Mobile App Advertising Benchmark Report from Appsumer

The versions of iOS that enabled App Tracking Transparency (ATT) are now one year old and now is the time to analyze its impact on mobile app advertisers. That’s exactly what Appsumer did in their new Mobile App Advertising Benchmark Report.

The report analyzed over 100 apps with an average ad spend of $354,000 per month.

Here are some interesting facts from it.

Meta vs. Apple Search Ads (ASA)

The key fact is the increasing popularity of Apple Search Ads (ASA). ASA joined the Meta and Google duopoly and took first place in the popularity ranking among advertisers, as its share of use increased by almost four percentage points year-on-year to 94.8%, while Meta’s share decreased by three percentage points to 82.8%.

The trend also weighed in on the money, with ASA up five percentage points in marketer spending to reach 15%, while Meta was down four percentage points year-on-year to a 28% share. However, Meta is regaining its share of advertisers’ budgets. It is assumed that the company is starting to recover from the initial failure to adopt the ATT. Google has remained fairly stable on both metrics as most of its inventory is on the Android platform.

Now the question is, how much can Apple increase the ASA’s share of the money, given that the number of resources is limited by the volume of search in the App Store? It seems that its own DSP may be Apple’s answer to the challenges of further growth.

TikTok vs. Snap

In the second tier of advertising platforms, TikTok is now ahead of Snap in both advertiser adoption and budget share. However, TikTok’s popularity among advertisers dropped by almost seven percentage points year-on-year to 43.2%. The share in money remains stable at 3%, which indicates that not all advertisers were able to cope with the platform and effectively promote their applications on it.

Snap’s problems with ATT and the economic problems are well known, which shows up well in their budget share. Advertiser spending on Snapchat has halved year-on-year from 4% to 2%. However, while adoption dropped three percentage points year-on-year to 32.7%, it recovered from 25.4% in the first quarter of 22. This could be a sign of recovery and potentially a leading indicator of revenue growth in the coming quarters.

Small advertisers vs. multi-channel complexity

Although the number of channels used by advertisers did not change significantly on average, the data shows a large delta.

The largest advertisers grew by 1.4 channels year on year to 10.7 on average, while the smallest advertisers decreased by 1.1 channels to an average of 2.5.

The largest advertisers likely increased the number of channels to keep up with volumes when the performance of some channels slowed down. However, small advertisers are having a hard time keeping up with this multi-channel complexity in the ATT world, given their smaller creative, data, and optimization resources. This caused them to struggle to scale channels when performance dropped.

You can read more about all the changes in the report.