A Checklist for Scaling Paid User Acquisition for a Mobile App
Your app is working, the performance is stable, the users are satisfied, and you are ready to scale. While organic app store optimization remains an evergreen task, at this stage you might be interested in investing more in your paid user acquisition.
But before you start raising your ad budget and toggling your user acquisition campaigns to “active,” we recommend taking a step back… Evaluate if your app is actually ready to scale user acquisition before you decide on your marketing strategy. This will help you allocate your mobile marketing budget efficiently and foresee the possible pitfalls.
The team here at ConsultMyApp worked up this checklist so you can choose the best scaling strategy to hit your app growth KPIs. Our systematic approach to paid user acquisition can be applied across different mobile apps and different verticals. It doesn’t matter if you are promoting a delivery app or a subscription-based fitness app, these are valuable rules to apply.
Brief statistics on paid mobile user acquisition
Take a look at the following statistics:
According to a 2022 survey of app marketers worldwide, approximately 70% of respondents increased their budget for user acquisition campaigns.
The mobile app industry spent $295 billion on paid marketing in 2021, up 50% from $195 billion in 2020.
Customer acquisition costs (CAC) have risen by 60% in the last five years to 2022 to an average of $29 per user.
Spending on app-install ads grew 40% year-over-year in Q2 2022, reaching $9.8 billion globally during that quarter alone.
Gaming apps account for 74% of total paid user acquisition spending on platforms like Facebook, Google, and Apple Search Ads.
The top 100 mobile apps accounted for 80% of the total user acquisition spending in 2021.
Keeping this in mind, let’s discuss the essential points of the checklist for scaling your paid user acquisition strategy.
A checklist for scaling paid user acquisition
Here’s a handy checklist to help you decide when you are ready to scale the acquisition of paid users:
Your app has minimal to zero bugs and crashes.
Your app store listing is optimized at its best.
You know your target audience and the best user acquisition channels to reach it.
You prepared the creatives and tested them.
Your analytics are set.
You decided on the scaling strategy, markets, and channels.
You set and measure realistic KPIs and metrics.
You decided on the number of key metrics to track.
Audit your mobile app
Before scaling, confirm your app's readiness to avoid issues. Perform a technical audit and review user experience and user behavior to identify and resolve problems early. Your app is ready to scale when it has a positive unit economy regarding paid user acquisition. This means that LTV exceeds your pre-calculated KPI for payback.
Check the stability of key metrics tied to your monetization model. For subscription models, monitor the trial conversion rate and cost per subscription. For ad models, track the return on ad spend. For in-app purchases, measure the conversion rate per purchase and revenue per paying user. Metrics should hold steady across traffic sources and geographies.
For expanding to new markets, build in localization if required. Complete all product preparations beforehand.
Scaling without solid indicators of product-market fit and stable monetization risks seriously wasting resources and negatively impacting metrics. Tackling programmatic and technical concerns first and then validating unit economics ensures your app is truly prepared for growth initiatives.
Analyze the mobile app market
Ensuring product-market fit before scaling is essential. Your product might be too raw and not ready for new users. Also, are you planning to reach a new target audience or deliver a new app feature? For example, if a mobile banking app introduces a new budgeting feature, its target audience may expand to include users particularly interested in personal finance.
If your app plans a significant vertical scale, your user persona and competitive landscape might change significantly. Initiate new competitive research and check the benchmarks considering the new market segment you are planning to enter. Continuing to employ the previous acquisition channels and messaging would be inefficient and likely ineffective, possibly even counterproductive.
Identifying your total addressable market (TAM), otherwise known as the total number of people who can benefit from your product/service (i.e., anyone who could use your product/service). TAM is calculated by multiplying your average revenue per user (ARPU) by the total potential customers in the market. Once you have your TAM, determine what percentage of your TAM are current customers.
Prepare and test creatives
Defining the core message and creative strategy comes first when developing ads. After identifying your target audience, their needs/triggers and analyzing competitors, you can design initial creatives.
Test a small sample of users to gather feedback before finalizing creatives. Produce variations of the top-performing ad concepts to have multiple options ready before scaling spend. This saves the budget by avoiding prematurely scaling creatives that underperform.
