attention.

One option: half as many Twitter users actually subscribe as is necessarily in a fully subscription revenue model. In this model — still very aggressive (some might say delusional) for number of subscribers, Twitter actually makes about 50% more revenue: almost $1.8 billion. And that includes almost $600 million in subscription revenue.

Note, I’ve suggested that even at a 50% ad load, Twitter subscribers would be a significantly more valuable audience than just average Twitter users. One, they have money, and two, they’re hard-core users of the site. That means:

1. They’re more valuable for advertisers
2. They use the site more, so even at a 50% ad load, they probably still see more ads than other Twitter users
3. With half the ads, the ads that remain are significantly more impactful, thanks to reduced ad blindness 

Still, a 10% subscription rate is extremely aggressive. Even YouTube, which has huge value to deliver in YouTube music and a galaxy full of short and long-form content to consume, has about a 3% subscription rate, given 2.6 billion users and 80 million subscribers.

Let’s see what 5% gives us:

Interesting! A 5% subscription rate still provides a very nice near-$300 million in quarterly revenue, plus the $60 million in ad revenue from subscribers and the big chunk: $1.1 billion from non-subscribers who still see a full ad load.

Let’s be honest: even a 5% subscription rate for $8/month and almost $100/year is a massive stretch. It’s extremely unlikely. It would be an incredible achievement. It might take years.

But … perhaps … it is possible.

Confounding variables

Note, there are plenty of confounding variables here that can significantly impact any of this math.

One is advertiser appetite for selling on Twitter. Advertisers have been pulling back on Twitter spend simply due to a certain level of Elon-inspired chaos. Two major agencies, Interpublic Group and Havas Media have advised clients to “temporarily pause their paid advertising on Twitter.” That’s a risk on ad revenue, which is still hugely important with almost any reasonably possible level of subscription revenue. The likelihood is that as the dust settles and the Musk era of Twitter starts to approach a level of normalcy, they’ll come back. But there are no guarantees.

Also, when you drop close to half of your staff, as Twitter did when Musk snapped his Thanos-gloved fingers and 3,700 Tweeps lost their jobs, two things happen:

1. Your costs drop a lot (but not immediately)
2. Your capabilities decrease (but unpredictably)

I haven’t factored in savings in the above calculations because it’s unclear how much Twitter spent on them. In 2021, Twitter spent about $3 billion on R&D, sales and marketing, and G&A. How much of that was salary? I don’t know. How much of that salary will be saved? Hard to say. What you can say is that firing costs — and yes, there is a class action lawsuit from Twitter workers coming — mean Twitter may not see short term savings, though of course the company likely will in the long run.

But what losses in capability does Twitter now have?

Is the platform more likely to get hacked? Will it be less stable? Are there fewer ad sales and customer service people? Will Twitter be less able to develop compelling new ad products?

All good questions that we’ll learn more about in the coming months and quarters.

Summing up

Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter is one of those sea changes that makes you think of the iconic quote at the beginning of the Lord of the Rings: “The world has changed. I see it in the water. I feel it in the Earth. I smell it in the air.”

And Twitter is an important platform for advertisers.

Sure, it’s particularly important for brand advertisers — 85% of revenue as of 2020, though that has likely changed somewhat in the years since —  but it’s also a platform that many performance advertisers have used to good effect. Twitter ranked 10th in Singular’s 2022 ROI Index, ranking in no fewer than 19 of our various geographical, vertical, and platform top lists.

That means advertisers have a stake in how the platform develops under its new owner. There’s a huge amount of turmoil around the company right now, and advertisers — especially big brand advertisers — don’t tend to like turmoil and controversy.

The good news for Musk is that there is a potential path to a mixed model of revenue from both ads and subscriptions for Twitter. But it is not an easy one. Even at just a 1% conversion rate, the revenue from subscriptions would be only $60 million per quarter and just under a quarter of a billion dollars annually.

That’s nothing to sneeze at, sure.

But if that’s all that Twitter gets — and 1% is not an easy goal! — it shows how important it is for Elon Musk to prioritize making Twitter a safe and effective platform for advertisers, who would need to make up the multi-billion-dollar shortfall in revenue.

One thing we can say about Twitter right now: it’s at least interesting.

It won’t be shocking or controversial to many in the mobile growth industry that user/customer/player acquisition is getting tougher. Nor will it be controversial to suggest that keeping more of the users you do acquire via better mobile user retention is a good solution to spending a queen’s ransom on mobile user acquisition and continually, repeatedly, agonizingly losing 95% of them every single month.

