3 Useful Tips to Survive in App Markets in 2018

Mobile app marketing industry is obviously growing and it is getting harder to survive for apps in this market. So, let’s take a look at the growth rates and tips to keep up in app markets!

Mobile App Market in 2018

App market is growing as we mentioned:

The app usage is growing 22% year on year.

Users have up to 90-100 apps installed on their devices and use 30 of them actively.

People are spending two hours per day in apps. Also users spend more than 50% of their total digital media time in apps (Digital in Asia, 2017).

According to App Annie’s report, in 2018,

Total money spend in all of the apps market will surpass $110 billion.

$110 billion represents a 30% increase from the year previous.

The biggest amount of this $110 billion will be for the gaming apps again.

The Competition is Getting Harder

According to App Annie’s research;

By the end of October 2017, iOS App Store had more than 2 million and Google Play had more than 3.5 million apps available.

50,000 apps on iOS App Store and 150,000 apps on Google Play were launched during the October alone.



Also, share of iPhone users who have four or more streaming apps on their phones grew to 31% (previous year: 25%). So, consumers seek a wider variety of video content and look for alternatives every time.

App marketers are making strong efforts to maintain their presence in app market. As a result, mobile video advertising spend has grown by 63% in 2017. So it is assumed that the competition will also get more and more harder.

So, What Should Be Done

The first thing marketers have to do is to create brand/product awareness. For this purpose, app marketers can boost their apps via ads. But we can’t skip the most crucial part of this process: Optimization.

Marketers seek to launch ad campaigns with the lowest budget. These campaigns have to reach and attract relevant users with their app. But how?

The solution of this question lies on leaving behind the traditional ways of mobile ads and focusing on the latest trends. Let’s take a look at the examples of mobile app advertising trends of 2018 below.

Discover Programmatic Advertising Basics

Programmatic advertising is the method to make advertising more targeted and relevant to create more efficient buying.

Programmatic advertising can support launching ads of various formats enabling precise targeting. As we said in our previous article, programmatic advertising is one of the most efficient and trending ways of optimized advertisement methods.

Programmatic display spending has reached almost $33 billion in 2017.

Forecasts predict that spending will reach over $45 billion by 2019.

So it is easy to see the growth of the programmatic ad and marketers should use the benefits of programmatic ads on optimized advertising purposes.

Choose Video Ads for the Best Results

According to James McQuivey, who is digital marketing expert, just a single minute of video content is worth 1.8 million words. That’s why the thrive of mobile video ads market is not a surprise at all.

Mobile video advertising spend has grown by 63% in 2017.

It’s expected that in 2018;

People time spend watching videos on mobile devices (36 mins per day) will double watching them on non-mobile ones (18 mins per day).

Mobile video viewing will grow 25% in 2018 and 29% in 2019.

So, let’s try to attract the most appropriate consumers’ attention via video ads in 2018!

Adapt Your Ad Formats to Native

“The word native, in terms of the advertising world, is no longer just a buzz word. It is has now become a core part of the advertising industry.”

As we defined before, the meaning of native advertisement is to advertise your app in a publisher’s platform in native way. The crucial point is here: Your app’s ad content has to match with the publishers content.

By the way, using social media to boost native ads have been going popular day by day. So, experts suggests that focusing on social media will be efficient for mobile app marketers.

If a marketer decides to launch a native ad, he will most likely to get more efficient results: Native mobile ads encourage four times higher click-through rates than standard mobile ads and they are viewed 50% more than standard mobile ads by consumers. Also, according to Business Insider, native ads will drive 74% of all ad revenue by 2021. So, it is essential to launch ads in native way.

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Mobile marketers:



You can create, manage, and measure your mobile ad campaigns with App Samurai to acquire qualified and engaged users for your mobile app.

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Bonus Tip: Promote Your Gamified Content

Gamification is defined as “The use of game elements to promote desired behaviors among customers and employees”. It is useful to help increase brand engagement, customer involvement and loyalty.

Loyalty programs, auction biddings, employee of the month challenges, coupons and coins… These techniques are used in order to enhance effects of core experience by applying the motivational techniques.

When we think for mobile apps, gamification effectively works not only for attract customers’ interests but also increase their app usage rates. Here is the example of gamification below.

Aliexpress: Via it’s coin and coupon system, members can get coins and coupons by entering the application. And they can use them to buy products from the app.

If the customer visits the app every day, the amount of coin that they win increases.

Also, members can play games to collect coins and coupons such as Flip ‘n’ Win, Lucky Forest, Bubble Challenge.

So, the benefits of gamification is more obvious right now. But we have to point out the most crucial point in here. In order to convert consumers into customers via your gamification, make consumers aware of your gamification at first. To do that, you should launch mobile ads and stimulate them to come and try your gamificated app. If you succeed in this ad strategy, it will be easier to engage many potential users with the help of gamification.

Final Thoughts

Mobile app marketing is aggressively growing and marketers boost their ad budgets in apps market, because everyone who has interest in apps industry knows the potential of this field. Because of that, app marketers want to presence themselves to relevant consumers. But not everyone has enough budgets to spend money without considering it. That’s why, spending money with the most optimized way is important and in order to do that, latest ad trends and app interfaces should be used by marketers effectively. So in that kind of competition, you should take action immediately and adopt in these new ways to gain more users!