Mobile App User Acquisition: The Four Effective Channels for Your Apps Traffic

Developers and marketers are finding it increasingly difficult to gain visibility for their apps, with over 2 million apps in both the Play Store and the App Store. As a result, while making the app more discoverable remains critical, an increasing number of app owners are looking to acquire users through various paid acquisition sources to supplement their organic numbers for faster growth.

The removal of COVID-19 restrictions, Apple's IDFA changes, and macroeconomic headwinds such as persistent inflation and rising interest rates have all had a significant impact on the mobile and digital advertising industries in 2022. Last year marked a turning point for mobile games, app spending, and brands' willingness to invest in digital advertising. Thus, the user acquisition cost is growing. How do app marketers address mobile user acquisition and user acquisition costs? 

Here's some good news though. Global downloads are still significantly higher than pre-pandemic levels despite they have slowed since the outbreak of COVID-19. 

As an app marketer, the key performance indicators you care about continue to show impressive upward trends. When you look back, you can see double-digit year-over-year growth.


Non-organic installs—resulting from paid and owned marketing activities will also see the bars rise higher each year, with an arrow pointing upward.



Looking further ahead, the app economy is still thriving.

Mobile ad fraud is now one of the major headwinds that directly impact mobile app user acquisition costs. There are mobile tech solutions for combating mobile ad fraud, but they are beyond the scope of this article.

In this blog, we'll go over everything you need to know to create a successful paid mobile user acquisition strategy. You will be able to start growing your mobile app business after reading this guide.

What's paid user acquisition?

There are two approaches to user acquisition. Paid user acquisition refers to strategies in which you pay to have your ads or content distributed through various channels such as mobile ad networks or social media.

The most obvious benefit of paid user acquisition is the incredible reach it can provide. You can reach users almost anywhere in the world by using mobile ad networks. Paid user acquisition also allows you to build industry brand awareness.

However, implementing a paid user acquisition strategy can be more difficult than it appears. First and foremost, a budget is required to spread your advertisements. Producing effective creative content is an additional challenge. This approach may appear overwhelming at first, especially for indie developers who lack the workforce to devote to their paid strategy.

Paid user acquisition, when combined with a solid organic strategy, can produce results that would otherwise be impossible to achieve.

⭐️Related Reading:

Why Should You Do Both Organic & Paid App Marketing For User Acquisition?

Four effective mobile user acquisition channels

There are several ways and sources for an app owner to acquire users inorganically, including PR and influencer marketing, but digital advertising remains the most popular way for most apps to acquire users, owing to:

• Granular targeting
• Mass reach
• Comprehensive pre & post-install analytics

The thing to remember about mobile user acquisition channels is that their landscape is constantly changing as the efficiency of some channels declines and new channels emerge to replace inefficient ones. In general, there are four major groups of channels: major ad platforms from Apple (Search Ads paid advertising platform), Alphabet (Google Ads, including YouTube), Meta (Facebook Ads, including Instagram), and TikTok, ad platforms from other major social media sites, mobile ad networks, and newly emerged acquisition channels such as podcasts, Reddit, Spotify, Twitch, and others.

Mobile ad networks

Mobile ad networks make mobile user acquisition much easier. These platforms function by bringing together ad publishers and advertisers. From the standpoint of advertisers, these channels allow you to easily present your creative content to a wide range of users. Unity, AdMob, Mopub, IronSource, Vungle, and AppLovin are some popular mobile ad networks.

Mobile advertising networks benefit both parties. Ad publishers can monetize their apps by selling app space, while advertising apps can reach potential users by purchasing this ad space.

Social media advertising

Social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram and Twitter offer highly targeted advertising options that can help you reach your desired audience. With social media advertising, you can target users based on their demographics, interests, and behaviors. You can also create different ad formats such as video ads, carousel ads, and app install ads that can drive traffic to your mobile app. Social media advertising can be expensive, but it can be highly effective in driving traffic and acquiring new users.

TikTok becomes the fastest-growing ad channel, challenging digital ad leader Meta. TikTok is attracting an increasing amount of digital ad spend, owing to a growing active user base, high levels of engagement, and reportedly lower advertising costs, among other factors.

Google ads

Google Ads, formerly known as "Adwords," enables us to run a universal app install campaigns for iOS and Android apps. You can target users based on their location, set a budget, and optimize bids for mobile app install campaigns. Your ads would essentially appear on Google Search Network (Google Search and Google Search Partners), Google Play, Display Networks, and YouTube.

Google's bold move to UAC has paid off: it has significantly increased its share of the app install ad pie since its launch in 2017.

Apple Search Ads

The fundamental issue in paid user acquisition is reaching the right people at the right time. Ads displayed while using apps, for example, are less effective than App Store Optimization. A user searching for an app in the App Store is more likely to download a new app than a user playing a game. As a result, achieving an effective CTR and lowering acquisition costs is generally more difficult in paid channels.

Apple Search Ads combine the best aspects of both paid and organic search. Ads that you pay to have taps appear in front of users who use the search tab. Advertisers can reach users when they are most likely to download an app this way.

⭐️Related Reading:
Beginner's Guide: All You Need To Know About Apple Search Ads(ASA)
Maximize Your App's Potential: The Power of Apple Search Ads Metrics, Benefits, and Measurement Strategies

Another reason for the growing popularity of Apple Search Ads is the IDFA's deprecation. Because it is becoming more difficult to serve personalized ads to iOS users through other channels, Apple Search Ads will most likely become one of the most effective user acquisition channels for app marketers.

The conversion rates of this mobile ad network are impressive because advertisers can reach high-value and relevant audiences through Apple Search Ads. While Apple Search Ads claims an average conversion rate of 50%, AppAds.ai suggests conversion rates could be even higher.

Apple Search Ads also supports personalized ads and methods for increasing conversion rates. App marketers can target demographics based on location, gender, and sex. The Creative Sets feature allows for the display of customized app screenshots in response to various search queries.

How to acquire users with AppAds?

Regarding Apple Search Ads, AppAds can help you scale your campaigns with less budget and time. We offer professional advertising optimization strategies. Besides, you can also reduce costs while increasing app downloads by using our Automation and Smart Campaign tool. Automation can help your app marketers to create automatic optimization rules to manage their ASA accounts efficiently. It also monitors the account at all times and executes automatically when the rules meet your ideal conditions set by you, thus saving much time and effort. Using Smart Campaign and Automation of AppAds, some of our clients reduced their acquisition costs by more than 40%.  

⭐️Related reading:
4 Steps to Automatically Scaling Apple Ads Campaigns

AppAds will give you the Ads Manager tool to create, improve, and monitor your strategy. Regarding paid growth and bidding keywords, the Keywords Planner will help you identify competitors' performing-well keywords, analyze the bidding keywords' performance, and create your own strategy. Some of our clients increased their CTR by 200 percent by utilizing AppAds's Keyword Planner.