Ouch.

Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results is one definition of insanity, according to Albert Einstein.

So finding a way to keep 10 out of every hundred new people who install your app instead of just 5 is a pretty attractive proposition, no? Especially in a post App Tracking Transparency world, where finding and acquiring new users is harder than ever.

User acquisition is tough because the attention economy is a zero-sum game

If someone’s playing your competitor’s game, they’re not playing yours. And even if all of us mobile thumb-flipping zombies are spending 5 hours a day on our phones, it doesn’t mean 10 minutes of that can automatically be allocated to your app.

“Even if we install around 80 apps, we just use maybe 20 or less per month,” says di Nunzio. “And actually many users, they just use one app and they use one app on a daily basis … and this first spot is already taken. Sorry, guys. Facebook, YouTube, Snapchat … it’s really hard to compete with those giants.”

A particularly painful challenge in mobile user retention: 75% of the people who install an app never make it past the first day.

They may not even open your app.

Or they may open it once, like I did with an app last week after a (probably expensive) Apple Search Ads click, and then decide the App Store listing wasn’t upfront enough about what functionality the app has by default, and what you actually have to pay for.

You know how your app gets an instant delete?

Don't be upfront about your monetization model in the App Store.

Surprise me with it on first open.

BOOM, gone.

There are a thousand other options, baby.

— John Koetsier (@johnkoetsier) November 3, 2022

There are, after all, millions of apps, and only a finite number of minutes in each of our days.

“A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention,” says di Nunzio, quoting a 1971 (!!!) quote from Herbert Simon, the developer of attention economics.

Mobile user retention via proactive engagement: onboarding

So what do you do?

It’s simply absolutely essential to have an intelligently-designed onboarding experience.

“Mobile teams who proactively engage with consumers … they see double [retention] rates compared to industry average,” says di Nunzio. “And 90% of consumers, if they come back once a week, they will stick around.”

The number one mistake he sees: poor onboarding experiences that lead to poor mobile user retention. The worst, according to di Nunzio, is the typical product walkthrough you see in so many apps, with 1, 2, 3 or more labeled steps that you tap through: here’s where you do X, here’s where you do Y, and here’s where …

“We call this feature dumping,” di Nunzio told me.

The trick to avoiding that is to really clearly identify the core reason a new user has installed your app and home in on that specific thing only. Your app might do 5 things or 105 (maybe it’s a super app?) but there’s one core reason TODAY why a real live human being tapped one of your ads or searched for a keyword and then made that magical decision to install.

Understanding this key initial psychological driver and creating clever ways to know or at least assume what it is will boost initial time in your app, which will drive engagement, which will boost retention.

None of this means you can’t tell new users about additional features and capabilities. 

Just don’t do it right away.

“We have a bunch of the super apps globally, especially in Latin America and Asia,” di Nunzio told me. “We work with some of them and what we find out is, onboarding is clearly complicated for them because they offer so many things. You can shop, you can book an Uber, whatever, right? So if someone comes to my super app because they’re interested in second-hand shopping, the onboarding process should cover that part. That’s it. I’m interested in that. Offer me the value.”

But you have more to offer?

Sure.

Tell them about that too. But tell them next week.

“If then I have also food delivery or other things …  I can present the future step by step, like in a second time, third time, or whatever is the right time for it. When we bombard users with different messages, the result is just confusion, and at the end, I will abandon the app: it doesn’t do what it promised.”

Also bad for mobile user retention: too many opt-in asks, including ATT

Another bad practice: immediately asking for the ability to track users. (I just changed phones, requiring a re-download of all my apps, and I literally see some of the biggest apps do this.)

“We are obsessed with opt-ins today,” di Nunzio says. “But this just creates noise.”

Worse, it’s noise that is essentially asking for a favor before we’ve preemptively and proactively been helpful first, and done a favor or 2 or 10 for our new users or players. 

Much better: wait until an occasion comes up natively and naturally in the process of using your app where it makes sense to ask for the ability to send a push notification (a delivery is coming) or enable live activities (the game is on) or say yes to ATT (ads that don’t suck).

“Everything starts from the proper onboarding,” di Nunzio says. “And then moves into right message, right time, right channel … it seems really easy [but] is extremely complicated, especially today where users are not really willing to share their data easily.”

And much more in the podcast …

ATT and (eventually) losing both third-party cookies and GAID means mobile growth pros need to keep more of what they find. There’s so much more to share from our conversation, but you’ll have to watch the video or listen to the podcast to get it all.

