User acquisition is the discipline of bringing new users to your app at a cost that makes your business profitable. It sounds simple. In practice, it’s one of the most technically complex areas of digital marketing — shaped by iOS privacy changes, multi-platform attribution challenges, creative performance cycles, and monetization models that make “cost per install” almost meaningless as an optimization target.
Table of Contents
This guide covers how to build a user acquisition strategy for a mobile app: which channels to use, how to measure correctly, how to structure creative, and how to think about budgeting across growth stages.
What Changed in Mobile UA (And Why Your 2021 Playbook Doesn’t Work)
Before diving into strategy, you need to understand why mobile user acquisition operates differently now than it did three years ago.
ATT (App Tracking Transparency) restructured iOS measurement. Apple’s 2021 ATT framework requires explicit user consent for cross-app tracking. Approximately 60–70% of iOS users decline tracking. This eliminated the IDFA — the identifier that allowed Facebook, Google, and other platforms to measure the full path from ad impression to in-app event.
The result: iOS campaign performance on Meta looks worse than it is (because attribution is incomplete), optimizing to install on iOS sends bad signal to the algorithm (installs are over-attributed; revenue events are under-attributed), and SKAN (SKAdNetwork) — Apple’s privacy-preserving attribution framework — is the only compliant measurement mechanism for iOS campaigns.
Agencies that didn’t rebuild their iOS measurement approach are still flying blind on iOS, optimizing to platform-reported metrics that misrepresent actual performance.
Creative fatigue cycles accelerated. TikTok’s rise changed creative norms across every platform. Users now consume short-form video natively and scroll past anything that looks like an ad. On TikTok, winning creative saturates in 2–3 weeks. On Meta, the same creative that worked in 2021 (polished, brand-forward) underperforms UGC-style content significantly. Creative production volume and testing speed are now core UA competencies — not media team admin tasks.
CPMs rose, then partially stabilized, but remain elevated. Meta iOS CPMs peaked in late 2022–2023 following the iOS disruption and have partially corrected. Google UAC CPMs remain high in competitive categories. The net effect: scale requires either more creative variation to maintain performance, international expansion to lower-CPM markets, or channel diversification.
The UA Channel Stack: Where to Actually Spend
Not every app needs every channel. The right channel mix depends on your monetization model, target audience, and growth stage.
Apple Search Ads (ASA)
Best for: All app categories. Non-optional for any app serious about iOS growth.
ASA is the only channel where you’re reaching users who are actively searching for an app to download at this exact moment. That intent makes it the highest-quality traffic source in mobile UA — consistently producing better trial-to-paid conversion and D30 ROAS than social channels for subscription apps, and better D7 retention for games.
The limitation is scale: the App Store search universe is finite. You’ll eventually hit a ceiling on spend efficiency in a single market, which is when international expansion or other channels become necessary.
Admiral Media is an Apple Search Ads Certified Partner. We run ASA across all four placements (Search Results, Search Tab, Today Tab, Product Page Ads) with SKAN attribution properly configured to revenue events.
→ Learn how we manage Apple Search Ads
Budget to start: $5,000–$10,000/month per market for meaningful optimization data.
Meta (Facebook & Instagram)
Best for: Subscription apps, ecommerce apps, broad-audience consumer apps.
Meta has the largest audience and the most sophisticated optimization algorithm in paid social — but iOS measurement is permanently impaired post-ATT. Running Meta for iOS apps requires: Aggregated Event Measurement (AEM) configuration, Conversions API (CAPI) for server-side event matching, Advantage+ campaigns for iOS discovery, and Android-primary testing before iOS scale.
Budget to start: $5,000–$15,000/month. Below this, iOS algorithm learning is slow and creative test volume is insufficient.
TikTok
Best for: Gaming apps, lifestyle/consumer subscription apps, younger demographics (18–34).
TikTok is now a serious UA channel for apps with audiences that overlap its user base. The platform’s algorithm distributes content based on engagement signals — meaning a winning creative can find its audience without granular demographic targeting. The downside: creative has the shortest half-life of any platform (2–3 weeks for a winner), requiring continuous production.
TikTok attribution also requires MMP integration to be accurate — native TikTok attribution over-reports conversions by 30–50% compared to MMP-attributed installs.
→ Learn how we manage TikTok ads for apps
Budget to start: $5,000–$15,000/month. Minimum effective spend for creative test volume.
Google UAC (App Campaigns)
Best for: Gaming apps, utility apps, Android-primary apps.
