Last year’s holiday season saw smartphone and tablet owners downloading apps and games at rocket’s pace. This pushed the marketing cost for developers to acquire new users up in January. In February, those numbers finally started to significantly recede.
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In addition to the drop in marketing costs, downloading habits slowed to an average of 5.2 million daily downloads in February, according to Fiksu’s App Store Competitive Index. As new smartphone and tablet owners came online in late December and January, they pushed that figure to 5.32 million and 6.1 million, respectively.
“On the heels of a record-shattering holiday season, February presented a more consistent ‘normalized’ and valuable landscape for mobile app marketers,” Fiksu chief executive Micah Adler said in a statement. “In the absence of major events or device launches during the month, the February Indexes provide early indication of what we can expect the ‘new normal’ to be for marketers this year.”
As user-acquisition costs fall at a quicker rate than average daily downloads, that “new normal” should favor marketers looking to stretch their budget as far as possible.