Summed up the results of the year together with Tanya Moroz, VP for Customer Success in Appodeal. She spoke about trends in the mobile advertising market, plans for the next year and the company’s successes.
Tell me, what was the year for you personally, where are you now?
The year was objectively difficult, I had to relocate for obvious reasons. Now in Barcelona, everything is fine, but still my soul aches for everything that is happening. Despite this, it turns out to work, to support users with similar problems, to assist those who could not leave the country and vice versa to those who also had to leave it urgently.
I am proud of how we managed to improve the product. From the tools we have added and debugged LVT, eROAS forkasts. Now clients can build very accurate predictive models for up to two years.
We also made a cool tool for automating UA, which we are already testing with our users. Also, with the release of the latest SDK update, in which we took into account the wishes of customers for improvement, we see an increase in the seventh-day ARPU metric by 25% in a number of cases.
What was the year like for the company? What have you done, implemented, and what in general would I like to highlight in terms of achievements?
Of course, geopolitics influenced us, we saw a drop in the CIS region, which began to recover by the end of the year.
The year was very productive: we relocated most of the team to Polish and Spanish offices due to the war, significantly transformed the business inside, attracted a large number of new studios, helped existing ones grow.
In partnership with Adjust, we helped many studios to take the first steps in purchasing, which significantly expanded their opportunities for growth. One of the major achievements was the integration of our Bidmachine network into the Applovin MAX stack.
And, yes, the company is breaking revenue records again.
How has the advertising market changed over the year?
If you look at the series of deals this year, you can see the trend towards the consolidation of market players. Transparency is becoming less and less, the mechanics of auctions and what bids are offered remain one big blackbox for publishers. Large platforms fix in their policies a ban on the use of add-ons to their service that would allow publishers to get the best conditions available on the market.
SKAD 4.0 has become a big innovation, its appearance makes it easier to work with IDFA data. Increasing the number of digits in postbacks from two to four for UA may make it possible to receive more detailed reports about the source of the installation.
In general, there is a tendency to adapt to the conditions of confidentiality. User privacy will continue to be the main trend in UA. In addition to adapting to the new version of SKAD on iOS, advertisers will have to start preparing for similar changes on Android.
Has the practice of working with gaming companies changed? In what and how exactly?
Competition for users is growing, there are more and more games, huge publishers are flooding the market with advertising, it is difficult to compete. The market is beginning to actively develop tools that help make the purchase of users more efficient. Companies are switching to ROAS optimization and automation of the entire procurement process – from attempts to create creatives using Stable Diffusion and DALL—E to bid management and updating creatives in campaigns.
We are also working on such tools for the growth of mobile business.
What are the main trends in mobile gaming marketing that you would highlight at the end of 2022?
The use of AI in development, in creatives, there are also many applications that actively use AI. Preparations are also underway for the introduction of Privacy Sandbox on Android and the possible rejection of user id.
What are the company’s plans for next year?
We plan to grow and enter new markets. Small and medium-sized studios now have a need for self-publishing tools that we offer, so there is a large field for development and growth.
In Bidmachine we will adapt to SKAD. At Appodeal, we are working on a dashboard for effective analytics of SKAD campaigns.
We are also currently working on one global breakthrough product, which we plan to announce in early 2023. It will be fully open source and fully consonant with the company’s mission — to make the mobile games market more honest and transparent for all players, in particular for publishers.