Subscribe to Growth Masterminds on YouTube and or the audio podcast on a variety of the top podcasting platforms.

SKAN 4 is here. Now what are you going to do about it?

I’ve seen such a range of opinion from the marketing community about SKAN 4. Most are happy there’s more measurement. Most are happy there’s more detail. Most are happy there’s more clarity. But most are also still trying to figure it all out. Many are poring over small details in the documentation looking for answers to questions that don’t seem obvious. And some are just reeling from all the complexity.

So Singular CEO Gadi Eliashiv and I spent an hour live on LinkedIn last week going over SKAN 4 in detail and taking marketers’ questions on the updated SKAdNetwork framework:

• What’s new
• What’s good
• What’s confusing
• What’s unfortunate
• And yes, what’s ugly

Watch the video above to get everything (or subscribe to our Growth Masterminds podcast to get it in audio form.)

Here are a few highlights …

First, the positive on SKAN 4

There’s a lot to like about the new SKAdNetwork version 4, as we covered in detail in our first post, as well as our Singular product updates post:

• More postbacks (!!!)
• More data in the first postback (potentially)
• At least some data even if you have very low numbers per campaign
• A pretty powerful new Source Identifier
• Web to app capability (but only for Safari)
• More clarity around crowd anonymity
• Earlier postbacks via locking conversion values

There’s a lot to keep straight in SKAN 4. Here’s a chart that helps you kind of see it all at once:

The interesting challenge of SKAN 4 is an amplification of the same one in SKAN 3: balancing granularity with experimentation.

Maximizing granularity, or the amount of data you get from each conversion and install, requires concentration: focusing resources on a limited number of partners and campaigns to ensure you achieve Tier 2 or Tier 3 amounts of data return from SKAdNetwork. But finding the best sources, targeting, partners, and creative requires experimentation around all of 3 of those important factors.

Finding the right balance between the two needs will be critical.

But there’s still some ugly, too

There’s still debate in the mobile marketing community over exactly what certain sentences or paragraphs in the SKAN 4 documentation mean under real-world conditions, and we won’t really have a sense for what kinds of volume define the tiers until app publishers are running ads at scale.

Here are some of the key challenges in SKAN 4:

• Time: it’s going to take months for the ecosystem to support
• Work: all the partners in the mobile adtech value chain have some work to do, especially ad networks who now have to figure out how to optimize campaigns based on this new reality … just months after some of them kinda figured it out on SKAN 3
• Confusion: many will be dealing with multiple versions of SKAN in the wild, requiring support for SKAN 3 and SKAN 4
• Other mysteries: some things we won’t know for a long time. One example: exactly how do the crowd anonymity tiers work, and what volume will marketers need to drive to get maximum data?

Living in a SKAN 3 version of a SKAN 4 world?

It’s actually interesting when you think about it: if you don’t care about the richer data that SKAN 4 has to offer, could you essentially live in a SKAN 3 version of SKAN 4?

In other words, if you totally didn’t care about aggregating volume in source IDs, you’d basically get what SKAN 3 was giving you:

• 1 postback
• A 2 digit source identifier
• At Tier 0 of crowd anonymity

The question is: would this offer more data at lower data volumes than the existing SKAN 3? One of the presumptions in the mobile marketing community, based on some extrapolation of what Apple has said, has been that Apple wanted to provide more data at low volumes, as well as significantly more when higher volumes protecting consumer privacy justified it. 

So it could — I emphasize could — be the case that you’d get more data in SKAN 4 without really trying anything different than you did in SKAN 3.

It’s unlikely that many advertisers will adopt a strategy like this, and we’ll know more about required volumes for data as Apple’s new attribution framework grows in the wild. More data is better, generally.

But some might be tempted …

One thing is guaranteed: it’s now more complicated

The goal at Singular is to abstract all of the complexity and just let marketers do their jobs. But while it will get simpler, that’s is literally an impossible task. 

Just having more postbacks means you’ll now need to think of additional events in your app to report on. And having the possibility of getting both fine and coarse values for postback 1 means you’ll need a conversion schema to sync up fine and coarse values into a single understandable and actionable framework of KPIs and value.

Something like this, for example:

Plus, you’re now able to lock conversion values. That’s a positive, and gets you data earlier, but it also spreads cohorts over more time. Which, of course, are already being elongated by the now-much-longer random timers for getting your postbacks after their conversion windows: up to 6 days.

