Apple & Google Updates You Can't Miss: What Do They Mean for App Marketers

 

Every Apple and Google update will impact app marketers' strategies to some degree. This article will give some thoughts on the recent update.

 

What does Apple Search Ads' expansion mean?

It's believed that Apple Search Ads would benefit from the blow iOS 14.5 and the new privacy limits dealt to the ecosystem of ad networks. Given the increasing demand from advertisers for Search Ads, Apple would endeavor to increase its inventory (to capitalize on high-quality placements and potential downloads).

 

This will take place in 3 phases. As with News and Stocks, Apple will first provide additional locations within the App Store app, then add more Apple Services, and finally, it will allow independent app developers to use Apple Adverts to sell their apps and games using Apple display ads.

 

They would have a significant advantage over all other ad networks because Apple Search Ads is the only ad network that can still exploit priceless personal information (which apps and games customers downloaded, played, and made an in-app purchase from).

 

 

We are currently in phase two of this plan, and Apple has just introduced a very advantageous placement within the Today tab feed. The number of users who open the App Store would almost exactly match the volume of impression ads in these placements (more than 500M which is pretty similar to Instagram DAU).

 

The audience browsing the Today tab is still significantly larger than the audience searching for a specific keyword, so I anticipate the CPMs to be relatively high, at least until the path to ROAS is clear. The competition for this placement will likely be fierce.

 

The last time ASA increased its inventory was through ads in the Search tab, above the list of suggested apps, but those ads had poor unit economics because of their wide-ranging audience.

 

Despite this, the prominence of a Today tab ad, which resembles a featured placement nearly exactly, is probably much more prominent and likely to have much better economics.

 

The second placement, which ASA mentioned, is somewhat less intriguing and may be found at the bottom of product pages in the area titled You Might Also Like. A very small percentage of users who visit a product page ever reach that section, according to data from Storemaven's a/b testing of product pages on hundreds of millions of users.

 

That location probably won't produce as many impressions as you would hope.

 

There are certain issues with ethics. How can ASA let adverts from rival companies appear on your product page? You invest time, money, and effort into getting your audience to visit your product page, together with your marketing and UA team. I don't see why you would allow your competitor to pay Apple to "take" customers who you may have brought to their page (perhaps through a sponsored advertisement, costing you money).

 

The difference, in my opinion, between Google Search letting you bid for a competitor's brand keyword and Google suddenly "forcing" an ad from the same competitor on your website landing page is not very far from allowing your competitors to bid on your brand keyword, which is a common activity that is well accepted in the industry. It's a little bit excessive if you know what I mean.

 

But in any event, don't worry too much (even though you're undoubtedly experiencing a heat wave right now), as, despite its unattractive positioning, this placement is unlikely to deter a sizable portion of visitors to your product page from purchasing your product.

 

To sum up, I believe that by interpreting this action, we can clearly sense how aggressively Apple is doubling down on expanding ASA's inventory, so the likelihood that Apple will introduce a display ad product that app developers can use to monetize their apps with "approved and user-private" Apple Ads (and advertisers reach that inventory with an Apple DSP) is a logical next step.

 

What do Android's limitations on app advertising mean?

As a result of Google's announcement that it will be adopting new ad standards for apps and games published through the Google Play store, there has been a bit of a tempest on Twitter this week regarding mobile growth-related topics.

 

The following is what the rules state (you can see the official notification for more instances as well):

• All full-screen interstitial advertisements (video, GIF, static, etc.) that appear unexpectedly, often after the user has made another decision, are prohibited.
• It is forbidden for advertisements to show during gameplay at the start of a level or at the start of a content segment.
• video in full screen Before an app loads (splash screen), interstitial advertisements are not permitted.
• All forms of full-screen interstitial advertising that cannot be closed after 15 seconds are prohibited. Full-screen interstitials that require user consent or that appear after a game app's score screen and do not interfere with users' activities may last longer than 15 seconds.

 

Some claimed that this would spell the demise of the extremely ad-dependent hypercasual category. Some people claim it's not as horrible.

 

 

It can be concluded that:

• Any "bad actor" developer that tries to deceive customers into being unable to close or skip ads will suffer severe consequences.
• Any developer dealing with reputable, well-known ad networks should anticipate certain adjustments to the time of advertisements (because most of them are already compliant with the other requirements).

 

Most of these adjustments will pertain to how and when advertisements are shown within games. Here, it would be vital to know how Google would define the "beginning of a level." But I don't think Google really wants to get rid of ads; I think they just want to make them less annoying and more anticipated.

 

A certain effect that would reduce the total number of ad impressions a game may generate from a single average user can be anticipated, depending on what is prohibited on the adverts that appear at the start of a level. User drop rate curves would determine how many users would abandon the game before viewing an ad that they previously viewed since it was displayed at the very beginning of their session if adverts were pushed to later in each gaming session.

 

But I don't think the entire hypercasual business model would fail as long as Google permits advertisements to still be served, albeit a little later in a user's session than they used to. Due to advertisers' willingness to offer lower bids for each hypercasual install, ARPU would slightly decline, and CPIs would follow.