Mobile marketing 2019 landscape unmasked via Adjust Benchmarks

Adjust’s Global Benchmarks 2.0 is designed to empower marketers and publishers to better understand the mobile marketing landscape, the tool is the first of its kind to make specific KPIs, such as retention and fraud data, publicly available.

The insights are based on Adjust’s aggregated database and analyze a combination of over 7,000 apps. The tool can be used to create tailored reports, free of charge, saving you from having to buy expensive third-party benchmark reports. 

Mobile marketing 2019 Global Benchmark early findings

With low retention rates unchanged, keeping loyal app users remains a challenge for mobile marketers. The retention data underscores how critical the battle for good first user experience is, with 79% of users churning by day 2. 

Conversion from click to install has also grown -- now up to 2.4%. Once someone clicks on an install link, it doesn’t necessarily mean they’ll go on to download the app. Most of the time, users drop out of the process last minute. A rise in conversion rates, then, could be attributed to increasing focus on fine-tuning creatives and messaging to best attract users. 

Fraud rates drop as fraudsters shift their focus to vulnerable apps. The data reflects a drop in the fraud rates that Adjust is seeing. But this doesn't mean that there is less fraud out there. Fraudsters have stopped attacking well-protected app publishers and will focus more heavily on apps that don’t use fraud prevention tools.

The data also shows that Click Injection now accounts for almost half (47%) of all fraud, followed by Click Spamming (28%). This makes measures like the recently introduced Click Validation all the more important. Click Validation, an industry standard created by Adjust, is based on the simple premise that for every click, there must be a corresponding impression. The methodology requires ad partners to share this impression data with attribution providers, allowing them to check if there is a matching impression within a reasonable timeframe made by the same device. 

The validation requirement dramatically increases the workload for fraudsters seeking to steal brands’ and advertisers’ ad budgets, significantly hampering Click Spamming, Click Injection and some other forms of ad fraud.

SDK Spoofing rates are down to 12%,  and while spoofing is nearly undetectable, it isn’t unstoppable. Regularly updating your app’s SDK is one of the best ways to ensure it isn’t spoofable. Just as you would regularly update your phone’s operating system with each new release, so should you do the same with your SDK.