5 Top Tips for Mobile Acquisition in 2025
A short, but very useful blog post this week from the UA team at CMA! Lots of food for thought across a wide range of areas from SKAN mapping to MMP’s to the very heated topic of organic cannibalization….
1. Integrate Paid & Organic Strategies
It may seem like an obvious statement, but we still see lots of mismatches between paid and organic campaigns which cause massive inefficiencies within your media. Here are some top tips on things to consider when you’re integrating the two approaches of organic (ASO) and paid media:
Use Custom Store Listings (CSL’s) & Custom Product Pages (CPP’s) for paid campaigns wherever possible
Adjust Apple Search Ad (ASA) bids based on organic keyword ranking
Ensure promo text & creatives match paid ads
Consider using CPP’s & ASA for creative testing on iOS instead of PPO
Beware of view-through Attribution in ASA
Beware of GAC and ASA organic cannibalization!
2. Review Channel Mix & Ad Formats
Are you just using traditional web acquisition channels for mobile such as Meta & Google Ads? If so, and you’re serious about scaling, you should definitely review that channel mix:
Consider Demand Side Platforms (DSP’s) such as LiftOff or Dataseat who can provide access to a world of in-app advertising and inventory
If you are using DSP’s, ensure you have dedicated resource (or work with an agency) to ensure ads are correctly optimized, creatives are fine-tuned for mobile and your ads aren’t served in apps that aren’t aligned with your brand!
You should definitely be using Apple Search Ads (ASA) and Google App Campaigns (only for Android!)
How much time do you invest in creating video assets? Although they are consuming, video generally performs a LOT better than static assets, so is worth the investment
3. Ensure your MMP is configured correctly!
Mobile Measurement Platforms such as AppsFlyer or Adjust are essential for anyone spending ANY money on paid channels. However, they’re only useful if they’ve been configured correctly, as without the correct data you’ll find it impossible to scale efficiently:
Make sure you’re tracking revenue and using the correct events (use Server-2-Server if necessary)
Ensure attribution windows are optimally set to prevent over-attribution
Try and avoid view-through attribution (recently launched with ASA), especially with long windows!
4. Look at your SKAN bit-mapping
SKAN is the bane of many mobile marketers lives these days, but we’ve got to work with it, and use it as creatively as possible:
If you have low volumes, ensure you include high-volume events such as session start, and plan a “course-grained” schema
Are you using your 6 bits optimally (000000)? There are clever ways of tagging events - you don’t have to assign each bit to a single event. Think of it this way - you have 2^6 (64) possible outcomes you can represent, so get clever with how these are mapped!
5. Review your organic (ASO) strategy
Okay, this is supposed to be about paid, but you can’t ignore the other side of the coin, so here are a few pointers to make sure you’re actually leveraging ASO correctly (doing an average-to-good job on it will only see you sit in the middle of the results so this is pretty important…):
Is ASO really working as hard as it should?
Have you reviewed it recently?
Are you using indexing IAE’s, autocomplete targeting or other more advanced techniques to stand out above the market?
How do you compare to the wider market for organic Share of Voice in each country (see example below)? You can use CMA’s ASO benchmarker if you’d like to take a look for yourself - it’s free and easy to use!
Share of Voice Showing Impact of ASO updates on our client’s app vs their competitors
If you’d like to find out more about how you could improve your mobile acquisition setup, driving more scalable, profitable growth then please get in touch by emailing us at hello@consultmyapp.com or using the button below!