Brutal, flexible, global: How top marketers are unlocking outsized ROAS right now

How will you unlock outsized ROAS in your performance marketing campaigns? You stop playing it safe, you start going global, and you stay flexible about exactly how and where you are going to get your wins. At least, according to 5 experts who see thousands of campaigns and their results every week.

We recently asked 5 smart people in mobile marketing to share their top tips for boosting ROAS. (Check out our full conversation here.) 

And we also shared the result of our new Singular ROI Index, with unprecedented insights for winning in mobile marketing this year.

Here are the 5 experts:

• Rebecca Nzelle Ewang, MobileAction
• Beth Berger, Moloco
• Joseph Iris, Persona.ly
• Bartosz Pezinski, Liftoff
• Rachel Glazier, Reddit

Our goal: unpack what’s driving performance today, plus what’s going to matter tomorrow. Here’s a brief summary of what we learned …

Outsized ROAS: brutality & flexibility are driving advertising performance

For one, marketers are going from safe to surgical. 

Even brutal.

“Partners we’ve been working with for years that usually have stable budgets per month have started to be more brutal with their choices,” says Joseph Iris from Personal.ly. “ They’re doubling down on what works and they’re cutting down what doesn’t work completely. And this isn’t behavior we saw before.”

In other words: patience is a commodity in very limited supply in the performance marketing community in 2025.

Like, unobtainium limited.

But boosting ROAS isn’t just about making fast, brutal decisions to kill underperforming campaigns. It’s also about flexibility. It’s about being even more adaptable. UA and re-engagement budgets are increasingly fluid, shifting seasonally, monthly … even weekly.

“We also see differences between the balance of UA and reengagement budgets with parts of the year going for UA exclusively, parts of year are going to more reengagement,” Iris added. “Everything still becoming more expensive everywhere is forcing advertisers to be more flexible in their planning and the reaction times should be faster.”

Key takeaways:

• Shorten the leash on campaigns
• Once they’ve had enough spend or impressions to demonstrate performance, make a decision
• Kill underperforming campaigns, creative, hooks, CTAs
• Pivot to new options, but also new channels, new partners
• Try more
• Fail fast

Cheat code to boost ROAS: yes you can go global even at your size or budget

So your app is in English with maybe some AI-translated languages just in case, and you know you appeal more to American needs than, maybe, app users in Korea or Spain.

Doesn’t mean you need to limit your targeting via geo anymore.

“We’ve seen a shift towards globally focused campaigns and more user-level targeting like device language, even within broader geos,” says Bartosz Pezinski from Liftoff.

There are English speakers all over the globe, not just in the US, Canada, UK, NZ, or Australia. And they might be perfectly happy to use your app, watch ads in it, maybe subscribe to it.

Here’s the kicker:

Targeting them via device language is a cheat code for potentially super-cheap installs that are super-valuable. Think about it: maybe they’re digital nomads, earning a high salary from a western tech company while living cheap in Thailand or Portugal or the south of France.

Finding them via language is 1 thing; adding devices is another. Because, of course, device types are proxies for how wealthy someone is, and therefore for how likely they might be to buy, subscribe, or watch expensive ads.

Someone with the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold5, which retails for about $1,800 USD, is likely not very hard up for cash. Same with the iPhone 16 Pro Max, even if you find it in a low cost-of-living country.

Thing of the ROAS if you can acquire them for pennies compared to what it might cost in the U.S., or Korea, or Germany.

Incrementality can be your best friend when you need to put a rocket engine under your ROAS

Hey, we all love last-click. It largely built the wider performance marketing and mobile marketing industries as we know them. And it’s still super-useful.

But incrementality is a great way to over-deliver on ROAS.

And know that you did.

“It’s not enough to have ROAS,” says Beth Berger of Moloco. “It needs to be incremental ROAS. It’s not enough to get scale. It needs to be incremental scale.”

Berger’s calling out one of the biggest challenges that stunt rookies in performance marketing: surface-level metrics that look good but don’t actually reflect real business growth. A recent podcast guest on Growth Masterminds put it this way:

A pizza shop wanted to run a promo, so they paid kids to hand out coupons for 25% off pizza all over town, and they told the kids whoever’s coupons generated the most sales would win a prize. Turns out, 1 kid generated almost 90% of the sales.

So the manager asked him: what’d you do?

His answer was both genius and a gigantic face-palm:

“Stood outside the door and handed them to people walking in.”

Ouch.

Incrementality measures the net new value driven because of the ad spend. Instead of asking “did these ads play a role in the customer journey, incrementality asks “would these users have installed/subscribed/purchased if we didn’t advertise to them?”

Critical difference.

Key tools and strategies for boosting ROAS in 2025, according to the panel

It’s not 2020 anymore. The tech and tools are changing faster than ever.

Here’s what fueling ROAS growth in 2025, according to our experts:

• Generative AI for emotion-driven creative
• Custom Product Pages for iOS
• Tight alignment between ads and app listings
• Community-driven platforms like Reddit that reward authenticity
• Advanced machine learning models designed to optimize across multiple goals, not just installs
• App Store/Google Play campaigns that are aligned with ASO development
• Incrementality testing
• Machine learning and AI for better campaign optimization
• Reengagement … still relevant today (and still possible!)

YMMV, of course.

Find what works for you, but test changes every month or quarter.

So much more in the full webinar

There’s a ton more in the full webinar, including a sneak peak at Singular ROI Index for 2025. Get your copy here to see:

• The top-performing ad networks by ROI, scale, and growth
• The Singular ROI Quadrant: where value meets volume
• Breakout platforms like Moloco, Liftoff, Reddit, and Apple Search Ads
• First-ever ability to filter results by geo and app categories
• Insights into the rising wave of rewarded ad networks

Plus much more.

And of course go watch the full webinar to get all insights from all our panelists.