Mobile app growth platform Mobmio is preparing to launch a new version of its platform. The key changes will be in the area of tracking and displaying its results. The new platform will rely on raw data, automation and access to data through a "single window".  The company has already invested $500,000 in these innovations in the first quarter of 2024 and plans to increase the number of clients and partners in MENA by 2.5 times in a year. The project continues its rapid growth under the wing of Mitgo X, the R&D department of Mitgo Group, one of the global IT industry leaders in AdTech and MarTech. The boom of the mobile industry in the region has been going on for several years now. Mobmio estimates that in 2023, the share of mobile purchases in total online orders jumped from 32% to more than 40%. In the first months of 2024, the amount spent by customers buying through mobile apps doubled year-over-year. Part of this explosive growth is driven by platforms like Mobmio, which helps brands engage mobile users and increase purchases through mobile traffic channels, while the apps monetize their audiences and generate additional revenue. The platform is now actively working with dozens of apps. These innovations will help it increase the number of customers in MENA and all over the world by 2.5 times this year by redirecting huge staff resources to expansion and development after the automation. A common problem of many affiliate networks is that brands betting on mobile traffic have to study statistics from multiple sources - ad networks and trackers. It is often not complete, making data reconciliation difficult. Affiliate network managers often have to spend more than 50% of their time manually bringing all these disparate pieces of data together so that the brand can get a more complete tracking picture. And even after these efforts, it is often not possible to achieve 100% transparency and accuracy of data, because these services and platforms often provide already processed, secondary data, and may miss some of the indicators. The new platform will automatically collect raw data from the most efficient trackers, which will eliminate any inaccuracies in processing and will double the efficiency of the network team. The first wave will integrate the largest mobile trackers - Adjust and Appsflyer. The second wave will include the rest of the industry leaders - Mytracker, Impact, Branch and Custom. The new platform is scheduled to launch in the third quarter of 2024. "With this strategic investment, we are not only enhancing our platform's capabilities but also solidifying our commitment to revolutionizing mobile app growth. Our aim is to simplify the complex data landscape and provide actionable insights that drive real value for our clients.", - Aleksandr Kryvosheiev, CEO of Mobmio. 

As regional brands compete fiercely to earn a coveted spot on users’ smartphones, new research from AppsFlyer has revealed that the country’s mobile marketers would be wise to concentrate their efforts in and around the Holy Month.In analysing key mobile app trends through Ramadan, and comparing these to the weeks leading up to the Holy Month, AppsFlyer’s research showed that in the Middle East, non-organic instals (NOIs) — those driven by marketing campaigns — of mobile apps were up by 27% this year, which is even more pronounced than the 21% spike observed during Ramadan 2023.“We have been analysing mobile app behaviours through the Holy Month for several years now and the ‘Ramadan Effect’ is abundantly apparent. During this time, consumers have limited time to reach physical shopping destinations before iftar and mobile shopping sees a surge as a result. Marketers can leverage this behaviour by creating targeted campaigns that offer deals on essential Ramadan items and increase engagement by creating content that highlights the significance of Ramadan and how their products can enhance the experience. By creating targeted e-commerce campaigns, brands can drive sales and revenue during this period,” said Sue Azari, Industry Lead - eCommerce, AppsFlyer.UAE Leads Surge in App Installs while Finance Apps Skyrocket by 384% During Ramadan in the Middle EastIn its YoY comparison, AppsFlyer found that the UAE in particular drove this positive trend, with NOIs in the country surging an incredible 164% this Ramadan. As in previous years, AppsFlyer’s researchers analysed trends in specific app categories including finance, food delivery, and eCommerce (shopping). This year, the performance of finance apps was especially impressive with the category showing a 384% spike in total instals compared to Ramadan last year. “In the Middle East, through the Holy Month this year, we saw a significant surge in financial app adoption, signalling a shift towards sophisticated investment trends. As competition intensifies, companies must innovate to stay ahead in the app industry,” said Otávio Tranchesi, Industry Lead - Finance, at AppsFlyer.Remarketing conversions — app spending driven by campaigns that aim to re-engage users that have already downloaded an organisation’s app — was also well pronounced for financial apps for which this metric grew a staggering 39%. Similarly, food delivery apps resonated well with UAE consumers, recording a 169% spike this Ramadan in NOI, while the eCommerce category also showed respectable 27% increases.Capitalizing on Ramadan Effect by Embracing Customer Retention StrategiesAzari was quick to emphasise the need for UAE brands that have benefitted from the Ramadan Effect to now work diligently to consolidate their gains. Just this year, AppsFlyer showed that UAE consumers are easily disenchanted by the mobile applications offered by brands, with the majority (56.44%) of Android apps being uninstalled within just a month of being downloaded.“Companies must solidify their gains by retaining the hard-won customers through continuous engagement efforts. This will mean delivering outstanding customer experiences to reinforce the current user base and extending marketing and engagement strategies across email, SMS, and push notifications. Personalising experiences will also be key to enhancing engagement, fostering loyalty, and generating increased value for customers,” said Azari.

