user acquisition

CloudX, which makes AI infrastructure for app publishers, is expanding from monetization to agentic buying for user acquisition.

Marketers today are operating in an outcome-obsessed world. For mobile app marketers, especially, the smallest screen in the home – the mobile phone – has become the default choice for driving lower-funnel outcomes.

A peek into fintech app Betterment’s nimble growth marketing strategy amid tariffs turbluence, with CMO Kim Rosenblum.

Performance marketing can become a crutch for some brands, warns Duolingo CMO Manu Orssaud, especially app-based businesses that are under pressure to show rapid growth. That’s why Duolingo makes organic marketing a top priority.

Last year, Mode started testing AppLovin’s mobile user acquisition platform, AppDiscovery, to determine which in-app events are most valuable and target new cost-conscious Android users.

Is it possible to get through an earnings call in 2023 without talking about AI? Apparently not! AppLovin spent most of its Q2 earnings call on Wednesday hyping Axon 2.0, the latest version of its AI-based ad tech platform, which the company released last quarter. Axon uses predictive machine learning to target app-install ads to […]

Google released a batch of new monetization, targeting and measurement features for AdMob on Thursday, with a focus on (what else?) data privacy. “Everybody is thinking about how they can evolve in this new world,” David Mitby, Google’s senior director of product management for app ads, told AdExchanger.

Steve Webb, the former global head of Facebook’s Audience Network, has joined Unity Technologies as VP of revenue for ads under its Operate division. Webb’s first day was June 13 and he replaces Julie Shumaker, who was elevated to SVP of revenue for Unity’s Create division in October. (Unity, which went public in September 2020, […]

Airship has acquired app store optimization specialist Gummicube for an undisclosed sum. Combining Airship and Gummicube makes sense, says Airship CEO and President Brett Caine, because marketers want greater insight and control over the full app marketing funnel, from discovery and download through to monetizing and retaining users.

Ad tech companies are buying gaming companies, and gaming companies, like Zynga, are buying ad tech. In May, Zynga, maker of FarmVille and Words With Friends, spent $250 million to acquire in-app monetization platform Chartboost. But don’t call Zynga a “content fortress,” says Scott Koenigsberg, Zynga’s chief product officer.

Despite Apple’s ATT curveball, Zynga is having its best revenue and audience growth year since the company was founded in 2007. The social game developer, whose titles include Words With Friends and the FarmVille franchise, grew its advertising business 99% year-over-year in the third quarter to $134 million. Total quarterly revenue was $705 million, a […]

“Data-Driven Thinking” is written by members of the media community and contains fresh ideas on the digital revolution in media. Today’s column is written by Dor Birnboim, US VP, Strategic Partnerships, ironSource Attribution is a key part of successfully scaling and optimizing user acquisition campaigns for the highest quality users. But there is no one-size-fits-all […]

“Data-Driven Thinking” is written by members of the media community and contains fresh ideas on the digital revolution in media. Today’s column is written by Dor Birnboim, VP of strategic partnerships at ironSource Aura. Whether it’s Uber trying to eliminate media waste or Deliveroo attempting to validate investment in a new channel, brands are rethinking […]

Snap is embracing direct response advertising with both arms. It’s been launching performance-focused ad products for Snapchat at a regular clip over the past couple of years, and on Thursday it added a few key new features to its app ads toolkit. Performance advertisers on Snapchat can now optimize for installs directly from Lenses, implement […]

Ad creative can be a bigger driver of performance for app advertisers than audience-based targeting or segmentation. “We can make a huge difference, depending on the creative, in almost any game regardless of the target,” said Rick Grunewald, a digital marketing analyst at PerBlue, a Wisconsin-based mobile game studio with a license to develop games […]

Jam City is jamming, despite COVID-19. The LA-based casual mobile game studio plans to hire artists, producers, data analysts and people focused on creative strategy. Gaming is one of the few verticals that’s growing during the ongoing health crisis. People started playing more games when stay-at-home orders were announced in March, and the behavior has […]

