Without a comprehensive post-install retention strategy, acquiring users ultimately results in a structural deficit. It may take three separate purchases to generate one conversion event.

As a result, when evaluating ideal app marketing agencies, explain why reviewing their attribution models, channel mix testing protocols, and concrete pricing tiers is necessary.

Do the executive market realities and key performance indicators (KPIs) for app marketers line up with your expectations of app marketing programs?

Most vendors use the same optimization service offerings and have similar service levels in app marketing. Mobile growth partners have the responsibility to help brands effectively combine search visibility, pay-per-click (PPC) acquisition efforts, and long-term user retention to drive revenue growth through app installations.

How to Evaluate App Marketing Agencies

An essential part of evaluating your agency options involves applying hard metrics for financial performance and the type of service capabilities they provide.

A critical component of finding success with search engine optimization (SEO) is having visibility (through keyword optimization) in the app store.

A good app marketing partner will be able to connect the search intent of users with the ability to monetize them after they have installed the app.

The cost of app marketing is significant, and the cost of retained earnings is historically dependent on the number of new subscriptions converted to revenue.

A minimum baseline of agency retainer fees is $3,000 to $25,000/month. Applications normally require an additional $3,000 to $10,000/month for ASO services. Fees for user acquisition through paid methods range between $5,000 and $25,000+ in fees paid directly to the agency in addition to your media buying budget.

Given that the average CPI within the industry should be about $1.75, those numbers help guide your company's efforts to establish its app marketing program. As you continue down the path to conversion, user registration is only the first of many steps in the sales funnel.

The cost of getting one user to register is approximately $3.50, but as soon as you begin looking at generated revenue, the costs really start to escalate. The average cost per action (CPA) for direct purchase is $75, while the CPA for an in-app purchase is $87, while the CPA for recurring subscription acquisition costs around $37.

Market research can also be costly and can range from $5,000 to $15,000 prior to launch. If you choose to manage ASO yourself, rather than outsourcing it to a consulting agency, you can expect to pay $250 to $1,500 each month for subscription-based ASO software tools. Be cautious to establish appropriate boundaries between bootstrapped budgets, funded growth phases, and enterprise scalability.

List of Verified App Marketing Agencies

1. Moburst

Moburst is an agency specializing in mobile application marketing as a premium tier of service available to mobile app developers.

Moburst has a minimum monthly fee of $5,000 and charges between $150 - $199 per hour for direct consultations, meaning it is not an option for early startup founders operating with limited amounts of capital.

Moburst’s operational model is built on high-level consulting regarding mobile product development. Moburst provides high-level consulting for over 200 mobile application products, where Moburst directly correlates user acquisition with deep app store optimization (ASO).

The margin for error in data attribution is zero for enterprise clients such as Google, Samsung, Uber, Bumble, and Robinhood. Moburst provides a full-service offering, from generating creative assets to how to execute complicated media purchase transactions on the largest digital advertising networks.

The most significant benefit of working with Moburst is that they can map paid traffic directly to user behavior after installation. Clients are charged for the significant value of their marketing strategy, as well as the vast scale at which Moburst operates.

If your mobile product lacks the most fundamental forms of retention loops, the consulting phase will reveal them to you before you start spending any dollars on paid ads. They provide a consultative service that examines the exact channel mix decisions made by the client and makes recommendations based on that.

2. Yodel Mobile

Yodel Mobile targets mass search visibility through the application store optimization (ASO) process, by increasing ASO through a combination of paid media campaigns and organic methods (ASO).

The pricing structure for Yodel Mobile's services is high-end, with a strong reputation among users and clients throughout the industry.

The case studies provided by Yodel Mobile are extremely detailed. For example, one of Yodel Mobile's clients had a verified review where the client reported a 4,303% increase in keyword visibility and a 191% increase in browse impressions on the iOS app store.

Most importantly, Yodel Mobile relies on a specific workflow that has been designed to link organic keyword dominance to efficiency in paid media when working with large brands (e.g., Gymshark, Virgin Trains, B&Q, The Economist, and NBCUniversal) and has shown success launching and scaling apps.

It is important to note that visibility is worthless unless it converts.

Yodel Mobile prevents the slow volume of learning that occurs when a client is launching an app in the app store algorithm by leveraging aggressive keyword iteration and targeted paid traffic to force early indexing. Yodel Mobile has developed a new methodology that solves the bottleneck that occurs when a highly functional app cannot be found by users that are looking for that type of app.

3. App Guardians

The minimum monthly fee charged by App Guardians is $10,000, with an hourly fee structure of $150 to $199. App Guardians is geared to companies with investment funding, as they require an ongoing budget for long-term growth goals.

In addition, App Guardians offer services in the three important areas of ASO, user acquisition, and retention of users over the app lifecycle.