As digital consumption continues to surge, particularly among Gen Z and Millennials, the realm of Connected TV (CTV) presents a wealth of opportunities for media planners. Paul Wright, General Manager of Western Europe and MENAT at AppsFlyer, offers insights into the strategies media planners should prioritize in 2024 to leverage this shift and ensure campaigns effectively engage with target audiences. From capitalizing on addressable media to navigating CTV analytics, Wright delves into the nuances of CTV advertising and its transformative potential in the ever-evolving media landscape.With the surge in CTV usage especially among Gen Z and Millennials, what strategies do you believe media planners should prioritise in 2024 to leverage the opportunities presented by this shift? And how can media planners ensure that their campaigns effectively engage with the target audience?You’re absolutely right in that the consumption of digital services and content is on the rise. The United Arab Emirate’s video-on-demand market user penetration is projected to rise from a current 18% to 22% by 2027. The most recent AppsFlyer report on this topic showed that 64% of businesses are already running direct-response CTV campaigns, and 98% of them believe CTV will eventually overtake mobile as an advertising channel, with a quarter predicting this will happen by the middle of this decade. It is easy to see the attraction of CTV advertising — the opportunity to reach new customers, the prospect of higher engagement levels, and the potential of higher lifetime value.The hundred-million-dollar UAE VoD market is but a sliver of a hundred-billion-dollar global ecosystem. This presents new opportunities for marketing professionals to enhance the effectiveness of campaigns because CTV ads have been shown to produce much higher viewing completion than other forms of communication. With the ability to fine-tune both the message and the audience through insights from rich data sets, campaign-runners can be more strategic with their ads, placing them across top-tier networks and popular content, and even re-engaging their OTT and CTV viewers across the various devices they use. In light of the conversation surrounding Gen Z and Millennials, it's crucial for media planners to recognize the dual-screen opportunity, particularly the synergy between TV and mobile, especially on social media platforms. With the surge in CTV usage among these demographics, media planners should prioritize strategies that capitalize on this trend. One effective approach is to integrate TV and mobile advertising seamlessly, leveraging the strengths of each platform to engage audiences across multiple touchpoints.How can advertisers leverage the unique advantages offered by CTV, such as addressable media and immersive ad experiences, compared to traditional TV advertising?Traditional cable operators can only track number of views and viewer location, which is not the richest set of insights in today’s consumer markets, where individualization is a must-have. OTT platforms perform much better in gathering data, in terms of both quantity and quality. They know much more than just what people are watching; they know how they are watching it, and when they disengage from content and why. They can also compose reports on cross-regional viewing trends that can be immensely useful to marketers.These are the technical benefits that lead to the business advantages — new audiences, enhanced engagement, and higher lifetime value. Unsurprisingly, data drives the transformation story. Rich metrics gleaned through OTT and CTV platforms remove the guesswork from viewing analyses and put paid to the leaps of faith associated with campaigns of old. Today’s streaming services can accommodate niches that account for episode content, short-form content such as news reports, live streaming, and VoD. There's a significant programmatic opportunity for media planners to delve deeper into targeting, allowing for granular precision in reaching specific demographics and audiences. Leveraging platforms such as the TTDs, Amazon, and now Walmart, presents a unique advantage, as they can bring in valuable signals from various sources. This enables media planners to optimize their campaigns effectively by tapping into rich data insights and reaching audiences across multiple touchpoints.How do advancements in CTV analytics and measurement tools, including Attention measurement, influence media planners' decisions to invest in CTV advertising?The insights made possible by CTV platforms offer a host of benefits to marketers who can use this invaluable information to fine tune their campaigns. For example, by tracking brand reach, they can get to grips with the extent to which OTT ad campaigns are reaching relevant audiences. Along with reach goes frequency and the gross-rating points (GRPs) of OTT ad campaigns.Or consider another crucial metric — brand lift. OTT ads can drive brand awareness across different audiences. Marketers must measure the perception change directly related to their campaigns, including awareness, favourability, and purchase intent. All these data points can lead to a better understanding of how messaging approaches directly lead to a better position for the brand within the market.Measurement and fragmentation are potential challenges in CTV placements. How do you suggest advertisers/media planners address these challenges while ensuring effective ROI on their ad campaigns in the CTV space?You've touched on a very important point here. A significant challenge for CTV advertisers is that every inventory source collects data differently, resulting in different insights. Often, providers operate in walled