Apple Search Ads Gets a Significant Boost While Meta and Snap See Declines; TikTok Pulls Ahead of Snap for Share of Advertiser Wallet

Appsumer, a leading performance insights platform for mobile app advertisers by InMobi, unveiled its benchmark report on how major advertisers are leveraging the top sources for app downloads, analyzed through advertiser channel adoption and share-of-wallet. The report provides a snapshot of advertiser behavior from second quarter 2021 to the second quarter 2022 and reveals that Apple has gotten a significant boost to Apple Search Ads (ASA) as a result of their AppTrackingTransparency (ATT) initiatives, while Facebook and Snap saw declines in both share-of-wallet and market share.

“The largest advertisers likely increased channels to maintain volume when performance dipped on some channels. Smaller advertisers frequently lack the creative, data and optimization resources to diversify quickly across channels.”

The report also revealed that smaller advertisers continue to struggle with the increasing complexity of cross-channel advertising; while the number of channels used didn’t move significantly, the underlying data shows more detail on how larger and smaller marketers adjusted channel mix. Large advertisers increased the channels used year-over-year by an average of 1.4 channels to a total of 10.7. In contrast, smaller advertisers decreased the channels used on average by 1.1 year-over-year to 2.5.

“There is a clear divide between the success of larger advertisers and the struggle of smaller advertisers,” explains Shumel Lais, General Manager of Appsumer by InMobi. “The largest advertisers likely increased channels to maintain volume when performance dipped on some channels. Smaller advertisers frequently lack the creative, data and optimization resources to diversify quickly across channels.”

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Lais recommends that smaller app players consider building lean experimentation processes to help diversify channels, and a cost-effective data infrastructure can help provide valuable insights into the complexities of cross-channel measurement in a post-ATT world.

The report’s findings also highlight the shifts among market leaders, including:

• ASA joins the duopoly of Meta and Google at the top table of advertiser adoption, with adoption growing nearly four percentage points to 94.8%, while Meta adoption declined three percentage points to 82.8%.
• ASA’s share-of-wallet rose five percentage points, reaching a 15% share. Apple’s first-party data advantage on iOS for both measurement and targeting has helped, but they will need more inventory, which is why rumors of an Apple DSP are swirling.
• Meta’s share-of-wallet declined four percentage points year-over-year, still finishing significantly ahead of ASA with a 28% share. However, the data reveals that Meta saw an increase of share-of-wallet in early 2022, suggesting that they’re starting to recover from initial ATT headwinds.
• Snap lost 50% of their share-of-wallet and was impacted by both the current economic climate and ATT headwinds. However, while adoption declined three percentage points to 32.7%, it bounced back from 25.4% in the first quarter of 2022. Snap may recover its share-of-wallet in coming quarters as adoption growth can be seen as a leading indicator.
• TikTok pulled ahead of Snap for both advertiser adoption and share-of-wallet. However, TikTok’s advertiser adoption declined nearly seven percentage points to 43.2%. Their share-of-wallet remained steady at 3% suggesting that some advertisers are succeeding, while others are struggling to come to grips with the platform.

iOS versions that enabled ATT reached mass adoption in June 2021, allowing the report to offer full comparative year-over-year analysis of its impact on mobile app advertisers. The Appsumer Benchmark Report data comes from a longitudinal study that looked at more than 100 North America and European consumer mobile apps with a median spend of $350,000 per month between the second quarter of 2021 and the second quarter of 2022. Assessments ensured that no single advertiser represented more than 20% of the dataset to avoid a single advertiser from dominating or skewing the results.

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