App Guardians provide the internal CRM, push notification triggers, and in-app messaging sequences necessary to keep the daily active user count at a high level of engagement.

App Guardians realize the harsh truth about acquiring a user through marketing; purchasing a user is useless to both the marketer and the user if the app is deleted within 3 days after install.

4. Gummicube

As for Gummicube, they are a purely ASO (app store optimization) agency and do not blend with other app marketing agencies who have a broader marketing offering.

Gummicube has developed some incredible proprietary tools, namely DATACUBE & Splitcube. These tools enable Gummicube to perform very detailed A/B testing & cohort analysis directly against app store search trends.

This gives them a very high data-driven capability when it comes to market localization. Translations are only one part of the equation; identifying the regional search intent and cultural behaviors associated with the keywords is key.

Gummicube also enjoys a great deal of praise for their direct project management capability. If the main bottleneck for your app is organic search, Gummicube has a very targeted data-focused solution.

Gummicube understands that the search rules for Apple are completely different than those for Google Play indexing.

5. Replug

Replug positions as a complete mobile growth partner through a focus on privacy-first measurement and analytics. This is a large advantage in a very restricted tracking market, as it allows for true measurement of actual growth.

The performance claims made by Replug can be specifically verified through data. According to review data, their monthly growth in revenue was 36% and their monthly growth in organic installs was 20%.

They provide all aspects of mobile application growth, including app store optimization (ASO), paid user acquisition, and enhancements in retention; moreover, they also provide extensive analytical analytics for mobile app developers.

In addition to this, they have a consistent system for correct attribution of users who pay for a mobile application. For this reason, Replug ensures that your mobile measurement partners (MMPs), e.g. AppsFlyer, Adjust, or Singular, are set up correctly to track to the exact source of your paying users.

Without having a clean record when examining where your ad-sourced traffic is coming from, the performance of any ad campaign operates on sheer guesswork.

Replug also works to remove attribution noise that is common to the vast majority of mobile ad campaigns. By establishing the actual channel of performance, Replug reallocates spent budgeted towards an ad campaign based on both vanity and real return on ad spend (ROAS).

6. SemNexus

SemNexus heavily focuses on early-stage app startups, primarily through the use of influencer marketing and direct development alongside traditional ASO.

Their presence in the marketplace appears to be large; however, the reviews are split. This generally happens when agencies work with early-stage founders with unrealistic expectations regarding their user acquisition costs.

Although influencer-generated traffic can create tremendously large spikes in the number of downloads of an app, typically that spike in downloads leads to little or no user retention in the future, especially if the app does not match the promises made by the influencer about it.

You must work closely with SemNexus to set very strict operational processes in place.

If you choose to hire SemNexus as a developer, you should take caution to maintain a clear delineation between their development service and the marketing implementation. Request that a firm testing cycle for its influencer campaigns is established so that clients purchase engaged users, not just inexpensive clicks.

7. ConsultMyApp (CMA)

CMA has a proprietary data positioning system that sets it apart from generic agencies. CMA runs its own proprietary tool called APPlyzer, which tracks app store trends and keyword changes in real time.

CMA offers a fully integrated suite of ASO, user acquisition, analytics, and retention solutions using data to ensure sound decision-making concerning all of its media buys.

CMA does not just try to determine which creative tests work best through trial and error – they simply have the data that tells them which screenshots and video ads perform best with which user segments.

Analytics is pointless without execution.

CMA bridges that analytics/execution gap by converting its analytics into actionable media buying strategies. CMA is ideally suited for any company needing organization to its complex, multi-channel marketing budget.

8. Favoured

Favoured is not a company that is strictly focused on acquiring users through ad buys. Favoured puts the majority of its emphasis on app promotion using various methods including emails, paid social advertising, in-app messaging and push notifications.

Favoured is a creative-centric firm. Favoured believes that the most successful bid strategies are achieved through a combination of technical calculations and the creative aspects of advertising, and therefore takes into account the quality of an ad’s visual components when assessing its effectiveness.

Additionally, Favoured understands that burnout of video ad creatives is a contributing factor to failure to convert on paid social campaigns on platforms such as Meta (Facebook) and TikTok. Without the capability to refresh video ads on a weekly basis, the cost per install will increase dramatically.

Favoured manages the labor-intensive task of ongoing creative asset development. By focusing on email and push notifications, they utilize the bottom half of your retention funnel. They create the precise messaging pathways needed to draw a lapsed user back into your app and help them finish a purchase.

9. Phiture

Phiture is a pure mobile growth consultancy. They are well-known for developing the Mobile Growth Stack, which serves as a framework for marketing teams around the globe to execute their acquisition and retention strategies.

They do not provide traditional managed service offerings where they simply run your ads on their end of the wire. Phiture partners with you as a consultant, performing audits and developing strategies for you to use internally or they partner with you to implement more effective operational practices.

