Mobile app marketing trends 2022

Data-hungry marketing teams have been put on a diet and everyone needs to adapt to using less data to make decisions. With this change, they went from needing a PhD data scientist back to ‘real marketers’ who focus on brand growth, incorporating awareness into performance marketing plans, measuring the incremental value of the conversion funnel, and crafting awesome creative ads with fewer data.

The skills required to run UA keep shifting as the typical media buyer tasks are being replaced by 3 core areas: creatives management as the primary performance lever, data science to interpret the complexity of measurement in a world with multiple but partial sources of truth, and the intersection of acquisition & product through onboarding & monetization experimentation. Many app marketers are also rediscovering the joys & pains of working on the web in parallel as it can be beneficial for a holistic marketing mix.

With iOS reporting-as-we-know-it broken for most part, thanks mainly to the idiosyncrasies of the SKAdNetwork timer and the opacity of Apple's privacy thresholds, marketers will become increasingly comfortable with measurement outside of SKAN - probabilistic measurement, modeled conversions - and incrementality. Of these methods, marketers will increasingly embrace the latter as a source of truth using methodologies that range from basic spreadsheet based models to more sophisticated statistical analyses.

User acquisition is losing influence within companies. Lots of businesses have been acquisition-driven, and performance sometimes rules marketing departments. Compared to other teams like PR, Product Marketing, and Brand, acquisition teams could easily demonstrate their impact on the business. Now we’ll have to work harder to persuade skeptical execs to spend that much money on ads and to hire more people.

Simply doing keyword optimizations is no longer an easy ticket to ASO growth. In modern ASO it is still important to optimize your keyword metadata, but more and more, the job of an ASO team shifts to managing other factors. In both stores, A/B testing or CRO has seen its level of importance over keyword optimization grow, and thankfully we now have proper tools to do so in Apple's Product Page Optimization and Custom Product Pages, and Google's Custom Store Listing. A/B testing or CRO has seen its level of importance over keyword optimization grow, and thankfully we now have proper tools to do so in Apple's Product Page Optimization and Custom Product Pages, and Google's Custom Store Listing.