Marketing Talks. Yana Savitskaya, Apptica

Yana, please tell us about your background. What were you doing before becoming the CBDO of Apptica, and how does that experience help you now?

Before starting my career in IT, I used to work in the event industry. We organized huge conferences worldwide, and provided consecutive and simultaneous interpreters for such events. This experience helped me gain valuable soft skills like building a good rapport with different people, resolving conflicts to the satisfaction of all the parties involved, and making the most out of networking. There were a lot of emergency situations when we had to make changes at the very last moment, so creative thinking and a tailored approach to each partner are the key ingredients that help me in my current position now.

In the pro-privacy era, AI algorithms can play a significant role in identifying and targeting high-value users for mobile apps, managing segmentation, lowering churn rate and enhancing retention.

So, you are currently developing a mobile app analytics service. Please tell us more about your product. Who is the main target audience?

Apptica began its journey in 2017 as an ad analytics platform. Starting out with the mission of giving a comprehensive view of the mobile advertising market, over time the product has evolved into a complex, feature-packed service.

Our algorithms collect data from 11 million apps and 3.7 million App Store and Google Play publishers in 37 countries and 29 large ad networks.

Apptica stands tall in a competitive field as a strong ad intelligence platform. During H1 2023, we processed around 15.8 million creatives, which is 50% more than we did over the same period last year, and we keep enhancing our capacities with around 1 million creatives captured daily. In total, our creative gallery includes more than 54.3 million creatives.

Besides, customized presets and a user-friendly interface provide our clients with the best user experience.

Apptica caters to four main types of clients: publishers, game developers, venture companies, and digital/marketing agencies. Currently, the first two categories take the lead, however, investors and agencies can benefit from our data as well, i.e., identify promising startups or keep track of the best performing promotion campaigns.

Looks like you mostly focus on gaming products. You’ve probably collected a lot of insights. Would you like to share them with our audience?

For now, the majority of our clients come from the gaming industry, that’s why we share relevant insights on a regular basis. Our most recent report sheds some light on the state of the mobile gaming industry in H1 2023. You can download it here.

If we dive into it, we can pull out some thought-provoking takeaways:

• India (4.32B) remains the largest market for downloads, accounting for 15.29%. Brazil (2.99B) takes the second place, followed by the US (2.57B). China (1.3B) gains a larger share (+0.96%) leaving behind Mexico (-0.5% | 1.19B).
• Revenue: The United States ($5.71B) continues to gain market share (+4% compared to H1 2022) along with Japan (+1.2% | $4.17B) and China (+2%| $3.23B). South Korea experiences the biggest decline (-2.6% | $356.3M).
• Almost all genres demonstrate a decline in downloads compared to H1 2022. Within the top-5 genres, Casual has the largest market share (+0.62%), with total downloads going down from 4.24B to 4.14B. The same pattern applies to Action (drop from 4.29B to 3.9B) that loses its share by 0.18%, Simulation (-50M), and Arcade (-24M). Puzzle shows a positive trend with +90M downloads and +0,57% market share. Casino and Card are also among the categories with upward dynamics (+121M and +87M).
• Gaming accounts for 29.6% of total downloads and 51% of total revenue.
• RPG has been showing a gradual decline in the past two years, with revenue falling from $5.9B in H1 2022 to $4.4B in H1 2023 (-3.2% of total share). However, RPG still remains the largest genre. All other genres have been demonstrating a negative revenue trend as well.

Speaking about the creative aspect, what position does the gaming vertical hold, and what trends/approaches can you highlight?

Gaming advertisers make up 50.7% of all advertisers, which is 8% more than in H1 2022 (30K in H1 2022 vs. 37K H1 2023, 22% growth).

In total, gaming apps generated 8.9M creatives that equals to 56% of the total number of all creatives. 68.6% of the creatives are running on Android and 31.4% on iOS.

Hence, gaming publishers are the main advertisers in terms of traffic and number of creatives. It’s the vertical that shows a positive trend along with Tools, Productivity and Lifestyle.

