The past couple of years have thrown curveball after curveball at mobile marketers. When the pandemic came along in 2020, marketers had to adjust rapidly to changing user behavior and expectations. They were forced to reimagine their strategies — putting new emphasis on how they could help customers — all while consumers became more mobile than ever before.
Suddenly people who had been fintech skeptics were forced to bank online, and people who never played a game were downloading them in droves (80 billion downloads to be exact). And then 2021 came along and, with the help of Apple, threw a whole new challenge at mobile marketers: App Tracking Transparency (ATT). Just as app growth marketers thought they had their feet on firm ground, it shifted again — and frankly, new challenges are probably coming down the road in 2022.
The future of probabilistic matching and other big questions
One of the biggest questions plaguing mobile marketers since ATT went into effect is whether or not Apple is going to disallow probabilistic matching. Without user-level identifiers available on iOS many marketers have started assigning campaign membership probabilities based on a user’s behavior.
For many marketers and their mobile measurement partners (MMPs), probabilistic has filled the gap in the wake of iOS 14.5+. If Apple were to disallow it, companies that have relied on this technique for most of 2021 would have to scramble to find a new strategy.
However, there are plenty of creative app marketers who are already thinking about growth in 2022, and how to measure and achieve your campaign’s success without identifiers.
Mobile marketing trends and tips for 2022
If one thing is certain, 2022 has more trends and surprises in store for app marketers. So we turned to the experts for a few predictions about what trends they think will impact growth strategies in the year ahead:
Nadir Garouche, User Acquisition Manager — “There are still many advertisers that struggle to measure the results of their campaigns since ATT has been enforced. This is the case especially where a big share of their install mix comes from mobile web (ie. Google search, YouTube web), which SKAN totally ignores. In that case, instead of waiting for the ad network to improve their modeling for measuring conversions, I recommend that you focus more on looking at blended ROAS or incrementality. Pause all networks but your main one during a stable period in terms of user monetization and check after a few weeks how your revenue vs. ad spend evolved, you’ll see much clearer numbers than what your ad network could have estimated.”
Alper Taner, App Growth Consultant — “Promo code based attribution will be a hot topic again as brands are able to track the activity in real-time through their backends based on the code usage despite this method’s downsides.” Promo codes have always been a way for brands to track the campaigns that work, and these time-tested
To hear more of what Nadir and Alper, as well as Dora Trostanetsky, Growth Marketing Lead at Trade Republic, have to say about developing a growth strategy in 2022, join them for MGS Special Editions on January 12 at 12 p.m. ET (or later, on-demand).
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