Google App Campaigns are fully automated — you supply creative assets (image, video, HTML5) and Google distributes them across Search, Display, YouTube, and Play Store. The automation is genuinely strong for gaming and high-volume apps; less effective for niche or low-volume categories where the algorithm lacks sufficient data.
Budget to start: $5,000–$10,000/month. Higher volume improves algorithm performance significantly.
Reddit Ads
Best for: Niche apps with identifiable Reddit communities (finance, productivity, gaming, tech).
Reddit is underutilized for app UA because it requires community-native creative — ads that look and sound like Reddit posts, not ads. When done correctly, Reddit delivers high-intent users in specific categories at CPMs significantly below Meta and TikTok.
Budget to start: $2,000–$5,000/month. Lower floor than social platforms.
YouTube
Best for: Games with gameplay demo hooks, apps with complex value propositions.
YouTube delivers skippable (TrueView) and non-skippable pre-roll video at scale. It works best for apps where a 15–30 second demonstration converts — gameplay footage for games, walkthrough demos for productivity apps.
Budget to start: $5,000–$10,000/month for meaningful reach.
The Measurement Architecture That Makes UA Decisions Possible
The most common UA failure mode isn’t creative or bidding — it’s measurement. Apps that make budget decisions based on platform-reported numbers are optimizing to a distorted signal.
You need a Mobile Measurement Partner (MMP).
Adjust, AppsFlyer, Singular, and Branch all serve the same core function: independent attribution that sits between your ad platforms and your app, applying consistent attribution logic across all channels. An MMP eliminates double-counting, applies consistent attribution windows, connects installs to downstream revenue events, and provides the cohort ROAS view (D7, D30, D90) that tells you whether a channel is profitable.
Without an MMP, you cannot know if your UA is profitable. You only know what each platform claims — and platforms are incentivized to claim as much credit as possible.
Configure SKAN properly for iOS.
SKAN (SKAdNetwork) is Apple’s privacy-preserving attribution framework. Without correct configuration, SKAN reports only install events with no revenue signal. With correct configuration — conversion values mapped to revenue brackets — SKAN tells you whether iOS installs are monetizing at target rates, even without IDFA.
SKAN configuration is technical and error-prone. Most apps have it misconfigured. We audit SKAN setup as the first step of every new engagement.
Build cohort dashboards, not snapshot dashboards.
Snapshot reporting (today’s CPI, today’s installs) is nearly useless for optimization. UA decisions require cohort views: users acquired in Week X, how they monetized by Day 7, Day 30, Day 90. A keyword that delivers $3 CPI but 4% trial conversion is worse than a keyword that delivers $7 CPI and 22% trial conversion. Cohort dashboards make this visible.
Creative Strategy: The Variable That Moves Performance Most
More than bidding strategy, more than audience targeting, creative determines UA performance. On TikTok, creative IS the targeting. On Meta, creative accounts for 70%+ of performance variance across campaigns targeting the same audience.
Volume matters more than most apps acknowledge.
A single “best” creative concept will saturate. The question is how quickly. On TikTok: 2–3 weeks. On Meta: 4–8 weeks. Without a pipeline of new creative entering the rotation, performance decays and the reflex is to blame the channel or increase budgets.
The apps that sustain UA efficiency at scale produce 20–40 creative variants per month — testing hooks, formats, messaging angles, social proof styles, and CTAs systematically. This is a production system, not a monthly creative brief.
Test one variable at a time.
Structured creative testing isolates: hook (first 2–3 seconds), messaging frame (problem/solution vs. social proof vs. feature-led), format (UGC vs. screen recording vs. animation), and CTA. This produces learnable data instead of winners you can’t replicate.
Platform-native creative outperforms repurposed assets.
TikTok creative that works looks like a TikTok post. Meta Reels creative that works looks like an Instagram story. YouTube pre-roll that works hooks in the first 5 seconds before the skip. If you’re repurposing one asset across all platforms, you’re underperforming on all of them.
AI creative generation is becoming a real advantage.
Admiral Media’s AI Creative Factory generates creative at scale — AI-generated video variations, automated hook testing, rapid iteration on winning formats. This isn’t replacing human creative strategy; it’s multiplying the volume of structured tests we can run in parallel.
Budgeting Across Growth Stages
UA budget allocation looks very different depending on where your app is in its lifecycle.