This is a huge differentiator when selecting a vendor. Look elsewhere if you want them to execute your business for you.

Use Phiture's services if your internal marketing team is not able to integrate ASO with paid UA and retention. Phiture offers the distinct operational workflow requirements that enable you to repair poor data hand-offs between marketing departments.

10. Remerge

Remerge focuses almost exclusively on app retargeting and incrementality-targeted app advertisements. Their specific focus is on re-engaging users who have lapsed after installing the app.

The current landscape of privacy legislation makes it very challenging for advertisers to accurately track the performance of their retargeting efforts.

To solve this issue, Remerge applies sophisticated logic to identify users who installed but did not convert and to serve them tailored advertisements across various mobile platforms.

In addition, Remerge quantifies the incrementality of their advertisements to objectively measure whether users converted as a direct result of the advertisements or whether they were going to convert regardless. To measure true incremental lift and maximize resource usage, you must be able to measure actual media efficiency.

Remerge provides an in-depth assessment of your media effectiveness. This is especially beneficial for mature apps that have had a successful acquisition of a large user base but are faced with high churn rates/low buy-in.

11. Performcb

Performcb is an affiliate-based, outcome-driven acquisition platform in which you only pay based on the performance metrics obtained as a result of your advertising efforts instead of the standard monthly fee you would pay for the same amount of effort.

If you have a business model that requires new customers to spend less than $87 on their first in-app purchase, Performcb helps you build a network of affiliates who can drive that specific behavior.

The main challenge with these types of networks is the quality of the traffic you will receive.

In some cases, these systems can provide you with poor-quality users who will perform a specific action but will not be retained as paying customers after that point. In order to mitigate this risk, you must implement stringent attribution hygiene and actively monitor the LTV (lifetime value) of the users who are delivered through Performcb.

12. Adikteev

Adikteev leverages advanced machine-learning technology in order to identify user behavior patterns that correlate to churn, and then build compelling retargeting campaigns around these identified users.

In other words, before your user deletes your app, there will be a specific usage decline prior to that point. Adikteev leverages that pattern data and uses it to develop targeted advertising campaigns to help you re-engage those users before they leave.

This will involve flawless integration between your mobile measurement infrastructure and Adikteev uses to develop their machine-learning models to ensure accurate data is being fed into their models.

Ultimately, machine-learning is only as good as the dataset that is provided to be trained upon.

13. M+C Saatchi Performance

M+C Saatchi Performance helps brands maximize the potential of their mobile applications and increase their average revenue per user (ARPU) by creating a full-funnel mobile marketing process that includes analysis of performance, tracking, etc.

They have a sophisticated reporting system in place for tracking metrics and performance via testing and have an established testing process for developing the optimal advertising creative for each platform (i.e., Facebook, Google, TikTok, etc.).

14. Creative Clicks

Among top app marketing agencies, Creative Clicks is a performance-based and creative-driven agency that solves the problem of creative fatigue being the leading cause of underperforming ad campaigns.

Through large scale testing and production of the right combination of creative and text, they will identify what works for your audience with the lowest possible cost per impression (CPI).

Creative Clicks will iteratively improve your advertising creatives until they find the winning combination. They create for your benefit a never-ending stream of testing new ad concepts with actual consumer data and then remove any failing ones that will cost you money.

15. NinjaPromo

NinjaPromo is considered a full-service app marketer. They provide mobile growth and digital branding services and do more, depending on what your app needs.

Clients of NinjaPromo have reported huge increases in downloads by as much as 330%. They have established an integrated marketing approach that allows you to connect app campaigns with broader digital and public relations campaigns and additional digital branding efforts to help build awareness for your brand.

However, there are risks associated with using generalist services when it comes to mobile growth. You must perform due diligence to ensure that NinjaPromo's mobile team has first-hand technical knowledge of MMP setup and app store algorithms before you contract as a client.

16. Topanda

Topanda is a company focused exclusively on app marketing growth through organic and paid methods, predominantly within the technology hub of Israel. They provide sophisticated technical optimizations to enhance your app's visibility in app stores through ASO.

They understand how keyword weighting works, the impact that screenshot conversion rates have on the performance of an app, and how quickly an app gets positive reviews impacts its ranking in the app stores. Topanda creates strategies to increase the frequency of positive reviews and elevate the app's listing in organic search.

Topanda offers specialized localization services, another area they excel in. They have a better understanding of the various cultures and search behaviors within the target region of the app compared to performing direct translations of an app's store listings.

17. Hop Skip Media

Hop Skip Media uses a pay-per-click (PPC) strategy to assist in mobile growth through a strong emphasis on search visibility based on consumer intent rather than using disruptive social ads.

Users that find solutions via Search Ads (Apple) and Google Play usually have high intent when they perform their search. The intent expressed by these users is captured by Hop Skip Media when they own the paid search results, which will typically lead to a higher initial CPA.