gardens, which force advertisers to work directly with them, deal with varying and limited data sets, and prevent user-level data from leaving their individual platforms. The result is an extremely competitive and fragmented marketplace, where advertisers face challenges around accurate measurement and attribution.That said, because CTV advertising is so rooted in data, it’s possible for marketers to measure the success of their campaigns, and attribute results to the right sources, with pinpoint accuracy. This will require the support of a good MMP to help them navigate the fractured landscape, providing centralized, unbiased attribution across media sources, channels, and devices. Brands can successfully overcome defragmentation by running upper and lower funnel campaigns with the same measurement partners. Combining brand and performance campaigns on CTV would defragment the funnel and allow for a better understanding of the user journey. And of course, another crucial part of the solution is data standardization. Working with a partner such as AppsFlyer, that is capable of enabling standardization, will ensure that even though more and more networks are becoming walled gardens, you can still get all those data points in one consistent analytics dashboard.Two key user journeys to track are as CTV-to-CTV attribution and measurement and CTV-to-mobile attribution and measurement. The former is where CTV ads result in CTV app installs, on the same device or operating system, while the latter is where viewers install a mobile app after seeing it advertised on a CTV device. In both cases, where things get tricky is that each CTV platform provides its own reporting method, and the reporting itself may vary in terms of consistency, granularity, and naming conventions. This is where an MMP such as AppsFlyer can help, by providing a consolidated dashboard. By working with an MMP that integrates directly with CTV platforms like Roku, Fire TV, Apple TV, Android TV, Chromecast, gaming consoles, and smart TVs, marketers can access deeper metrics such as LTV and metadata for better attribution.

AppsFlyer unveiled a new report which reveals that UAE consumers are easily disenchanted by the mobile applications offered by brands — the majority (56.44%) of Android1 applications are uninstalled within just 30 days of being downloaded. This figure is notably higher than that for more mature markets such as the United States and United Kingdom, where the average 30-day uninstall rate for Android apps stands at 46.76% and 47.82% respectively.Commenting on the implications of the above-average rate of app uninstallation in the country, Paul Wright, General Manager Western Europe and MENAT at AppsFlyer, said: “Research we conducted in early 2023 indicated that the vast majority (84%) of UAE business believe that mobile apps are a ‘must’ to stay relevant to their customers and consequently 9 in 10 UAE businesses now offer an app as a means of engaging with customers. However, as our latest research shows, earning, and then maintaining, a spot on customers’ smartphones is becoming immensely difficult. The harsh reality is that with a multitude of competitors and rising user expectations, apps that fail to deliver quickly and effectively are at an increasing risk of being uninstalled.”The company also shed light on which types of apps are most susceptible to rapid changes in user perceptions. Looking at non-organic installs — driven by successful conversions of marketing efforts — Lifestyle apps fared the poorest with 86% being deleted within 30 days. Even the top 10% of these applications suffered an uninstall rate of 50%. Interestingly, Finance, Shopping, and Food & Beverage applications all showed high uninstall rates for non-organic downloads at 70%, 66% and 62% respectively.These figures were all significantly better for apps that had been organically downloaded by users. In these instances, just over half (52%) of Lifestyle apps remained on users’ smart devices for over 30 days, while 58% of Finance apps, 64% of shopping apps and 46% of Food & Beverage apps achieved this desirable outcome. "Organic users have higher intent than non-organic users and therefore it is no surprise that across categories, their uninstall rate is much lower. That said, in the Middle East, for Android, non-organic instals account for the larger portion (55%) of all app installs. This significance of non-organic install cannot be overlooked. Rather, mobile marketers should recognise that their efforts cannot stop at simply driving installs. They need to work with other stakeholders to ensure that hard earned users are retained as this will yield greater ROIs on their campaign investments,” explained Wright.To enable app marketers to plan user retention campaigns more effectively, AppsFlyer worked to pinpoint exactly when users are dropping off the most. Globally, the company's data shows that the first day is when most users uninstall apps, likely the result of unmet expectations or false promises. Although all verticals display a similar trend over the first 30 days, Finance apps set the pace early on with 23% higher day 1 rates compared to the average of other verticals.“As the highest uninstall rate occurs on the first day, nailing the onboarding process becomes paramount. To reduce the uninstall rate within the first day and the first week, brands must ensure a seamless and engaging onboarding experience that fosters a strong and lasting connection with users," said Wright. "Moreover, as these high uninstall rates for UAE consumers demonstrate, brands should avoid over-promising in an attempt to maximise downloads, as it can lead to frustration and potentially damage your brand irreparably."

