Just pulled our iOS numbers for Q4 and wow. CPMs are through the roof and our CAC is basically double what it was last year.
Tried shifting budget to Android but the LTV gap is still real. Wondering how everyone else is dealing with this mess.
Shifting focus to longer tail keywords can definitely help. Bigger companies often overlook them.
Investing in influencer partnerships is smart too. It allows you to fix costs and usually leads to better conversions since people trust those recommendations over traditional ads.
Look at your onboarding flow. Most apps lose 80% of users in the first week.
If you can bump Day 7 retention from 20% to 30%, your unit economics improve without touching ad spend. Way easier than fighting iOS auction prices.
Also check if you’re measuring CAC correctly. Are you including only media spend or the full cost? Sometimes the math is off and you’re not as deep in the hole as it looks.
ASO still works if you actually do it right.
We started focusing more on retention and getting existing users to spend more. Cheaper than finding new ones right now.
Been seeing the same thing across three different apps I’m running. What saved us was going deeper on creative testing instead of just throwing more money at the same ads.
Started running 15-20 creative variants per week and found some weird winners. A simple screen recording outperformed our fancy produced video by 40% on cost per install.
Also worth checking your attribution windows. We tightened ours from 7-day to 1-day view and found some campaigns that looked terrible were actually bringing quality users.