Preparing multiple effective creatives also delays creative burnout, where relevance and CTR drop as users get tired of overexposed ads. Expand your creative selection continuously to keep messaging fresh as you scale to larger audiences.
This is the chance to try the new ad types like shoppable and playable ads. Shoppable mobile ads enable users to make purchases directly within the ad interface. These ads generally display a catalog of products or a featured item, providing a seamless path from ad to checkout. By integrating a call-to-action like "Shop Now," these ads allow for immediate conversion without requiring the user to navigate away from the platform they are currently on.
Playable mobile ads are interactive ads that allow users to experience a mini-version of an app or game before downloading it. These ads serve as both an advertisement and a trial, offering potential mobile app users a test run of the app’s features or gameplay before downloading it. Both shoppable and playable mobile ads are designed to engage users more effectively than traditional ad formats and can be considered if you plan to reach a wider audience.
Establish robust analytics for user acquisition campaigns
Ensure that your technology stack can handle real-time analytics, high data volume, and integration with other tools you may be using. Mobile measurement partners (MMPs) offer a wealth of analytics capabilities that may not be available in-house. They can integrate multiple data sources, provide granular insights, and often offer advanced features like fraud detection.
When choosing a third-party tool, consider how well it aligns with your account structure and the custom metrics you want to track. Your metrics dashboard should be easily accessible, and it should provide real-time data.
This enables rapid responses to any fluctuations in the user acquisition key metrics, allowing for timely adjustments. Make sure you identify the metrics that are most relevant to your business goals and UA strategy and have them prominently displayed on your analytics dashboard.
Determine scaling scenarios for user acquisition strategies
In the context of a mobile user acquisition strategy, there's horizontal and vertical scaling. Horizontal scaling often involves expanding the user acquisition efforts to new countries or regions and platform diversification across multiple platforms (e.g., social media, ad networks, influencers, app store ads, web-to-app, etc.). If you are struggling to decide which channels to prioritize, a thorough audit of your acquisition strategy can help.
Horizontal expansion also considers targeting new audience segments and involves creating different campaigns or ad sets for each segment. If your app has multiple features or services, horizontal scaling can also involve targeting different user sets based on those features.
Vertical scaling involves increasing the budget for existing, successful campaigns. The assumption here is that higher spending will proportionately increase user acquisition, given that other variables remain constant. You might experiment with different bidding strategies to see if higher bids lead to exponentially better placement and, consequently, more conversions.
Vertical scaling also considers optimizing your current campaigns by adjusting ad creatives, keywords, and targeting options. Improved performance allows for more user acquisition without necessarily increasing spend.
Vertical scaling might also focus on the most profitable segments and getting higher engagement, better retention, and increased lifetime value (LTV). The idea is to get more value from each user, making each acquisition more profitable.
When scaling ad spend, a measured approach is crucial. Sharply increasing traffic (e.g., from $100 to $2000 in ad spend) will diminish audience relevance and hurt KPIs.
Conversion rates, ARPU, and ROAS will drop as CPA (cost per acquisition) inflates on oversaturated campaigns. First, calculate baseline metrics at smaller volumes. Second, set incremental KPIs to scale smoothly toward your mobile app user acquisition targets.
Aggressive volume spikes almost guarantee worse performance. Pace your spending to expand deliberately, monitoring for metrics deterioration. Optimizing at each level safeguards efficiency as you scale.
Calculate threshold purchasing metrics and set realistic KPIs before you start scaling. When scaling campaigns, key metrics to closely track include CPM, CTR, IR, CR, and ROAS. The specific focus depends on your monetization model and goals.
For ad-driven apps, CPI (cost per install) and impressions per user take priority. With purchase models, optimize for CPA per target action like trials or purchases. ROAS indicates if your campaign is successful in driving revenue or not..
Continuously optimize spending around the indicators tied directly to your goals, whether it’s ad views, conversions, or return on investment. Keeping your core metrics optimized ensures sustainable scaling.
Watch for signals like:
A rising CPM, CTR, IR, CPI, and CPA—Indicates that spending efficiency is deteriorating
A falling CR, ROAS, and ARPU—Suggests audience relevance or if the platform optimization needs improvement
A declining CTR or IR—Can signal a creative burnout or if excessive paid traffic is suppressing organic traffic.
If you need help getting your app ready to grow, your next step is to get some free advice and contact the CMA team.