AppsFlyer today launched Creative Optimization, its new product that provides marketers with unparalleled insights into their creative assets and data-driven guidance on maximizing their impact. Coupled with Artificial Intelligence (AI), Creative Optimization identifies patterns, trends, and features that drive optimal audience engagement, enabling marketers to capture the most value from their ad spend while enhancing the effectiveness of their creative content and campaigns.  Creative Optimization empowers stakeholders across performance marketing, creative, and Business Intelligence (BI) teams to collaborate to craft diverse asset variations, test, and validate winning variables within advertisements — saving time and resources while elevating performance. Marketing teams now possess the tools to make creative decisions that marry human intuition with the precision, speed, and scalability of the AI capabilities embedded within the product. “The new Creative Optimization product presents a real breakthrough for marketers, bridging the gap between creative and growth marketing teams while addressing key pain points to drive success for both,” said Yevgeny Peres, EVP of Product Strategy at AppsFlyer. “By delivering sophisticated, in-depth creative insights, it enables growth marketing teams to optimize spend, increase scale, and drive profitability by automatically identifying which creatives perform best in campaigns. Simultaneously, it equips the creative team with valuable insights on the attributes of winning creatives, empowering them to focus on the most effective elements and allocate their time and resources more efficiently. This seamless collaboration closes the feedback loop, boosts confidence in creative production, reduces risk by minimizing investment in underperforming creatives while scaling the production of winning ones to drive profitability at scale.” AppsFlyer worked with more than 100 companies, including fintech company Dave and mobile gaming leader Papaya Gaming, through the development and testing of Creative Optimization over the last year. Companies across gaming, fintech, e-commerce, and entertainment industries employed the product to enhance their marketing efforts to great effect. Brands utilizing the product were able to grow their ad spend by as much as 300% while seeing vast improvements in key performance indicators. Campaigns resulted in increases in ad click-through rates of up to 50%, decreases in cost-per-install by as much as 30%, and saw up to 100% uplift in customer retention and revenue metrics. “AppsFlyer's Creative Optimization has been a game-changer for our cross-team creative collaboration efforts,” said Christian Espinoza, Senior Marketing Technology Manager at Dave. “We've seen a significant increase in efficiency, and it's transformed our creative optimization process by providing a deep understanding of what works best on specific channels and allowing us to extract maximum value from our top-performing assets. We’ve seen a major increase in efficiency — what used to take us 8-10 hours a week, we can now effortlessly pull and share reports with the creative team, making data-driven decisions without the need for manual data extraction or platform hopping.” “Creative Optimization is transformative for our campaigns, allowing our marketing team to reach larger audiences, improve our efficiency and collaboration,” said Dan Hayoun, Performance Group Manager at Papaya Gaming. “This has led to great results and helped turn the creative marketing process into a growth engine across our award-winning portfolio of games. As a leader in the next generation of gaming, we are constantly looking for cutting edge tools that can help us operate on a larger scale, while providing the best options for attracting and retaining players to continue growing our business.” Creative Optimization enables users to marry best-in-class AI creative capabilities and AppsFlyer’s analytics-driven dashboards to deliver the most efficient and effective campaigns: ?     AI-powered insights for maximizing ad spend and creatives’ effectiveness. Creative Optimization automatically analyzes creative assets, breaking them down into scenes, and provides performance data and guidance for effectively replacing underperforming elements. ?     Access granular performance data to uncover the winning formula for your creative strategy. Creative Optimization aggregates all creative performance data in one place, providing an unbiased, comprehensive overview of creative performance, including cost, installs, clicks, and down-funnel metrics like retention, lifetime value and more.?     Turn creative performance into meaningful data for your BI system. Creative Optimization consolidates all creative data, offering a reliable and up-to-date system that incorporates recent changes in the marketing ecosystem. This streamlines the data integration process and ensures a credible and trustworthy source for creative data within the BI system.  

