Record-breaking 134 billion downloads in 2021 have made mobile app market one of the fastest growing industries. According to Statista, the numbers are going to get even higher in the next years, making it very difficult for every app to stand out in this overcrowded market.
Therefore, mobile app growth is what app developers and advertisers need in order to face the cut-throat competition and grow their app user base while generating revenues too. Mobile app growth includes both organic and paid efforts to boost the number of users, increase the retention rate and generate in-app revenues by targeting and acquiring high-LTV users.
What is Mobile App Growth
Mobile app growth refers to all the actions aimed at increasing an app user base and its overall business. Indeed, it can combine organic activities such as App Store Optimization (ASO) with paid ones like app install campaigns and performance marketing. While app store optimization, which aims to improve the ranking of your app in the app store with a SEO-like strategy, can help increase organic installs, paid user acquisition is essential to scale your app users base with high-quality users.
Mobile App Growth has seen a significant increase in Ad Spend by advertisers in recent years, with a projected ad spend over 100 billion dollars at the end of 2022. These numbers reflect the advertisers’ need to achieve a sustainable growth, fueled by both installs and in-app revenues.
Design a highly effective app growth strategy
In order to make the most out of your budget you need to design in advance an overall app growth strategy. First of all, you should know exactly who your app users are in order to target them efficiently. Then, it is essential to know what works and what doesn’t within the app itself, improve the least review features and release updates to fix what the audience doesn’t like.
Furthermore, advertisers can leverage more than one channel in their app growth strategy and each of them has different purposes and effects. Social media, PR and promotions can all increase brand awareness and make the app more popular to the target audience. At the same time, programmatic partners such as ad networks and DSPs deal more specifically with paid user acquisition and app install campaigns to drive mobile app growth.
Organic Mobile App Growth
Organic user acquisition refers to installs not generated by advertising activities like app campaigns. An install is defined as organic when the user downloads and installs the app driven by his own desire, without being influenced by marketing actions. These installs can be driven by multiple reasons like word of mouth or even a simple search in the app store.
In this respect, app store optimization is the most known organic technique for mobile app growth. ASO works mostly like SEO for web searches and aims at improving the listing of your app in the search results within the app store, be it Google Play Store or Apple’s App Store. Keywords, descriptions and ratings/reviews all affect the listing in the app store and can be improved by the advertisers. Conventional wisdom claims that a higher ranking in the app store search results can lead to a higher number of installs and a significant growth in the app user base.
Paid User Acquisition for Mobile App Growth
As stated above, paid user acquisition is essential to your mobile app growth in order to scale your app user base and increase your revenues too. The advantage of app install campaigns over the other mobile user acquisition channels is the better optimization towards business KPIs such as user retention rate, return on ad spend (ROAS) and average revenue per user (ARPU) amongst others.
Marketing partners, especially programmatic ones, can run app campaigns needing only a budget, some creatives, goals and general targeting criteria. Then, they either provide a self-serve platform to run the app campaigns with or, their team takes care of everything, from campaign set-up to the optimization process. Indeed, Mapendo is a fully managed DSP with a team of expert advertisers ready to run your app install campaigns and deliver meaningful results.
To learn more about what a fully managed DSP is don’t miss our article https://mapendo.co/blog/demand-side-platforms-what-is-is-how-does-it-work!
Programmatic app install campaigns have benefits starting with their extremely sophisticated targeting capabilities. Indeed, they can target users based on location, operating system version, device model, internet connection and many other criteria. In addition, DSPs like Mapendo leverages proprietary machine learning algorithms in order to analyze contextual dimensions and optimize app campaigns towards any advertiser’ KPI, from user LTV to ROAS and post-install events such as in-app purchase or subscription, to name a few.
Finally, app install campaigns are usually performance-based, meaning that advertisers are going to pay only for concrete results as installs, with a cost-per-install (CPI) model or in-app events, with a cost-per-action (CPA) model. This way advertisers avoid paying for traffic which only sees the ad but does not carry out the desired advertising action.
Why Mobile App Growth Is Important
- Mobile App growth focuses on both growing app user base and increasing revenues;
- Advertisers need an effective app growth strategy to stand out in the mobile app ecosystem;
- Organic and paid channels are both part of mobile app growth;
- App Store Optimization (ASO) improves apps’ ranking inside app store in order to increase organic installs;
- In the past few years, advertisers have gradually shifted their ad spend towards paid user acquisition activities.
- Paid user acquisition relies heavily on app install campaigns and programmatic advertising;
- Programmatic app campaigns can be optimized towards installs and post-install events aligned with business KPIs such as ARPU and ROAS.
About us
Mapendo is a tech platform for app user acquisition. We are a fully managed DSP, which runs machine learning powered CPI/CPA app campaigns. We help mobile apps acquire high-quality users at scale with programmatic traffic. Our ads reach 300 million people in the US every day and generated 1 million conversions for our clients in the last quarter.