Pre-launch / Soft launch ($5,000–$20,000/month)
Goal: validate creative concepts and measure unit economics before full budget commitment. Strategy: low-CPM markets (Canada, Australia, New Zealand as proxies for US performance), Android-first (no SKAN complexity), focus on learning — not scale. Test 8–12 creative concepts to identify 2–3 winners before hard launch.
Early growth ($20,000–$80,000/month)
Goal: establish profitable UA at predictable CPA in core markets. Strategy: scale winning creatives from soft launch, launch ASA alongside social UA, begin ASO buildout. Add new creative to rotation weekly. Evaluate international expansion in 2–3 secondary markets.
Scale ($80,000–$300,000/month)
Goal: maximize profitable growth across channels and markets. Strategy: full channel stack active (ASA, Meta, Google UAC, TikTok — prioritized by CPA efficiency), international expansion into proven secondary markets, creative production at 20–40 pieces/month.
Optimization ($300,000+/month)
Goal: maintain efficiency at scale while finding new growth levers. Strategy: channel diversification into Reddit, YouTube, Snap; international expansion into Tier 2 markets; heavy ASO investment to reduce blended UA cost; LTV modeling by channel and creative for budget allocation.
Common UA Strategy Mistakes (And What to Do Instead)
Optimizing to install instead of revenue. Install-optimized campaigns acquire users who install. Revenue-optimized campaigns (trial start, subscription, purchase) acquire users who pay. Fix: configure MMP postbacks for revenue events and optimize campaigns to those events, not installs.
Isolating paid UA from ASO. Every paid install drives the user to your App Store listing. If your listing converts at 35% instead of 55%, you’re paying a 57% premium on every install. ASO and paid UA should be managed in an integrated program — not by separate agencies with no shared data.
Treating creative testing as an experiment, not a system. Most apps test 4–8 creatives per month and call it testing. Real creative testing requires a continuous pipeline, isolated variable testing, rapid winner scaling, and systematic retirement of fatigued assets.
Scaling failing campaigns with more budget. More budget amplifies the direction a campaign is heading — good or bad. Fix structural problems (measurement, creative, audience, bidding model) before adding budget.
Ignoring international markets. US CPMs are 2–5x higher than Japan, South Korea, Germany, or Brazil — with comparable or better LTV for many app categories. International expansion is often the fastest path to scaling installs while maintaining or improving CPA.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is user acquisition in mobile apps?
Mobile user acquisition (UA) is the process of attracting new users to an app through paid advertising, App Store Optimization (organic), influencer marketing, and other growth channels. UA is measured by cost efficiency — cost per install (CPI), cost per trial (CPT), or cost per subscriber — and by downstream ROAS.
What’s the best channel for mobile app user acquisition?
There’s no single best channel — it depends on your app category and audience. Apple Search Ads typically delivers the highest intent and best trial-to-paid conversion for subscription apps. Meta provides the largest audience and strongest retargeting capability. TikTok is strongest for consumer apps targeting 18–34. Most serious UA programs use 3–5 channels simultaneously.
How much does user acquisition cost for a mobile app?
Cost per install ranges from under $1 for a free casual game on Android in a low-CPI market to over $15 for a subscription productivity app in the US on iOS. What matters more than CPI is the cost per downstream event relative to LTV.
How do you measure user acquisition performance?
Correct UA measurement requires a Mobile Measurement Partner (MMP) — Adjust, AppsFlyer, Singular, or Branch — integrated with every ad platform, with postback events configured for downstream revenue actions. MMP data, combined with SKAN for iOS, provides the accurate cohort view (D7, D30, D90 ROAS) needed for optimization decisions.
What is SKAN and why does it matter for UA?
SKAdNetwork (SKAN) is Apple’s privacy-preserving attribution framework for iOS apps post-ATT. When a user doesn’t grant tracking permission (the majority of users), SKAN is the only way to receive any attribution data from Apple. With correct configuration, SKAN’s conversion values can be mapped to revenue events — giving you monetization signal for iOS campaigns even without individual user tracking.
Should I run UA or ASO first?
Run both simultaneously, but if you must prioritize, fix your App Store listing (ASO) before scaling paid UA spend. Paid UA drives users to your store listing — if the listing has a 35% conversion rate instead of 55%, you’re paying 57% more per install than necessary. Running paid UA and ASO in an integrated program produces the best long-term results.
Admiral Media manages user acquisition programs for gaming, subscription, and ecommerce apps across 40+ markets. If you want an audit of your current UA strategy — channel mix, measurement setup, creative approach, and budget allocation — contact us here.
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→ How to Reduce Your App’s CPI
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