Interesting Reads
How to Measure "Hard-to-Measure" Marketing Channels
Rand Fishkin is back with another of his 'radical contrarian' takes on marketing measurement and attribution.
Like the previous one, his recommendation basically boils down to 'train yourself to do media mix modeling based on intuition', but this time it's a lot more actionable and step-by-step. All models are wrong, but some are useful.
Industry Buzz
Mobile Marketers Pivot Away From Paid Media After Apple Upends Industry
AppsFlyer released their latest Performance Index for ad networks, and most of the media headlines read something like this one from VentureBeat: Apple Search Ads tripled market share as others sank in privacy push.
In this article, Adweek took things a layer deeper and also looked into the impact on owned and earned marketing channels.
Scoop: Meta ending support for Instant Articles
Google AMP has been dead for a year and a half (long live AMP…but seriously, I don't miss it at all). Now its little sibling, Facebook Instant Articles, is also leaving the building.
From one perspective, it's a bit strange to see Meta getting rid of Instant Articles at the same time as most walled gardens are trying to bring as much content as possible inside the walls. But this probably says much more about the low value of news within Facebook than it does about the wider 'content fortress' strategy.
Privacy & Security
iOS 16.1 Introduces New Copy-and-Paste Permission Settings on Per-App Basis
Apple already fixed the iOS 16 pasteboard bug, but now they're going a step further to implement a proper persistent permission…which is how it should have been all along.
Tips & Techniques
emre on Twitter: "a really smart & unique ui pattern"
Here's a novel growth hack: the Telegram app has a logo hidden under the screen notch. You'd never know it was there...until you take a screenshot!
Data
Sign up to receive benchmark monthly insights
AppsFlyer's top-notch benchmarks report hasn't yet been refreshed since its release earlier this year, but there is now an option to subscribe by email to future monthly updates as they come out.
The Encore
WebKit/Quirks.cpp
If you're trying to replicate the behavior of a specific website, and it's just not working...it might not be your fault: turns out that some sites have special treatment hardcoded straight into the browser!
Podcast
Powering Up Product Growth Through Data and Technology
Senior Product Manager at Expedia Group: Mickey Noworyta
In this episode of How I Grew This, Mickey Noworyta shares his approach to driving product growth, testing new product features, and the difference between attribution and incrementality.
Mickey is the Senior Product Manager at Expedia Group, where he and his team focus on exploring performance marketing ideas. While Mickey is a seasoned Product Manager, he has also worked as a drilling engineer for the oil and gas industry, a researcher, and a data engineer and developer.
Events
Mobile Growth Meetup - London
When: Wed, Oct 26, 6:30 PM (BST).
Where: Coqbull SoHo.
Panelists: Angelina Kazarema, News UK.
Mobile Growth Meetup - New York
When: Tue, Nov 8, 6:30 PM (EST).
Where: Serendipity Labs.
Panelists: TickPick, Publishers Clearing House.
Who’s Hiring?
- NBCUniversal | Sr Product Manager, MarTech — Universal City, CA
- WAWA, Inc. | Loyalty Coordinator — Wawa, PA
- Warner Bros. Discovery | Product Manager — New York, NY
Do you have a mobile growth role you’d like to share with the community?
Just fill out this form — it’s free!
This week, I came across an awesome teardown of an ad campaign on Reddit, run by Caliber (a new fitness coaching app).
To those of us in the performance marketing space, this probably doesn't look like an 'ad'…but that's exactly the point. What we have here is a really cool example of paid promotion for an app done in a way that is both empathetic to its audience (Redditors are infamously tough on ads) and intuitively viral.
Install ads have always been a low-hanging fruit for user acquisition — it's so easy to just turn up the volume knob by throwing more money at the problem — but this is your periodic reminder that there are many other ways to drive growth!
Alex Bauer