Pavel Livshits, Regional Business Development / Growth at AppsFlyer, spoke about important trends in the mobile marketing market.
Pavel Livshits
How was 2020 for the company?
2020 was a great year for AppsFlyer. In January, we announced a Series D funding round of $210 million. Salesforce Ventures also joined this round at a late stage, increasing our valuation to $2 billion. We have also exceeded the $200 million ARR (Annual Recurring Revenue) mark, and the global team now has more than 1,000 employees.
This year we have released two very important products:
- Xpend is a cost collection solution that helps customers better understand and optimize their budgets;
- Incrementality is a functionality that allows marketers to determine the real value of their advertising campaigns by measuring which conversions were made only as a result of marketing campaigns, and which could still occur organically.
What new trends in your niche do you consider worth paying attention to?
There are positive trends in working with confidentiality. An example of this is Apple's changes regarding IDFA. The new policy will affect all areas of mobile marketing, including attribution.
With changes come opportunities — we are already helping our clients prepare for the release and the new rules. Our SKAdNetwork modeling allows customers to see what their data will look like in the absence of IDFA, what analytical data they can collect, and how conversion measurement and value can be optimized.
In the absence of identifiers such as IDFA, marketers will need to attach more importance to aggregated data. That is why we focus on working with probabilistic models. AppsFlyer is now fully ready to work with SKAdNetowork.
We have also improved our Web SDK, which will allow customers to properly work with the user funnel using web to app and app to web.
What new market trends would you note in general?
In the gaming segment, the pandemic has led to an accelerated increase in the number of installations. The growth was 45% year-on-year.
Last year, active discussions were held at all conferences about the future of the hyper-casual genre. Many have argued that this category of games is about to die or get a hybrid monetization model. However, this did not happen: the hyper-casual segment still primarily earns money from advertising. It also showed an increase of 250% in terms of inorganic installations compared to 2019.
There is also a significant consolidation of the gaming sector. The number of transactions in our region has increased significantly. Companies from other verticals, having no experience in game development, absorb entirely or invest in already successful studios.
Below are the main trends based on 2020 data in mobile marketing, you can read more in our report.
- App downloads increased by 33%, and UA expenses reached $74.6 billion.
- The cost of installation increased by 30% after the lockdown.
- App revenue is growing across the board: IAP, IAA, and subscriptions.
- There is a huge organic demand for non-gaming applications, while gaming applications have grown dramatically in terms of UA.
What will be the stake in the development of the company in 2021?
Growth will be a key focus. We plan to significantly increase the number of employees and enter new markets by opening more local offices. At the moment, we already have 19 offices around the world.
AppsFlyer will also continue to improve current products so that our current and future customers have the best solutions for measurement, attribution, anti-fraud, segmentation, as well as better ensuring maximum user privacy.
The world of MarTech has changed a lot over the past year. Growth will be shown by companies that focus on R&D and will be able to adapt their products to new market realities as flexibly as possible.
What game releases are you interested in this year?
The coolest release of the year is Among Us. No game in my memory has shown such rapid organic growth, especially a cross-platform one. The rules and mechanics of the game are very simple, which made it accessible to everyone (including playing with friends who are not gamers).
Genshin Impact. There are not many games of this scale on the mobile market. I initially went to play "for work", to see how the monetization was organized. As a result, the game dragged on — I enjoyed spending dozens of hours in it.