DUBAI : Wego has emerged as the #1 travel app for flight search and booking in the MENA (Middle East and North Africa) region with a year-over-year (YOY) growth of over 157.7% and 143,002 downloads in February 2023, according to data from data.ai.This data was gathered by analyzing the download rates of 1,062 travel apps that offer flight and hotel search capabilities. Wego has also earned the distinction of being the most downloaded travel app for flight-focused brands in the MENA region, and secondly, it is the most downloaded travel app under Meta and OTA categories in Kuwait since September 2022. With holidays such as Eid Fitr approaching soon, the app's popularity is expected to rise steadily.Wego is an award-winning travel app and one of the largest online travel marketplaces in the MENA & Asia Pacific. With its extensive network of airline and hotel partners, Wego offers travelers a comprehensive range of travel options, allowing them to find the best deals and make informed decisions about their travel plans.Whether traveling for adventure, work, family, or other reasons, users can rely on Wego to provide them with a seamless booking experience.Wego's success can be attributed to its user-friendly interface, which allows users to browse and compare flight and hotel room options from multiple airlines and hotels in one place.Moreover, throughout the year 2022, Wego has introduced a string of new updates and features for its users, like easier payment gateways with its collaboration with Tabby and Apple Pay. This, coupled with the app's competitive pricing, has helped Wego secure its position as the top travel app for flight search and booking in the MENA region.

AppsFlyer today released its State of Gaming App Marketing for 2023, an in-depth report on key gaming trends for app developers, marketers and game studios to utilize as they navigate through a year of challenging macro trends, including the new age of data privacy. As the post-Covid era unfolds, a digital slowdown, or return to pre-Covid conditions, is taking place. While the effects are becoming increasingly apparent in metrics like overall app installs by consumers, the gaming app economy still showed resilience with nearly $27 billion invested in ad spend by gaming marketers and developers worldwide in 2022 to acquire new users. Overall, Android game app installs rose slightly, by 8% compared to 2021, whereas iOS game app installs showed a small decline, with a 5% drop. Based on advertising investment, the United States remains the largest target market for gaming app marketers by a significant margin, followed by Japan, South Korea, Germany and the United Kingdom.“If 2021 and the first quarter of 2022 was the golden age of gaming, the second half of 2022 and especially 2023 will be a time that marketers, developers and studios will need to overcome challenges to adopt highly-focused, efficient strategies for attracting and inspiring loyal, valuable players,” said Shani Rosenfelder, Director of Market Insights at AppsFlyer. “Evolving marketing budgets coupled with drops in consumer spending across some genres mean game businesses are compelled to prioritize profits over growing the sheer size of their numbers of players. Despite the hurdles, however, mobile gaming remains a lucrative powerhouse nearing three billion players globally. Marketers will continue to succeed by putting more focus on modern measurement capabilities, utilizing techniques that deliver an engaging experience while respecting user privacy, and leveraging remarketing and owned media channels further in order to offset increases in their cost-per-installs (CPI). Additionally, they will need to dive deep into the complex yet promising SKAN 4.0 from Apple, and invest more in campaigns outside of the United States, as gaming is truly a global phenomenon.”As for gaming app revenues, the State of Gaming report reveals that consumers spent the most on in-app purchases (IAP) in role playing and social casino (not real money) games. Purchases in these game categories declined mostly in the second half of 2022, leading to an overall drop in IAP revenues by 7% compared to the first half of the year. The economic downturn appears to have impacted consumer behavior in high IAP genres of role playing and social casino more than other categories like match or puzzle games, which rely more on micropayments. In-app advertising (IAA) remained the strongest driver of revenues for hypercasual, match and simulation games, though IAA revenues also declined across most genres towards the second half of 2022.Key Insights from the 2023 State of Gaming App