In 2025, mobile app marketers are facing a perfect storm: rising user acquisition costs, tighter privacy regulations, and an oversaturated digital landscape. According to The 2025 State of Mobile App Growth Survey by Bidease, this reality is driving an aggressive shift in strategy, especially in how marketers create, test, and optimize ad creatives using artificial intelligence.
Surveying 400 mobile growth marketers, the report offers deep insight into how the industry is evolving to maintain scale and performance. It reveals the increasing reliance on AI, the dominance of short-form video, and a rising emphasis on retention over acquisition. As privacy frameworks shift—especially Google’s Privacy Sandbox—marketers are doubling down on creative iteration, smarter targeting, and channel diversification.
Findings from the 2025 Mobile App Growth Survey
1. AI Is Powering Faster Creative Turnarounds
- 76% of marketers refresh ad creatives at least every two weeks, signaling a rapid creative cycle.
- 66% are using AI tools to generate and test creative variants.
- 61% plan to increase creative testing budgets, recognizing that fast iteration leads to performance gains.
- AI helps solve for creative fatigue, enabling teams to scale production while maintaining engagement.
“By leveraging AI to increase creative volume and improve personalization, marketers are finding innovative ways to keep budgets manageable.” — Dennis Mink, CMO, Bidease
2. Video Ads Are the Top Performer—and Budget Priority
- 77% of respondents rank video ads among their highest-performing formats.
- Investment is surging on short-form video platforms like YouTube Shorts, Meta Reels, and TikTok.
- Video’s immersive format allows brands to tell compelling stories quickly, capturing user attention amid app-store clutter.
3. Retention Marketing Is Gaining Ground
- 43% of marketers now allocate over 25% of their budget to retargeting and lifecycle campaigns.
- Retention is no longer an afterthought—it’s a core growth pillar.
- Strategies include:
- Push notifications tailored by AI
- In-app promotions based on user segments
- Cross-channel remarketing using first-party engagement data
4. Privacy Remains the Greatest Obstacle
- Concerns over privacy and tracking limitations outnumber rising CPA fears by a 2:1 margin.
- 73% say Google’s Privacy Sandbox has a “major” impact—more than double those citing Apple’s IDFA/SKAN changes.
- Attribution is becoming fragmented, forcing marketers to:
- Adopt AI-driven modeling to predict user behavior
- Use engagement proxies like time in-app, frequency, and content views
- Develop stronger first-party data strategies
How Marketers Are Adapting
1. Leaning Into AI for Targeting and Measurement
- AI is used to model lookalike audiences without identifiers.
- Helps fill attribution gaps caused by SKAN and Privacy Sandbox limitations.
- Enables personalized ad delivery across channels.
2. Reusing and Iterating High-Performing Creatives
- Marketers are building creative libraries to quickly swap in high-performing elements.
- Versioning and localization through AI are common—e.g., dynamic text overlays, different CTAs for different regions.
3. Channel Prioritization Based on Engagement Signals
- Focus is shifting to channels with richer behavioral insights, like:
- TikTok (creative-driven engagement)
- YouTube (view-through metrics)
- Meta (retargeting and AI ad delivery)
- Channel diversification helps mitigate the risk of privacy-driven signal loss.
Efficiency is the New Growth Engine
Faced with tighter budgets, stricter privacy controls, and escalating ad competition, mobile app marketers are doubling down on agility, AI, and retention. The Bidease 2025 survey paints a picture of an industry in transformation—where marketers are learning to work smarter, not harder.
From rapid-fire creative testing and video dominance to privacy-adaptive measurement and AI-powered optimization, the modern mobile growth strategy is evolving fast. And as long as creative fatigue and attribution gaps persist, innovation will be the only constant.