If we narrow our discourse down to ad strategies and trends, we can name a few findings that are worth noting:

• TikTok, inherently different in comparison with other ad networks, is enjoying rampant growth. But it’s important to note that this channel is constantly evolving, with trends staying relevant for 2-3 weeks only, therefore, a creative fatigue hits faster here.
• Fake ads are still there, but have been seeing a drop in popularity. Some apps take elements of well-performing hypercasual mechanics and integrate them into their creatives. To make the transition smoother, publishers use mini-games, elements of onboarding funnels or LiveOps.
• AI is penetrating the industry at a fast pace, we already see an extensive number of AI-generated content: publishers iterate one concept using various options created by AI tools, or use those tools to create something unique that wouldn’t have been possible without these technologies.
• Growing share of the video content. As of H1 2023, video makes up 65%, followed by images (33%) and interactive ads (2%) among all verticals. In Gaming this disparity is bigger with videos making up 72%.
• Well-performing creatives often have a fail or wrong choice element along with customization (renovation, character selection) and drama (engaging storyline).
• IP integrations might be a smart strategy to secure good results and conversion rate.

As the hot season is coming, our audience would be interested to know what exciting things are happening in other verticals, wouldn’t they?

Regarding other verticals like Shopping and Health&Fitness, we witness steady growth of advertising activities. In Shopping we caught 264K of creatives in June, 316K in July and 190K in the first half of August (but the number of advertisers dropped by 3%).

The same pattern applies to Health&Fitness vertical: June — 81K, July — 183K (+126%), the first half of August — 113K (but here the number of advertisers has shown positive growth, +4%)

Overall, Health&Fitness vertical is growing in terms of downloads (+12.2K) with US (15.66%), India (13.44%), Brazil (8.12%) being at the top; meanwhile, Shopping category is suffering a slight decline (-5K).

Yana, could you please give some advice on how e-commerce can best prepare for the high season? Ad creative is the first thing the users see. What should advertisers focus on, how can they stand out from the competition?

I won’t surprise anyone by saying that the strategy should be data-driven and developed in advance, well before the hot season and special events like Black Friday or New Year.

Empathy and discounts should go hand in hand in the times of a global recession when the consumers are more sensitive about special offers and emotional connotations. So, in your creatives, you can try to convey support and say some meaningful words along with indicating a price reduction.

Push notifications play a significant role, they can help facilitate the purchase once a user leaves something in the cart or checks a product without going further. In that case, personalized offers might motivate them to complete the transaction (but it’s super important not to overload the users with too many notifications). Apart from that, many apps offer a powerful custom search bar and filtering options to simplify the search. Also, some partners claim that wish lists or an option to add a product to favorites encourage ongoing interaction.

We can’t but ask about the platform distribution and revenue trends?

The discrepancy between the platforms is no surprise. Most downloads are secured by Google Play (83.8%), whereas the biggest share of revenue is generated by the App Store (66.7%).

What general trends do you observe in the mobile app industry and advertising?

Market maturation and privacy pressure make it harder to be competitive. Privacy regulations have reduced targeting capacities, and putting pressure on running profitable and scaled UA. To stay ahead, companies have to adopt agile channel strategies (e-mail, SMS, push notifications, influencer marketing, brand integrations).

Along with the channel variety, there is a strong trend of revenue diversification: publishers are moving on to hybrid models (IAP + IAA; subscription, freemium model, cross-portfolio model).

Moreover, video content rocks nowadays. It is one of the most engaging forms of content with UGC and TikTok-like ads being on top.

Besides, we will witness a continued evolution of AI and Machine Learning Technologies. Again, in the pro-privacy era, AI algorithms can play a significant role in identifying and targeting high-value users for mobile apps, managing user segmentation, lowering churn rate and enhancing retention.

And finally, please share your favorite and trusted resources. What should we read, which events should we attend, and what courses should we take to stay informed about developments and changes in the analytics industry?

I follow the reports from major players in our industry like Liftoff, AppLovin, Adjust, etc. There are also a few good media that accumulate insightful articles and news: Newzoo, Mobile Marketing Reads, mobilegamer.biz, gamedevreports.

What’s more, we have our own podcast called Apptica Talks where experts share insights that shape my vision of the mobile industry and the trends. By the way, we’ve recently had a great talk with Genrikh about in-app traffic, fraud, predictive algorithms and the future of programmatic advertising.

And networking, of course. During the conferences, we often exchange information and data with our partners, learn how companies are evolving, and how the market is developing. Face-to-face communication is key ;)

So, we are looking forward to meeting our colleagues at WN Conference Cyprus, Linq Conference and other great events in the upcoming months.

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