MADV 005 - The time is now
Forget 2021: the mobile appocalypse already started in Q4
I have one goal in today’s episode: for you to click on the first link to read the long article I’ve written. A friendly warning, you may want to get a coffee first…
💥 IDFA0: the time is now
https://madv.substack.com/p/idfa0-the-time-is-now
A disruptive #longread to rethink your UA approach for Q4 & beyond, where I provide more details about the 💣 I dropped in MADV 004. I rarely post extensive articles, so your feedback is much welcome.
“TLDR: the mobile app installs ads reach on self-attributing networks is currently shrinking. Start adjusting your Q4 short term and 2021 mid-term strategy & mindset accordingly”. Read in full
🤳 More first-party content
I’m participating with Batch & Appsflyer to a webinar in French this Wednesday 18/11: “Optimiser l'engagement sur mobile en temps de crise”.
I’ll also take part of a Post-IDFA strategies panel (in English) with Andrea Raggi & Johannes von Cramon hosted on 26/11 by SplitMetrics
MADV’s friend Sylvain Gauchet has extracted, organized and summarized my recent subscription apps podcast with Eric Seufert in written, digestible chunks. Member-only link, otherwise head to growthgems.co
💀 More around the IDFA & changes in attribution
Still here and haven’t clicked above?
Despite the endless stream of coverage on the hottest topic in the industry, as a MADV friend puts it, “hardly anyone thinks enough about the associated train wrecks coming up.” Most advertisers & vendors are just as unprepared as in September.
Apple said to have finally fixed SKAdNetwork latest issues reported in MADV004, so maybe network can finally start testing how those conversion postbacks are looking…
“Contemplating the next 18 months of mobile advertising”: also directly related to the iOS ad app-pocalypse, the MDM podcast features David Philippson and Nebo Radovic on UA teams organization, media sources demand & the viability of programmatic. A big takeaway is the temporary pause on all automation efforts, to rethink attribution.
Last time I mentioned Facebook updated guidance for SKAdNetwork, which is critically important to get prepared, but as Eric & Nebo observe in the previous podcast: “we’ve heard literally nothing from Google. It’s really weird. It’s bizarre. Google has not even acknowledged that this is happening ... Google is just slow. It takes them forever to react to these things. There was that one generic press release and that was all”. It’s probably happening behind the scene. But besides Google’s usual practice of favoring big clients in private while leaving the rest of us in the dark, I’m on Eric on this : “part of it is just because there’s an opportunity which shuts down for them: Youtube view-through. There’s no workaround, we have no solution for that, it’s just gone”. Beyond UAC alone and its fundamental transparency issues, the death of impression-based attribution will totally change marketing performance perspective, and we’re back again to the same conclusion: incrementality measurement is the way forward.
Apple still hasn’t communicated how ASA will be tracked. Until now, the amount of LATon/off was disclosed within the UI, enabling some to run extrapolations on the untracked IDFA0 users, but since 21/10 there’s a gap between LATon+off and total conversions: iOS14’s LAT status doesn’t get disclosed anymore. Different rates of LAT on iOS14 make a second extrapolation dubious, be careful about reporting automation…
Adjust completed its article on how to get ATT opt-in and packaged it in a quite insightful pdf.
In the MDM Slack, someone has been reporting not even seeing any iOS14 attributed from Facebook, although this looks more of an edge case than an industry-wide observation. I’m awaiting confirmation.
My friend Thomas Benias did an overview of changes coming for various players in TheDrum.
Once you’ve read my IDFA0 piece above, you might be more interested in checking out this incoming webinar with Winclap on managing LAT campaigns.
📰 App marketing news, November 2020
Subclub, episode 3 features Jack Mor from FitnessAI on “Taking a Fitness App to Y Combinator and Beyond”. Great perspective about a vertical some say is saturated but keeps seeing innovation & new players.
A new website for ASO inspiration (hat tip Alemaya)
Apple to suggest apps to install in iOS14.3 during an iPhone setup? That’s what 9to5mac suggests. I wonder if there will be ASA placements there too.
iOS Apps available to run on desktop (with MacOS Big Sur & a M1 chip)
Appsflyer released a detailed report with 2020 gaming data. 2 interesting quick insights: paid installs grew 2x faster than organic installs this year. And While IAP was increasing significantly (+25%), in-app ads were dropping (-16%), even more so when looking at the US alone.
SensorTower also released their Q3 report (under a signup wall) listing top publishers in a selection of countries. US mobile game revenue reported at $5.8b, slightly down from Q2 huge numbers.
US elections have pushed news apps up (more on this on Appfigures blog, which also report a curious trend about Alexa). Oura is also reporting an average 1.4bpm heart rate increase and 139 millions sleep hours lost that day (More on this in Sifted).
ConsumerAcquisition keeps releasing valuable content, with a new piece on Creative Optimization. By the way, if some start thinking they’ve been sponsoring MADV to get featured every other week, I’d like to mention 100% of the content you’ve seen in MADV so far is “organic” (unpaid for). I might include sponsored content some day, but it will always be clearly marked as such. I’ve actually refused one of them last week as I didn’t think it was interesting enough for my readers.
Talking about Creative, another episode of Mobile Ad Eaters is out, with Szilvia from PixelFederation.
In MADV004 I mentioned how Chess apps are soaring thanks to Netflix series. I was surprised that flat search volume, for good reason: search queries on chess have risen: Anton Tatarinovich showed me Apptweak data on short & long tail keywords with rising search popularity index values. It’s also happening the web, although not that much on Youtube where you can see some of the series games deconstructed, as Claire Rozain pointed out.
Facebook keeps updating its Ad Library, now with information on spend & impression, as spotted in grow.co newsletter. I don’t seem to get those details most of the time yet though :(
Sheryl Sandberg once said: “If you’re offered a seat on a rocketship, you don’t ask which, you just get on”. Here’s a rocketship seat available: Mojo is hiring a head of growth in Paris. Small team, smart founders, big numbers, great culture & cool product. Ping me if you want a warm intro to their team.
💡 Worth following
Various announcements from my friends at mobile growth agency Phiture who always share a ton of value in the community:
Next week will see a new, must-join channel: the Mobile Growth Stack slack community. You can request early access not to miss Andy' Carvell’s AMA session on this Tuesday 7pm CET.
Their twitter account has a series of mini-videos on mobile growth topics with Andy Carvell explaining fundamental concepts of the MobileGrowthStack: insights & analytics, the attribution layer, deeplinks, even tracking
Their blog feature a great article from Jakub Chour on subscription pricing automation
If you reached this point and haven’t clicked on the first link, I’ve failed.
