What is an application?

An application (more commonly known as an app) is software that bundles together certain features in a way that is accessible to a user. There are millions of apps on both the App Store and Android app stores, offering services (or verticals).

Apps are the foundation of the mobile economy. Since the arrival of the iPhone in 2007 and the App Store in 2008, apps have become the principal way users have tapped into the smartphone revolution. Applications have helped create a number of multi-billion dollar industries. For example, mobile games now generate over $30bn in revenue per year, while apps from social media companies such as Facebook massively contribute to their multi-billion dollar revenues each quarter.

This massive rise in popularity has had a knock-on effect for advertisers. Their widespread use has made it increasingly important for companies to use mobile as a key advertising channel. Whether companies are generating business through apps or advertising on mobile devices, applications have made mobile advertising a valuable industry on a global scale.

Mobile applications are also important due to their versatility. The most popular app verticals include:

• Entertainment & News (for example, an application created by The New York Times, Youtube or Netflix)

• Travel (flights, hotels)

• Gaming (Mid-core games, hyper-casual games)

• Social (for example, Facebook Messenger, Reddit and Twitter)

• Business and Finance/Fintech (online banking such as PayPal)

• Utilities (such as Google Translate, Find My Device)

• Health & Fitness (for example, meditation app Headspace, Sleepcycle and food education apps)

• E-commerce (from eBay to Amazon, and everything in-between)

If you want to drive growth and increase the lifetime value (LTV) of your users, you’re going to need to accurately measure the performance of your advertising spend. The rise in sophistication and competition has meant that it’s important for both businesses and marketers to understand the performance of their apps. In a highly competitive space in which marketing costs quickly rise, and where there are potentially thousands of competitors, getting accurate intelligence about how an app performs can make a huge difference.

Adjust unifies your marketing activities into one powerful platform, giving you with the actionable insights needed when scaling your business. Because of this, we’re trusted by over 135,000 apps worldwide.

We offer attribution services to help businesses track the impact of their advertising, as well as enable analysis through superior app analytics that helps businesses segment and understand user behavior. Our store stats also assess user feedback, among a huge list of ever-growing features.

Adjust offers these tools across platforms. This means that developers releasing apps across a multitude of stores can analyze how their apps are performing. We also have a Fraud Prevention to stop marketers from handing over their ad spend to fraudsters.

To learn more about how Adjust help app marketers, take a look at our homepage, our blog and our official documentation.