2025: Growth, UA and Monetisation

I think the next will be year of focus on user experience, better onboarding, building even more connetions between Growth/User Acquisition and Monetisation:

▪️once you look at Games and Apps data (here based on Sensor Tower), it is very easy to see that Revenue grows much faster than Downloads (of course in many apps categories revenue numbers in tools are just proxy as the monetisation lays somewhere else, although it still shows some trend)
▪️ once we add additional revenue growth coming coming from ads (a lot of data points shows that in many games and apps categories in-app, in-game ads revenue grows much faster than in-app and subscriptions), then the difference between growth of monetisation and growth of downloads will be even higher
▪️ I am not expecting this trend to be changing as in many markets growth of new smartphones is really low and Growth industry focus more and more on quality of users (pushing tROAS solutions, developing pLTV solutions etc.). Especially that such solutions mitigate a lot of risk from running UA activities (you know very early if UA works for your app/game or not)
▪️ Of course it brings more opportunities to companies that have more ressources/are less risk averse so they can focus on more top funnel activities, wider and cheaper cohorts, activities that have lower monetisation in short term and higher in the long-term (especially combining it with better user experience for new users in the category).
▪️ I think 2025 will be a year with much more focus on retention (especially on non-gaming, iGaming that just recently “discovered” importance of that metric and its correlation with monetisation)
▪️ Especially that in many categories we can see declining retention rates
▪️ That happens at the time when share of LTV based UA solutions (ie. tROAS) grows in UA budgets, hiding that decline of retention
▪️A few times I was comparing retention rates of non targeted traffic (CPI based traffic) with targeted traffic (tROAS) and most of the time targeted traffic had 10-15pts (ie. 30% vs 40%) lower retention.