Every year, Mobile Dev Memo’s Eric Seufert releases a roundup of what different industry players think about the future of mobile marketing and ASO.
2020 Market Predictions
The major themes expected in 2020 are:
- The merging of mobile marketing into growth (moving away from traditional marketing). The main driver of this is, according to Seufert, the rise of event-driven, algorithmic campaign-management within Facebook, and Google advertising. Therefore in order to optimize mobile advertising spend, a team must be involved with overseeing monetization as well.
- Facebook is getting ready to launch its UAC equivalent, AAA, which further supports the above point.
- The two platform giants, Facebook and Google, will continue to dominate the mobile advertising industry further driving up user acquisition costs. To combat this, there will be a strong emphasis on a/b testing and continuing to improve conversion rates all across the funnel.
- Investors of privately-held or VC-backed companies experience a higher level of scrutiny from their investors and this scrutiny makes it harder to justify “growth at all costs.” This will have a knock-on effect, predicts Eric Seufert, and cause a pullback in marketing spend across both Google and Facebook.
- Thomas Petit claims that there will be fewer UA managers doing traditional UA work such as processing media buying as the algorithms will replace many of these tasks.
- ASO will become an even more key component of mobile growth strategy requiring more senior roles as the field evolves into the broader field of organic growth.
Competition in the app stores will intensify as the ‘winner takes all’ model becomes ever-present in a market where the top 1% of apps and publishers generate more than 90% of the revenues.
Read the full article.
2019 Market Predictions
The major theme predicted for 2019 was the strengthening of algorithmic media buying, mostly on Facebook and Google, along with the gradual disappearance of manual UA work.
Moreover, Andy Carvell of Phiture predicted that 2019 will be the year in which every mobile publisher will truly understand the power of ASO, at least the conversion rate optimization part of it. This means that mobile publishers will take a more robust and strategic approach to their ASO activities and performance monitoring processes, moving away from a reliance on hacks and quick wins. This will lead to an increase in creative and experimental designs showing up in the app stores.
Read the full article.
2018 Market Predictions
2017 was the year when Google and Facebook became the Duopoly, reaching a combined market share of mobile ad spend sufficient for the title. It reached the point where major publishers could not scale user acquisition without relying on these two platforms.
One prediction suggested that governments will look into the duopoly from an anti-trust perspective. Although the introduction of the GDPR did invite more scrutiny into the platforms, it seems that a closer look at their position in the mobile ad market didn’t materialize.
The UA market as a whole was expected to consolidate in 2018 around value optimization, ie optimizing ad spend based on the value users generate within the app or based on different in-app events that serve as a proxy for quality users.
Read the full article.
2017 Market Predictions
The market prediction for 2017 included an estimate that the MMP landscape will consolidate and that one of the major attribution providers will be acquired. Although that didn’t happen in 2017, in late 2018 Branch did acquire the attribution business of TUNE.
In 2016 we saw the rise of non-direct advertisement channels such as influencer marketing and more. 2017 was predicted to be a year where small to mid-sized developers ditch these channels in favor of performance marketing, and an accurate prediction that definitely panned out.
Read the full article.
Summary
As much as it’s always a fun mental exercise to try and predict where our industry is going but it has a ton of value too. There aren’t as many industries that are as dynamic and fast-paced as that of mobile marketing and growth.
Thinking about where the industry was just three years ago, and where it is headed today, companies that haven’t change their marketing strategy and the structure of their teams in these past three years are probably out of business today.
