Episode Details

Since Apple’s big announcement about upcoming privacy changes in iOS 14, mobile app developers have been scrambling to understand how these changes will affect their businesses. With IDFA effectively dead in the water, developers will no longer be able to use device-level attribution and high-resolution tracking to send targeted ads to their users. So what can they do?

In this week’s episode, we asked mobile marketing expert Eric Seufert for his take. Eric has had quite a career in mobile. From VP of user acquisition at Rovio to his recent consulting projects with subscription app companies, Eric has a depth and breadth of experience with mobile apps and games that few can match. He’s also a prolific writer. He wrote a book on freemium economics and has written hundreds of insightful articles on his site Mobile Dev Memo.

In this episode, you’ll hear about:

(1:07) Managing user acquisition at Rovio; freemium app dynamics at scale.

(6:30) Why it’s hard to determine the effect of a specific ad channel; holdout testing.

(9:10) The difference between mobile and traditional advertising: response time; Pepsi Super Bowl ads.

(22:10) Why Eric doesn’t like the term “user acquisition.”

(31:00) Why post-IDFA is more work for advertisers but provides a bigger opportunity.

(37:43) How App Store changes have shaped the entire mobile app market; Top Charts.

(44:25) Prediction: SKAdNetwork changes will most likely go into effect this January.

Follow Us:

David Barnard: https://twitter.com/drbarnard

Jacob Eiting: https://twitter.com/jeiting

Eric Seufert: https://twitter.com/eric_seufert

Quotes:

“When you’re spending a lot of money and you’re showing a person five ads a day, incrementality is critical in figuring out how much value did this particular ad contribute? … That’s the more interesting question because when these budgets get really large, you get these signals coming from all these different mediums, and figuring out which of those actually drives value is more important.” - Eric

“That’s what’s so interesting about the mobile ecosystem: that immediacy, that kind of lack of friction.” - Eric

“Just doing the fun clicking around Facebook Ad Manager, that’s not performance marketing. That’s advertising operations or something.” - Eric

“Google’s always going to tell you to spend more money. Whatever question you ask Google about improving your performance, it’s like, “Oh, just pay more money!” - David

“These systems were designed to sort of alleviate that need, on the part of the advertiser, to not have to have this big team of data scientists working on these models. Like, “Hey, we’ll do it for you!” And to be honest, Google could do it better than any individual advertiser could — it’s Google. And just the fact that they’re syndicating all that data across all these different advertisers, they just have more data than any single advertiser could. And that’s a good thing.” - Eric

“This is something I think Apple has failed at since the very beginning of the App Store: understanding the way their individual, seemingly small decisions end up shaping the entire market… Now w