Talk to us

So: how are you feeling about mobile marketing, advertising, measurement, and attribution since Apple announced SKAdNetwork 4 last week? If you’re looking for some insight, guidance, or advice, we’re happy to help.

Book some time, and you’ll have an expert on call.

It isn’t every day that you decide to acquire a massive ad network and its competitor puts its hand up and says: “Hey, you should have picked us.”

But of course that’s exactly what happened when Unity announced its intention to acquire ironSource in July. AppLovin submitted a proposal to combine with Unity in a deal ultimately worth $20 billion where Unity shareholders would ultimately own more of the combined entity, but represent 49% of the voting rights.

Riccitiello’s response?

“Well, you know, it’s wonderful to be loved by everyone.”

That said, in a space full of mergers and even more full of the knowledge of the massive value of first-party data in an App Tracking Transparency world, there’s huge potential value in pairing advanced ad network capabilities with massive platforms. And since Unity’s software is the superstructure underneath 70% of the world’s top 1,000 mobile games and literally half of all games made for mobile, PC, and console, Unity is a massive platform. Even if it’s not exactly constructed in the same way Google, Snap, Twitter — or even Apple with the App Store — are.

But advertising capability is not all Unity sees in ironSource, which it told AppLovin it was sticking with.

A big chunk of the value is in Supersonic.

“There’s a technology that they have there around their Supersonic publishing platform that enables a developer or a publishing organization to get better, detailed, nuanced feedback around player engagement before they release the game, and more so than you’d get from typical A/B testing,” Riccitiello says. “A key part of the thesis is making those technologies available more broadly to Unity developers. And remember, in mobile … that’s 74% of them.”

In other words, monetization is important.

And user acquisition is important.

But building a better product — a game that both captures player attention in the short term and keeps players engaged over the long term — is critical. Without that, nothing else matters. No amount of UA fills a bucket that doesn’t hold anything. And without engagement, there’s no monetization. Which might be OK for an indie developer, but doesn’t pay many salaries at a typical studio.

The ironSource acquisition, Riccitiello suggests, helps on the monetization front from all angles.

“A combination of analytics and advertising is one way to get paid,” he says. “More engagement means more hours of play, which means more revenue for a game developer. And, better targeted ads means getting paid more. And then the ability to use our network to find users that would play their game, meaning they could target their ads better. Those are all good things. And so, part of the ironSource deal is it enables us to do that bigger and better on behalf of our customers.”

One of the places in which Unity plans to do that is multiplayer games, which have seen a post-Covid boom. 

A recent Unity reports says that while during Covid, multiplayer game development was down — perhaps due to challenges in making sophisticated games while geographically separated — in 2022 there’s been a 40% jump in multiplayer mobile games and a massive 150% jump in console-based multiplayer games.

And that drives monetization, according to Unity: core gamers that play multiplayer games are 58% more likely to spend money — $ or more — on extra downloadable content than others.

That might be due to a long pent-up craving for socialization, Riccitiello says.

“It should be no surprise to us that the world’s first truly global pandemic in a century had an impact on us … it was a big deal and it’s affected everything.”

But also, it’s just simply more satisfying to play against real human opponents (or with real human team members). Which is why, across the board, around 55-70% of gamers played single-player PvP games, especially in Battle Royale, Fighting, Racing, and Sports genres. And around the same percentage played team-based player versus player games. Team based PvE (player versus environment) is the least popular game mode, Unity found.

“You can play against the computer and that’s satisfying to a degree, but there’s something … it’s hard to explain, but there’s an essence that is fundamentally different when you’re playing with another live opponent,” Riccitiello says. “[Software] got smarter and the AI definitely got smarter … but that ultimately gave way to the reality that playing against another human was infinitely more unpredictable.”

It doesn’t hurt monetization either.

“Once you’re playing against another human, putting up a buck to get a little bit of an advantage … if the advantage is nothing but livery so my dance is cooler, right? My avatar is cooler. That’s worth the buck. And so, multiplayer gaming is definitely an aspect of this [that increases what] people are going to spend on in-app purchases, I think.”

Engaging with real people is also what Riccitiello sees as a core component of the emerging metaverse, which he says is the next version of the internet: real-time, 3D, persistent, and interactive.

Gaming is a good glimpse of what that metaverse will actually look like, he says.

“We have a glimpse of that already in … Roblox and Fortnite … they’re 3D, they’re real-time, they’re persistent, and they’re massively enjoyed by audiences around the world.”

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