Products
2022 User Acquisition Trends

The mobile app market is saturated with companies. What are the development companies that are going to release new applications thinking about? 

Of course, about the audience that will use their applications. It’s no secret that to increase the income of developer companies, you need to attract more users. User acquisition in 2022 is the key to success in the fast-growing app marketing industry.

Last year’s sensation was the update of Apple’s privacy policy. Users were allowed to decide if they wanted the application to track their activities in other applications. One change entails other changes, in our case, in marketing practice.

Mobupps is already aware of the main mobile marketing trends affecting user acquisition and is ready to share them with its subscribers. But more on that later, while we look at the statistics.

Statistics never lie and we have irrefutable evidence that the number of users is growing not by the hour, but by the second.

The number of smartphone users is increasing every year, thereby increasing the number of mobile application users. Globally, the number of users has grown to 6.259 billion in 2021 and is projected to reach 7.690 billion in 2026.

Pic. 1 – Number of smartphone users (source: Statista)

Nearly 90% of mobile internet usage is spent on apps and only 10% is spent using a mobile browser. In 2021, smartphone users spent about 8 hours a day using the mobile Internet, and 88% of this time in mobile applications. This goes to show that optimizing websites or building your own mobile apps is essential to expanding your user base.]

Pic. 2 – Mobile internet time spent (source: eMarketer)

There are currently over 2.9 million apps available on the Google Play Store and 4.75 million apps available on the Apple App Store. Even though there are more users of the Android operating system than IOS, the competition here is much less than in the Apple App Store.

The release of new interesting applications by developer companies attracts the interest of more users. On average, about 70,000 new Android apps are released on the Google Play Store every month, and about 32,000 new iOS apps are released on the Apple App Store.

Pic. 3 – The number of apps released by Google Play (source: Statista)
Pic. 4 – The number of apps released by the Apple App Store (source: Statista)

Mobile marketing provides marketers with many opportunities to engage with their customers through social and entertainment apps.

Social apps are the most downloaded, they are also the place where smartphone users spend the majority of their time (more precisely, 50% of their total time of use). In second place are entertainment apps such as Netflix and TikTok, which account for 21% of total usage time. The lines between social and entertainment apps are beginning to blur as users use apps for the same purposes.

Pic. 5 – Share of apps usage by topic (source: Statista)

It’s time to move on to Mobupps User Acquisition tips.

  1. In-app video ads can be up to 5 times more effective than static display ads in attracting users.

With the rise of mobile users, in-app advertising is a sure way to attract new users. The variety of applications (for example, for home and work, fitness and health, travel and fashion, social, entertainment, or educational) allows an increasing number of users to find something for themselves. Marketers strive to create visuals that inspire, hold users’ attention, and enable mobility.

Pic. 6 – In-app ads

2. More attention will be paid to organic user acquisition. 

Let’s talk about ASO optimization, which includes the analysis of keywords and graphic resources on the application page. The role of ASO itself and the separation of ASO and ASA is likely to decrease further in 2022. The UA teams will rely on the ASO teams to share how to create effective CPP. On the other hand, UA teams will be able to share valuable insights into the performance of various CPP.

PPO allows you to test app creatives for 3 different product variations and shows app developers what options and processing methods are most effective in driving organic traffic. With CPP, developers can create up to 35 pages in the App Store. These can be icons, screenshots, and video previews of applications to better understand the reaction of the target audience. For mobile marketers, CCPs represent a profitable opportunity to target specific audiences and users with the tools they like best.

Pic. 7 – The blurring lines between organic and paid (source: AppTweak)

3. With In-App Events (IAE), marketers can promote events, contests, live streams, new seasons, or major app updates using event cards.

They appear on custom product pages and display event details such as event name, short description, image, or video directly in search results. It is worth noting that the cards replace the screenshots of users who have already downloaded applications. And by doing so, marketers increase the role of the ASO team in user retention.

Pic. 8 – An example of an in-app event on the App Store (source: developer.apple.com).

Over the years, the whole world has been watching the development of the mobile marketing industry and how mobile applications bring huge revenues to development companies. The competition is huge and hundreds of marketers are bidding on the same media, and users know that goals, as well as weekly tracking of their cohorts, are critical to improving UA performance.

Summing up, it can be noted that mobile marketing strategies and trends are also rapidly changing and updating. At the same time, Mobupps actively monitors trends and forecasts, planning its work with them in mind. Therefore, we are successful in mobile marketing and achieve high performance. Mobupps ask the ad network for benchmarks for the same category in terms of CTR, CPI, CPA, etc., tracks campaign trends, and work with the ad network to reach and beat those benchmarks.

It’s time to turn to Mobupps to develop a comprehensive marketing strategy for your mobile applications that will attract new users, retain existing ones and generate revenue.