On Tuesday, the latest Fiksu Indexes published revealed that there was a great opportunity in January for marketers to reach app users.
At $2.78, the cost to acquire a loyal user dropped 34 percent since last month and 4 percent since last year. And as predicted in last month’s analysis, download volumes increased to 8.8 million daily downloads in January, representing a 4 percent monthly rise.
“Taken together, these results paint a picture of consumers enthusiastically downloading apps, while marketers pulled back from holiday spending,” Fiksu reports. “The resulting increase in available ad inventory and consumer app usage, combined with a decrease in competition, meant January was a great time to connect with the right mobile audience: cost per loyal user hasn’t been this low since May, and was only this low twice last year.”
The Cost Per Install (CPI) Index, which measures the cost per install directly attributed to advertising, rose 12 percent month-over-month on iOS to $1.64. Counterintuitively, the end of holiday spending actually pushed CPIs up: marketers poured advertising dollars into incentivized channels on iOS in December to obtain higher ranks in the Apple App Store, keeping overall CPIs lower even as they spent more. Without the increased year-end competition for the top ranks, the amount of spend going to incent drops off, and prices slide up a bit.
“The conversion to loyalty was a lot higher this month, which shows advertisers are doing a better job of getting their apps in front of the right people,” said Micah Adler, CEO of Fiksu. “As predicted, a rise in usage continued from December into January but at the same time spending pulled back, which created an ideal environment for marketers to efficiently reach their target audiences. Those who were strategic about spending in January were certainly rewarded for their efforts to find loyal users.”
For Fiksu’s full January analysis, click here.
