For years, mobile app user acquisition (UA) was built almost entirely around SKAdNetwork (SKAN), Apple’s privacy-first attribution framework. While SKAN is still required for iOS compliance, modern app teams are now embracing web-to-app funnels, experimenting with creative testing, and exploring first-party attribution methods. UA has evolved, and SKAN is no longer its center of gravity. It’s a baseline signal, rather than a source of truth.
Today, teams are moving beyond standard app campaigns and rebuilding their campaign structures. Read on to understand the user acquisition strategy from top-performing app studios in the world, and how they run enhanced ad campaigns to make more money.
App campaigns under the hood: what isn’t working
As everyone knows, if you work with a mobile app and plan to spend money on paid ads, ad networks (Meta, Google, TikTok, etc.) offer a dedicated campaign type for advertisers to use. While each ad network has different naming — e.g. Meta and TikTok call it ‘App promotion’, while Google calls it ‘Google app campaigns’ — the goal is the same: to offer a dedicated advertising product for mobile apps looking to drive installs or specific user actions, like purchases.
For the sake of this article, I’ll refer to this type of campaign as a ‘standard app campaign’ (SAC).
SACs have been the standard way for almost every single app to run ads. They are pretty straightforward to set up, easy to understand, and designed specifically for mobile apps by sending all users to the same place: the app store product page.
Surrounding that moment, there are three crucial levers to make profitable paid ads:
- Pre-app store: test new ad creatives
- App store: app store optimization (ASO)
- Post-app store: onboarding and paywall optimization
But, even if you successfully use those levers, SACs have four main problems that impact all app advertisers:
- Measurement and attribution problems, caused by the implementation of SKAN and native models like Meta’s aggregated event measurement (AEM)
- Limited reach, since most app campaigns’ inventory cannot reach what web campaigns do — based on Paddle data, there is only a 15% overlap between app campaigns and web campaigns
- Limited control over ad placement and campaign types, caused by campaign automation
- Retargeting constraints on iOS due to privacy limitations, which make it hard to target with precision
Because of these problems and consequences, a new trend has emerged in the last two to three years: web-to-app.
The web-to-app trend
So, what the hell is web-to-app?
A good definition is: it is a marketing approach that brings users to a dedicated web-to-app funnel before guiding them to a mobile app. Here, users complete a personalized onboarding flow, subscribe, and then install the app.
Over the past few years, more and more apps have been testing and adopting web-to-app campaigns. By doing so, some companies have come to view SACs as no longer part of their marketing strategy.
Nathan Hudson, Founder & CEO at Perceptycs, wrote a good article on the reasons web-to-app became popular:
- Don’t pay any fees to Apple or Google
- Get your money faster
- Say goodbye to SKAN and ATT attribution struggles
- Build and deploy onboarding experiments faster
- Reach new audiences
- More control and more customization
For these reasons, lately, many app growth teams are focused on web-to-app. And new startups have emerged offering no-code tools to build and customize your web onboarding experience.
However, as Thomas stated on the Sub Club podcast, some apps are