Chart of the Week

Chart of the Week: Facebook's mobile ad muscle pushes up UA costs to a 2-year high

Combined with Apple ranking algorithm tweak

Chart of the Week: Facebook's mobile ad muscle pushes up UA costs to a 2-year high
The problem with producing regular reports is often times you're regularly reporting on not very interesting things.

That's often been the issue with Fiksu's monthly charts of how business on the US iPhone App Store is changing.

Over the past year, it's been looking at two metrics; the cost of acquiring a user who will open your app at least three times (its Cost of a Loyal User), and the download volume of the top 200 apps (its Competitive Index).

In July 2013, however, the former has finally thrown up something of interest.

Supply and demand

The Cost of a Loyal User rose 20 percent to $1.80, its highest level since December 2011.

Fiksu says there are two reasons: the strong ROI publishers are still getting from Facebook's mobile app advertising platform, combined with the ongoing changes Apple has made to the App Store ranking algorithm.


Click here for a larger image

As we pointed out in early August, this caused a lot volatility on the App Store; a process that Fiksu suggests was occuring much earlier than first thought.

One consequence was some companies spending more marketing money to regain the App Store rankings that their apps had lost.

Steady as she goes

As for Fiksu's App Store Competitive Index, this was little changed in July.



It rose 4 percent month-on-month, although on a year-on-year basis, this figure is up 33 percent.

[source: Fiksu]
Contributing Editor

A Pocket Gamer co-founder, Jon is Contributing Editor at PG.biz which means he acts like a slightly confused uncle who's forgotten where he's left his glasses. As well as letters and cameras, he likes imaginary numbers and legumes.