Scaling mobile growth: How smart marketers pay 37% less and get 60% more

The cold hard reality of mobile marketing is that the rich get richer and the smart get smarter. That sounds unfair, but there is a sunny side up: nearly every mobile marketer has a shot at success.

But achieve breakout mobile growth isn’t easy.

Among other things, it requires prioritizing what already know you should be doing, but aren’t.

Cold hard data on mobile growth: what we’re seeing

Over the past year our customers used Singular to optimize more than $10 billion in annual ad spend. That includes over a trillion ad impressions, billions of conversion events, and hundreds of millions of app installs.

And it shows us that some marketers are vastly outperforming others.

The average mobile marketer achieving average mobile growth uses just a few ad partners: typically ones whose names your parents would know. That’s not a bad thing: those massive media sources are used by billions of people every single day. They have unparalleled audience and reach, which every mobile marketer will likely need.

But it’s definitely suboptimal to only dance with the big boys and girls of advertising. When you look at the average cost to onboard new mobile users, for example, mobile marketers using five or fewer ad partners pay $3.58. Marketers using six or more average just $2.24.

That’s a big difference. And it means that for the same $100,000 ad spend, top mobile marketers achieve 44,643 app installs … while others get only 27,933. Over a year’s worth of marketing, that’s well over half a million potential new users in your app versus just 335,000.

That’s massive competitive advantage. And at an example $10 LTV, it’s over $2 million in extra revenue that top mobile growth experts bring in.

Which, of course, is additional fuel for even more growth.

Most marketers know what they need to do

The results above are based on hard data … actual data on spend and performance and conversions. But hard data like this doesn’t tell us something very important: why marketers are doing what they’re doing.

Or, of course, why they’re not.

So we surveyed over 900 marketers who run ad campaigns, and what we found is that marketers who fail to create mobile growth don’t fail because they they don’t know what to do — at least at the macro level. Instead, they fail because they don’t know how to accomplish what they need to do effectively, at scale, while avoiding fraud.

Most marketers — 60% of them — understand that in order to access significant growth, they need to add media sources, or ad partners. The problem is that scaling is tough. In particular, scaling beyond known safe channels is dangerous.

Marketers know and trust just a few name-brand media sources. Going beyond those entails serious risk: from complexity, fraud, management, knowledge/skills gap, and more.

As a result, most marketers simply try harder with partners they already know. Even though they believe that the best way to grow is by adding more ad networks, they turn to optimizing with existing, known networks instead of experimentation with new, unproven options.

Optimization is not bad. In fact, it’s a critical part of success.

But when marketers are optimizing on only a very limited subset of possible partners, they’re reducing their chances of bigger-picture success. Getting small incremental wins is great, but opening up entirely new veins of fast growth is better.

Most of this problem is simply due to lack of needed tools for scaling growth safely and profitably via marketing intelligence. Essentially, the price growth marketers pay for the lack of marketing intelligence is sub-optimal growth.

How to unlock breakthrough mobile growth

We’ve talked to the top echelon of mobile marketers who are achieving outsized growth. And we know how they’re doing it.

Download the full free report Scaling Mobile Growth report to get the answers, including:

• 4 critical levers that top growth marketers optimize
• 3 key ways top marketers achieve smart insights on growth opportunities
• 3 toolsets top growth marketers use to run their campaigns
• 7 ad partners who are delivering outsized returns

Testing and trying more marketing options improves results. It lowers costs, and it increases conversions. It’s what all marketers instinctively know, but it’s also hard.

And it does come with more risk.

With the right tool, however, marketers can understand what’s happening. Measure it. Analyze it for results. And use strategies and insights that allow them to beat the market … achieving significantly great results for less cost.

That translates directly to competitive benefit. And, ultimately, to faster growth.

Get the full report on how to get started.