Mobile advertising in 2022: what should we prepare for?

2021 brought many significant changes to the entire mobile market and the advertising system in particular. Let’s find out what app and game marketers should do in order to stay afloat in today’s unstable conditions.

App promotion in the post-IDFA era

In 2021 Apple has significantly complicated the life of app developers and mobile marketers. The implementation of App Tracking Transparency in iOS 14.5 that was released in spring hit advertisers with strict privacy updates, and iOS 15 drew a line and secured all the changes. This version contained many weighty updates that enhanced our security because of higher data-sharing visibility, but, on the other hand, deprived marketers of the opportunity to receive important data on users and their activity. From that moment, app developers no longer have access to Identifier for Advertisers (IDFA) by default. In order to receive it, they ought to openly request the user’s permission.

Now marketing specialists are facing the problem of:

1. Reducing accuracy of traffic attribution, which may lead to an increase in its cost;
2. Limited accurate targeting;
3. Limited access to tools like retargeting and lookalike audiences, which basically deals with audiences similar to a certain group of users. So, if the audience you use to build a lookalike is small, you won’t have the ability to make a high-quality lookalike user group.
   

Moreover, developers are concerned that Google is going to do the same.

These changes will lead to revision of the entire paid traffic gaining system — and make marketers concentrate on promotion channels that don't require spying on mobile users.

That's why marketers are now looking for new ways to diversify their spending. Many of them have already switched to alternatives, besides the good old Facebook and Instagram: in the current conditions, these channels no longer offer an excellent environment for promotion.

Which network has adapted best to IDFA changes?

In the post-IDFA era, acquiring iOS users became harder than ever before.

However, there is one network that has left behind unsurpassed leaders and will surely be a game changer in 2022. To find out which network has recently hosted the most successful advertising campaigns, just look at Apple's SKAdNetwork table. SKAN is Apple’s solution for deterministic attribution: its analysis clearly shows the ad network that adapted best to the post-IDFA era conditions.

If we take a look at the top-3 ranking, we will see that TikTok for Business made its way on the very top of the chart and beat Facebook, a true advertising giant:

1. TikTok for Business
2. Facebook
3. AppLovin
   

Since the summer of 2020, TikTok has grown by 45% and by September of this year it had surpassed the mark of one billion monthly active users: that is why it became a quite promising network for app and game advertising. This year a lot of new advertisers have come to this platform — and obviously will continue doing it in 2022.

High-quality creatives is a key

Despite all the changes in familiar advertising algorithms, mobile marketers still need detailed understanding of their target audience. Now advertising creatives – and scrupulous work on them – are a proven way to the top of mobile store charts. There is no doubt that the most successful campaigns start with a thoughtful and conceptual video that not only shows the mechanics of the game or how to use an application, but draws users into the game universe or shows what their life will look like after testing a certain app.

What is more, now, in order to do their best, the marketers need to refocus on creative testing and optimization to align creatives with the audience and therefore understand their preferences more deeply. Keeping in mind that Google will most likely follow the same path as Apple, we can state that ad creative is now an even more powerful tool than it used to be.

Our forecast for 2022

First and most important: the amount of advertisers with completely different products for mobile on the TikTok platform will continue to grow.

It is also possible that there could be a switch in platforms on which advertisers test their creatives. As TikTok managed to adjust for the modern marketing circumstances, more and more advertisers could turn towards this network to perform soft-launch of their campaigns in order to get more clear results.

As for the ad creatives themselves, the key to the success of an ad campaign in 2022 is a flawless quality: studios should work more carefully on creatives (especially for TikTok, a network with a billion active users) in order to withstand growing competition. The era of simple creatives is slowly coming to an end, so next year the creatives will show more "life” and be more sophisticated — they will include animation, storytelling, live action or other components that will hold the user's attention more strongly. Mobile game creatives will also not be limited to a single gameplay demonstration.

It is also obvious that now more and more studios are betting on inclusiveness and tolerance even in advertising creatives. In the following years, production teams will ensure that their product is not offensive to certain groups of people, does not contain provocative scenes, scenes of violence and other elements that may be perceived negatively.

Watch our most recent webinar to learn more about paid mobile growth in 2022: