A 2022 Guide To Success For App Marketers

India has witnessed a remarkable boom in its app economy in 2021, encompassing growth in various categories like finance, travel, gaming, OTT, eCommerce, and food & drinks. Several factors like high internet penetration rate, growing smartphone usersi, and increased mobile usage have led India to become the fastest growing app market globally.

Growth has been driven by Tier-2 and Tier-3 internet users

With a decreasing gap between the percentage of urban and rural active internet users, the past two years’ growth was also driven by increased app usage among tier 2 and 3 cities. Ban on Chinese apps, in early 2021, accelerated the creation and penetration of domestic apps in India. The impressive shift of a large user base of the popular short-form content app TikTok to domestic apps bore witness to this change. In addition, app developers’ concentrated efforts drove almost 60-62 per cent of users from tier-2 cities and beyond to these home-grown platforms. Further, eCommerce in India witnessed an uptick of 77 per cent between 2020 and 2021, with users from tier-2 and tier-3 cities transacting more than ever. The regional markets also increasingly embraced fintech, entertainment, and gaming categories.

Rising challenges with the growing app economy

The sharp growth in the Indian app economy vis-à-vis installs and downloads has also led to a few challenges, the most common being mobile ad fraud. Of the total e-Commerce app installs during the peak sale season in October 2021, 50 per cent were fraudulent. The increase in mobile ad spend along with the complexity of today’s digital ad ecosystem has created a wider playing field for fraudsters, making mobile ad fraud the industry’s biggest threat. Besides this, the growing competition has resulted in the over-saturation of the app market. The instant availability of over 6 million apps has impacted the user engagement of even the successful apps over a period of time. Hence, focusing on user acquisition and retention strategies while ensuring fraud protection will continue to be of utmost importance to marketers.

The implication of privacy push on the app market

Apple’s ATT updates in spring 2021 have left the iOS growth marketers uncertain about the future. Steady user ‘opt-in’ rate for iOS 14.5+ - now at over 45 per cent in Indiavii has varied impacts on different app categories. Being an android heavy market, India may anticipate impending changes from Google as well. While the intensity of Google’s potential move is still unspecified, the definite aspect would be the ‘prioritization of consumer privacy.’ This means that trust and privacy have to be at the core of app development in the future, with transparency for users on how apps are utilizing their data to drive personalized experiences. App developers and marketers must use this time to evaluate Google’s likely move to plan and implement a privacy-first strategy to mitigate its impact.

Roadmap for the future of app marketing:

To strengthen a brand against these changes, marketers will need to invest in areas that are in their direct control. Tactics that worked yesterday may not work today and likely won’t work tomorrow. In such a scenario, what strategies do app marketers follow to run successful campaigns? The answer would be – constant innovation and optimization of marketing strategies

with a privacy-first approach. Against this backdrop, here are a few recommendations for app marketers to succeed in their marketing efforts in the upcoming year:

Focus on constant optimization: With limited user-level data, marketers will have to enhance their martech stack to measure, attribute, and optimize marketing activities. This can be done through increased utilization of predictive analytics, acquired expertise in SKAN—particularly optimizing conversion values and all-around innovation across the marketing ecosystem.

Reassessing ways to curb mobile ad fraud: In the dynamic fraud ecosystem, marketers will have to strike a balance between optimization of ad spends and brand protection. With growing spending on digital, determining the impact will be important to control fraud. As per the MMA India report, 62 per cent of all digital ad fraud occurs on mobile ads. Interestingly, at present there are three most prevalent forms of fraud — stats show that of the $25.8 billion lost, app install farms/SDK spoofing accounted for 42 per cent, click injection for 30 per cent, and click spam for 27 per cent. Hence, marketers must look for different ways to counter fraudulent activities, including incrementality tests (running “turn off” tests) to measure advertising outcomes in a given period.

Privacy-centric measurement: With increased focus on privacy, it has become imperative for businesses to innovate their privacy strategy. The key progress indicators of any marketing campaign, tracking, and measurement, seem very different when looked at from the constantly changing privacy lens. Marketers incur a 65 per cent higher cost of acquisition due to poor measurement. With a 12 - 34 per cent jump in less than five years, the share of digital in the total marketing budget is expected to scale up in the coming year. Hence, marketers need to modify their existing strategies to maximise ROI for positive business outcomes. One of the methods to improve marketing activities can be by leveraging data cleanroom technologies to create secure data collaboration within the ecosystem. As the mobile marketing ecosystem rapidly evolves, the need to transform measurement strategies will become even more important.

2021 has been a year of change showing us how one update could have such a vast impact on an entire ecosystem. With Google giving indications to jump on the privacy bandwagon, 2022 it’s going to be an exciting year that’ll present new challenges and opportunities for mobile marketers and developers. With the ever-evolving mobile landscape, app marketers will have to be nimble-footed to adapt to these constant changes.

*The author is Sanjay Trisal (General Manager, AppsFlyer INSEA/ANZ)

Sanjay Trisal

Guest Author Sanjay Trisal is the Country Manager, India at AppsFlyer. In this capacity, he is responsible for building AppsFlyer's business in India across all verticals and domains including acquiring more local customers, scaling up on existing clients and focussing on business growth through product, sales, support and technology while growing the team. Sanjay joined AppsFlyer from InMobi, a global mobile advertising company where he was head of sales for Latin America. His prior experience include stints with bluechip companies like Ingram Micro, Dell Computers and Ramco Systemswhere he has shown his leadership skills and exponential growth across enterprise and small & medium businesses.