Marketing:$26.7 Billion total gaming app install ad spend worldwide in 2022. The US commands nearly half at $12.2B thanks to its high-volume and high-cost media landscape; Japan is a distant second with nearly $2B in spend.Worldwide, Android game app installs rose slightly in 2022, iOS game app installs showed a small decline. There was an 8% YoY growth in total app installs of Android games. A -5% YoY install drop on iOS reflects the continued challenges iOS app marketers are facing following Apple’s privacy changes (despite the improvement vs. the previous 2022-2021 YoY figure of -13%). In the US, still considered the most important market for gaming app marketers, 2022 saw a 19% growth in Android app installs and -1% decline in installs of iOS gaming apps when compared to 2021.The second half of 2022 in particular was a struggle for in-game purchases with the economic uncertainty in the market. There was a -7% overall drop in in-app purchase (IAP) revenue in H2 2022 compared to H1 2022, with iOS down -13% and Android down -6%. Overall, in-app purchases on Android gaming apps were down -14% year-over year (YoY), while iOS was down -1% YoY. This was driven largely by a decline in Role Playing and Casino game genres that typically have high rates of in-app purchases, and where the economic downturn appears to have impacted consumer spend.Categories that saw largest growth in 2022 vs. 2021: 48% growth rate for Android casino games, 3x more than second-place Hypercasual and 5x higher compared to the growth rate in puzzle and Role Playing games (RPG). Casino games led growth on the flagging iOS side, clocking an impressive 17%.Cost-per-installs on iOS continue to climb: 88% is the increase in CPI on iOS from Q1 2021 to Q4 2022, shooting up $3.75 per install as iOS marketers continue to accept high prices to acquire valuable Apple users. YoY rates show a 35% jump.Marketers increasingly leveraging owned media channels: As marketers look to get more value out of their budgets, the use of owned media strategies such as push notifications, in-app messages and cross promotion is seeing a sustained rise. This has led to a significant YoY increase in the number of owned media conversions, with a 16% growth on iOS and a 34% surge on Android.“As gaming marketers continue to navigate their way through a shifting economic landscape along with privacy changes, particularly on iOS, they face fresh challenges and opportunities in regards to their app marketing efforts,” said Adam Smart, Director of Product, Gaming. “Privacy restrictions on iOS limit the ability of marketers to leverage user-level data, which was previously the cornerstone of their ability to connect campaign performance to attracting new users. Yet despite a significant rise in media costs and measurement challenges, gaming apps are still investing heavily in capturing high-quality players on iOS, and are not shifting those resources to Android even if the approach results in attracting fewer users overall. This gives greater importance to the use of privacy-enhancing tech and data clean rooms in 2023 and beyond, and will also provide advantages to those able to leverage accurate and comprehensive data for making the timeliest decisions on where, when and how to optimally invest budgets in ways that attract and retain the most valuable players.”MethodologyAppsFlyer’s State of Gaming App Marketing, 2023 Edition is an anonymous aggregate of proprietary global data from 38 billion app installs from 18.6 thousand apps measured with 10 thousand quarterly installs and $13.9 billion in total ad spend measured from January 2021 to December 2022.T

Sarah Maina has been appointed as Appsflyer’s Middle East partner development manager.As part of her new role, Maina will be responsible for developing the company’s agency and media partner ecosystem, growing AppsFlyer’s partnerships in the region, and unlocking opportunities for its partners.In most organisations’ multi-channel marketing mix, mobile apps have become a cornerstone. Many marketers, however, struggle to accurately correlate marketing spend and app engagement with revenue. Maina’s collaboration with key regional partners, like Meta, Google and TikTok, will empower the company’s customers with the solutions they need to accurately calculate ROI across the marketing journey as they maximize their own media channels.Maina will be based in Dubai. She has more than 12 years of experience in the AdTech industry. Having held leadership roles at prominent organisations such as Millennial Media, AOL, Tempr, and Singular, she has extensive experience developing and managing partnership ecosystems.