What Drove App Growth in H1 2025 & How are Budgets Changing For H2?
It’s hard to believe, but we’re already halfway through 2025, which means many mobile marketers are taking a hard look at their annual targets. It’s an ideal time to make adjustments, which is why Bidease surveyed 100 app growth marketers to learn what they've seen over the first half of 2025 and how they’re shifting budgets heading into H2.
In the first entry of our three-part series, we’ll break down where marketers have seen the highest performance so far this year, and how investments in programmatic DSPs are taking center-stage as the backbone of their strategy for the latter half of 2025.
Key Takeaways
- Meta, Google, & TikTok continued leading performance in H1, but experienced marketers recognize that platform-provided attribution can inflate impact. Incrementality testing is one of the first strategic investments worth making.
- Marketers think programmatic DSPs are the smart bet for H2, with 74% planning to increase spend. This signals a shift toward efficiency, with more teams using flexible platforms to test, optimize, and diversify beyond walled gardens.
Meta, TikTok, and Google Continued Delivering The Best Results In H1
It’s not surprising that Meta is H1’s overall winner, with 23% of marketers saying it was the top performer in their growth portfolio. Thankfully, seasoned marketers have come to understand the limitations of consolidating too much of their budget into walled gardens. Most know that platform-provided attribution models frequently overstate their true impact, masking genuine incremental contribution. According to Bidease CMO Dennis Mink, that’s high up on the list of strategic challenges worth addressing.
“Experienced marketers know better than to trust platform-provided attribution blindly. Implementing rigorous incrementality testing, such as controlled holdout groups and matched-market tests, provides insights into actual performance.”
Dennis Mink, CMO of Bidease
For more insights on overall channel trends, download The 2025 State of Mobile App Growth Survey.
Programmatic DSPs & Paid Social Are Getting More Budget
While H1 spending was more-or-less business as usual, there are some interesting shifts going on as we drift into H2. A whopping 74% of marketers reported plans to invest more in advanced programmatic DSP platforms during the second half of 2025. This points to two contrasting mentalities among growth marketers:
- Spend More to Make More: A large portion of marketers are simply turning up the volume, increasing spend with the dominant channels to deliver more results. It’s a sound short-term fix, but not the most forward-thinking.
- Invest in Long-Term Efficiencies: An encouragingly large number of marketers are working smarter, not harder. Investments in flexible tools suggest more app marketers are now aware that solutions that operate outside of walled gardens can pay the greatest dividends.
Unsurprisingly, we’re fans of the latter approach. Programmatic DSPs like Bidease allow marketers to connect with their customers in the apps that they spend the most time in, and at the times that they’re most likely to convert.
“Increasing spend while maintaining efficiency takes skill but it’s worth it. Tools that enable structured creative experimentation, detailed audience segmentation, and precise real-time optimization provide a meaningful competitive edge. It’s a disciplined approach that mitigates risks like audience saturation and ad fatigue. The results are worth it.”
Dennis Mink, CMO of Bidease
Our Recommendation: Invest in Precision for a Competitive Edge
While increasing paid social budgets might seem like the fastest route to growth, investing in platforms that continue to provide marketers with more precise, data-rich growth paths are worth prioritizing. Instead of relying on platform-reported attribution, programmatic DSPs can enable real-time incrementality testing, deep audience insights, and dynamic creative optimization across campaigns.
Here’s how marketers can take action today:
- Layer incrementality testing into attribution workflows. Instead of relying on platform-reported results, marketers should implement controlled holdout groups, like PSA incrementality testing, or geographic lift tests to measure true channel impact. This helps reallocate budget based on actual performance, not inflated metrics, and prevents overspending in walled gardens like Meta and TikTok.
Use DSPs to run structured experiments across creative and audience segments. Marketers can increase DSP investment to unlock more flexible, scalable testing infrastructure. By enabling dynamic creative testing and precise audience segmentation, DSPs help teams optimize campaigns in real time and build long-term efficiency across paid social and influencer channels.
Prioritize Precision With Bidease
In H2 2025, performance leadership won’t be defined by spend alone. Bidease's advanced programmatic DSP provides unmatched incrementality insights, precise audience targeting, and real-time optimization to drive true performance. Connect with our experts today to discover how partnering with Bidease can unlock incremental growth and keep your campaigns ahead of the curve in 2025 and beyond.
Customer retention is the key
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What are the most relevant factors to consider?
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Don’t overspend on growth marketing without good retention rates
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What’s the ideal customer retention rate?
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Next steps to increase your customer retention
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