Lomit Patel, VP of growth at IMVU, a 3D avatar-based social networking universe, was already planning for an economic downturn in 2017. Growth marketing, he said, is as much about expansion as it is about mitigating risk. “I never only think about the moment, I think 12 to 18 months out,” said Patel, who joined […]

The online travel search engine Kiwi.com wants to retarget users in a personalized way that’s ROI positive, said Mark Calzaverini, the company’s head of performance. “At the very least, we need to be able to identify users, make sure we’re not selling them the same thing twice,” he said. For the last year and a […]

Tilting Point doesn’t just develop its own free-to-play mobile games. It helps other app publishers run performance marketing campaigns and, in some cases, even funds their game development. “We call it progressive publishing,” said CEO Kevin Segalla, who founded the studio in 2012. Over the last few years, Tilting Point has invested tens of millions […]

Mobile performance marketers like DoorDash are hungry for more video ads to feed their paid social user acquisition (UA) campaigns. Problem is, internal creative teams lack the bandwidth to meet the demands of their colleagues in performance, said Justin Neustadter, head of mobile consumer acquisition at DoorDash. Quality video creative is expensive to produce, and […]

The Axios Sports newsletter recently hit a major milestone: 100,000 subscribers, up nearly tenfold in less than nine months. But this is not just growth for growth’s sake, said Ernesto Arrocha, associate director of growth and engagement at Axios, which publishes just under 20 daily and weekly newsletters. Its sports newsletter maintains a 42% open […]

Most mobile user acquisition (UA) managers, like the ones who work at LA-based mobile game studio Jam City, are highly analytical creatures whose job is to dig into the data, analyze ad spend and manually adjust bids. But there’s increasingly less and less for them to do. Facebook and Google are systematically introducing more and […]

Google added a slew of new solutions, ad formats and targeting options to its automated app ad platform and to AdMob, the company said on Wednesday. And there’s a theme: Automation and machine learning are becoming increasingly central to Google’s vision for app advertising. Advertisers can use automation to be more efficient with their user […]

Any sign of bad traffic, and mobile game developer Glu flips the kill switch at the ad network and the publisher levels, said John Parides, Glu’s senior director of user acquisition. “This is something you need to be constantly monitoring,” said Parides, who’s been with Glu for almost five years, during which click spam became […]

MoPub released an SDK update on Tuesday that gives app publishers access to impression-level revenue data. Historically, that type of data – which lets user acquisition managers attribute revenue and lifetime value to specific users at the impression level – has been hard to come by. Most third-party ad networks haven’t been set up to […]

Jayne Pimentel, senior director of growth marketing at DraftKings, will speak at AdExchanger’s upcoming Programmatic IO conference taking place April 29-30, 2019 in San Francisco. Jayne Pimentel is hard on her technology partners, but that only makes the relationship better and more stable in the end. “I don’t want to say it’s a love/hate relationship,” […]

Machine learning is becoming central to user acquisition and app advertising at Google. On Wednesday, Google introduced five game developer-focused ads products, four of which are powered by some form of machine learning. The first new release, called pre-registration ads, for example, allows developers to reach Android users across the Play store, YouTube, search and […]

Mobile performance marketers who work with multiple ad partners spend less to acquire users. A growth marketer who works with five or fewer media sources pays an average of $3.58 per install, according to a report released Wednesday by mobile marketing analytics company Singular. But upping the number of media sources from five to six […]

Without a way to calculate ad revenue per user, optimization is just an educated guessing game. “I wouldn’t call it a complete blind spot, but the process is definitely not as efficient as it could be,” said Jeff Gurian, VP of marketing and ad monetization at Kongregate, a mobile and PC game publisher acquired from […]

The robots are taking over user acquisition on Facebook and Google, and that’s (mostly) a good thing. Whenever one of the large platforms automates an aspect of UA, it means more time for focusing on strategy and creative rather than drudgery, said Jess Hasenplaugh, head of UA at Berlin-based mobile game studio Wooga. “I’m happy […]