However, the users obtained through direct search results have a higher retention rate and LTV than the users found by clicking on a random video ad on TikTok.

This is because users that present their intent to find a solution to a problem will typically convert better than those who are interrupted with advertising.

Hop Skip Media is also a great fit for utility apps, FinTech products, and B2B mobile tools where users are searching for specific solutions to problems.

18. Thrivelia

Thrivelia focuses on the DTC app marketing and heavy retention of their app user base. They are positioned at the intersection of eCommerce and mobile app growth.

Selling physical products through mobile apps requires a complete change in retention strategies from the standard software subscription. Thrivelia builds the funnel around the repeat purchase experience by using in-app pop-ups, deep linking, and aggressive lifecycle marketing to bring users back to the checkout screen. The initial installation is just a gateway to the first purchase.

Thrivelia also focuses heavily on the ratio of customer acquisition cost (CAC) to lifetime value (LTV), ensuring that the cost of acquiring a user has enough margin for the physical products being sold.

19. AKB Growth

AKB Growth also delivers large-scale growth marketing and media campaigns for clients. The companies above specialize in providing solutions to help scale (or sustain) high volume of spends while maintaining an efficient level of ad buying (due to the lack of expertise).

The majority of your high volume spends are likely for your next round of funding, which means you will be under pressure to make sure you meet your user acquisition goals before your (next) round of funding. Therefore, you bring in an agency like AKB to help you manage your media spending.

AKB manages your media planning via the multiple channels available. They help you effectively buy across all channels (even new channels) while managing the complexity of using multiple platforms (such as Google Ads, Facebook, TikTok, etc.) in an efficient manner without drastically increasing the costs associated with your bids.

If handled improperly, scaling up your spending will result in destroying your overall efficiency.

They monitor the exact place where you begin to experience diminishing returns and shift your funding on a daily basis across networks in order to keep your target cost per install (CPI) at the same time as maximizing your overall volume of installs.

20. SAS Marketing

SAS Marketing focuses more on the analytical side of things and across all potential channels (including online, offline, and social media). They work on the premise that mobile growth does not occur in isolation from other channels.

They offer you the opportunity to connect your mobile data directly to your web, CRM, and financial reporting data so that you know exactly how much (if any) of your money was spent advertising to a mobile audience, as well as who actually clicked on your ad and converted.

In addition, if you have a broken attribution model, SAS Marketing will help you to rebuild it.

SAS Marketing will build the technical infrastructure to make sure every dollar you spend is being tracked, confirmed, and mapped to specific business outcomes.

21. Dewsign

Dewsign is focused on the eCommerce market. They are a combination of app development and marketing agency. Changes to the way they develop their products and their marketing strategies are based on consumer demand.

This combination of development and marketing creates synergy between teams when tracking codes are requested or installed in an app. For example, if a development firm vs. an outside marketing agency creates an app, the result is a completely seamless integration of tracking from day one.

The marketing agency and developer also design the user interface of the app to create the lowest CPA possible and build the highest conversion rate.

Making a commitment to hire one shop for both marketing and development is a serious long-term commitment.

You lose flexibility in changing marketing agencies quickly if you choose a custom development environment. You must ensure to retain all code ownerships and all the data before you sign any contracts with them.

22. HypeLife Brands

HypeLife Brands targets startup brand builders and app developers looking to grow their products through the process. They will help the founder figure out what type of market they intend to create or grow before spending their valuable acquisition dollars.

If you advertise a poorly branded generic app without a proper brand messaging, the paid advertising cost will quickly consume your budget. HypeLife builds not just your graphic visual identity, but also your tone of voice, and what makes you position your product core to the market.

HypeLife is designed for brands that are going through the launch stage, where even one misstep in positioning will lead to a failed product.

When users have faith in your visual branding of an ad, they will be less likely to download your application. HypeLife ensures that the foundation is laid for your marketing spend before you scale.

23. SLT Consulting

SLT Consulting is among the app marketing agencies that offer a strategic, growth-oriented mobile app marketing service. They place the highest level of importance on structural decisions made by a company and how those decisions lead to long-term success.

They present to companies an exact methodology of how to select channels and how to prioritize what your media spends on based on what the specific stage of your business is. They also help you identify the right moment in time when you need to stop using an outside agency to buy your media and start to manage your media buying in-house.

If you start spending money on ads without having a specific strategy, then you're just burning cash.

SLT Consulting not only builds the framework for success, they also set the limits on your budget and what your key performance indicators are for success, and align your marketing engine to the actual company cash flow realities.

The Final Analytics Mandate

If you cannot independently verify the exact cost to generate a paying subscriber, do not sign an agency retainer. You must demand a direct audit of their preferred mobile measurement configuration and enforce strict penalties for data discrepancies before handing over your media budget.