4 strategies to drive durable app growth in 2023

2022 was a year of change and resilience for the apps industry. Developers continued to push for innovations through economic uncertainty, digital privacy shifts, and changing user behaviors. As the industry continues to evolve with these forces, we’ve identified four opportunities to help app businesses sustain growth and break new ground in 2023.

Strengthen core ads revenue to nurture growth

Changes in consumer purchase behaviors can affect overall ad spend, cost per install, and eCPM, which directly impact app earnings. Doubling down on strengthening ads revenue can lay a solid foundation to nurture growth and innovations.

Access to a diverse range of ad sources can improve your app’s revenue potential. Last year, we welcomed Pangle and Vungle to join the existing 200+ demand-side platforms which include Google Ads and Display & Video 360. We’ll continue to introduce more throughout 2023.

Along with access to strong demand, the flexibility to control and optimize how each ad source bids for your inventory will help take ad revenue earning to the next level. You can easily set up real-time bidding, design sophisticated mediation chains, or build a hybrid system to best suit your needs with the AdMob platform.

Mattel163, the name behind the popular card game UNO!^TM, chose Google AdMob for ad mediation and later integrated bidding to further scale its revenue. The result was an impressive 12% increase in total ad revenue with the hybrid setup of mediation and bidding.

Save time with simplified operations

Time savings from daily ad operations will free up valuable technical resources which you can reallocate to more strategic initiatives such as testing new game genres or app categories. We’ve introduced enhancements to simplify operational processes to enable you to achieve growth goals. For example, the new A/B testing features help you make faster and easier optimization decisions. You can also scale your setups smoothly with increased system capacity and a faster loading experience. More improvements are coming to further simplify critical operational flows such as ad unit and brand safety management.

111 Percent, developer of the hit game Random Dice, wanted to find a new platform since ad operation was too time-consuming with its existing mediation solution. After switching to AdMob, the team achieved 30% time savings in ads management and saw a 28% increase in eCPM.

Gain an edge with unique data and insights

Consumers are also shifting the ways they engage with apps as the world reopens, urging developers to adapt their strategies to drive growth. Unique insights are key to enlighten effective strategy shifts. A clear picture of user lifetime value (LTV) can inform key attributes of the next hit game, while in-depth understanding of ad performance can help identify incremental revenue growth.

The Ads Activity report provides a comprehensive view of your earnings with continued improvements to offer more actionable insights for troubleshooting and optimization. You can also calculate more accurate LTV with impression-level ad revenue to find more valuable users and to run cross-promotion campaigns more efficiently.

See how casual game developer Tellmewow used new insights to better understand the return on ad spend, or ROAS, across hundreds of acquisition campaigns to scale the effort in a profitable way. Using impression-level ad revenue, it achieved a 22% improvement in ROAS across all UA campaigns by combining user LTV with CPI data.

Unlock new growth with first-party data

Shifting user expectations on digital privacy calls for technology innovations that enable app growth while respecting people’s privacy. First-party data is a powerful tool to help you build trust with users and unlock new revenue growth by activating your relationships with users.

We introduced the same app key to personalize ad serving on a per-app basis while respecting people’s privacy choices. We’ve seen an average of 31% ad revenue lift on iOS – where the identifier for advertisers, or IDFA, is absent – from developers who have adopted the latest Google Mobile Ads SDK version that supports same app key. We’ll continue to innovate in this area and invite you to partner with us to explore durable first-party data solutions to bolster growth and better protect user privacy.

2023 is bound to be an exciting year with lots of changes. We are excited to continue the partnership with app developers and industry partners to drive a thriving year.