From 2025 Wins to 2026 Bets: Mobile Growth Leaders Speak Out

The mobile app growth landscape in 2025 was a rollercoaster. Tight marketing budgets, volatile channel performance, and the shadow of AI defined a year in which user acquisition (UA) teams had to stay nimble. Marketers became more resourceful, doubling down on creative strategy, lifecycle retention efforts, and experimenting with AI toolsets to keep growth on track.

To make sense of the year’s twists and turns, we surveyed 100 mobile growth marketers and analyzed their biggest wins, missteps, and pivots. We found that marketers who focused on down-funnel engagement tactics and fresh creative iterations came out on top, and those who integrate AI into their workflows now are likely to continue winning in 2026.

Key Takeaway:

• Deepen your post-install strategy and bring AI into your workflow. Together, these approaches help you extract more value from every install, move faster with smarter workflows, and enter 2026 with a meaningful performance advantage.

2025 Retrospective: Wins, Pains, and "If Only..."

Looking back at 2025, UA teams surfaced clear bright spots alongside painful disappointments they’d gladly revisit. What stood out most was that marketers outperformed when they doubled down on post-install impact, iterated creatively, and used AI to modernize their workflows, while many traditional acquisition levers underdelivered.

The Biggest Wins: Focus on Foundation and New Formats

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Improved user retention and lifecycle marketing emerged as the single biggest UA win of the year – about 19% of surveyed marketers said this was their top success. In practice, that meant engaging and monetizing existing users more effectively, ensuring every install generated more value. This doesn’t come as much of a surprise. When we surveyed app monetization managers about how crucial revenue gains were heading into the holiday season, 72% expected better performance compared to last year.

The next-highest wins were expanding into new geographies, cited by roughly 16% of marketers, and running effective influencer/partner campaigns (also about 16% of marketers). These results indicate a notable shift toward both foundation and innovation: doubling down on lifecycle fundamentals like retention, while also diversifying with fresh channels such as influencers and new regional markets.

It’s worth noting that creative innovation was also among the top-mentioned success factors, likely spurred by new creative formats that reinvigorated campaigns like Snapchat’s new AR ads and Meta’s expanded AI toolkit. 

Collectively, these trends made it clear that the strongest results came from areas where marketers could actively experiment and refine their approach. By strengthening down-funnel engagement and steadily testing fresh creative ideas, UA managers were able to produce meaningful growth even as acquisition became more complex.

The Biggest Disappointment: Social Struggles

Despite being massive spend areas, traditional app marketing channels underperformed expectations in 2025 – especially social media. A full 40% of marketers in the survey cited social media advertising as the channel that most under-delivered against expectations. The next biggest letdown was mobile search advertising, with 21% saying Google App Campaigns, Apple Search Ads, or similar search channels were their worst performers of the year. These are striking figures, considering that social and search have long been the workhorses of mobile UA.

The culprit was clear: rising CPMs made even well-run campaigns struggle to maintain ROI. Tactics that once felt predictable became anything but in 2025. With costs climbing and visibility shrinking, marketers found themselves pouring more budget into the same channels for diminishing returns.

Back in August, we took a look at the channels growth marketers were investing in for H2 2025. We found that many were exploring a sampling platter of influencer marketing, retail media networks, web-to-app campaigns, and CTV. Given that just 3% of marketers said web-to-app underperformed and only 5% said CTV underperformed in this latest dataset, it appears at least some of these channel explorations paid off. So in 2026, diversify your acquisition channels as you would any balanced portfolio.

“When your go-to channels start faltering, it’s a wake-up call. Rising costs turned social and search into question marks, forcing marketers to rethink their mix and find efficiency in new channels like influencer marketing and retail media networks.”

‍Dennis Mink, CMO of Bidease

The Biggest Regret: Late to the AI Party

If they had a time machine, UA leaders overwhelmingly agree on one thing they would do differently in 2025: adopt AI tools sooner. Over 37% of marketers feel they were late to the AI party and paid the price for waiting.

The second-biggest regret was related to creative operations: 25% admitted they should have been more disciplined in their creative strategy and testing cadence, which may point to lapses in maintaining a steady testing rhythm, structuring experiments cleanly, or regularly refreshing creative.

These two factors identify an area where AI-powered toolsets can play a useful role: helping teams accelerate creative cycles and maintain a healthier testing cadence. 

As once-dependable levers like social and search became harder to rely on, the advantage shifted to teams with strong, scalable capabilities that adapted quickly. Those who were early in exploring AI-driven optimization, or who had a fast and iterative creative testing cycle, could better weather the storms of 2025. Our June research survey reflected this as well: most UA teams reported strong results from testing creatives on a biweekly cadence.

2026 Bets: Where the Budget is Going

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Despite 2025’s challenges, most teams are heading into 2026 with bigger budgets, at least on paper. A full 77% of surveyed marketers plan to increase their UA spend next year (19% expecting a 20%+ jump). But that isn’t the windfall it might seem. Most of those extra dollars will go straight to covering higher advertising costs, not fueling new growth. In our data, the number-one reason cited for budget increases was rising media prices and macro pressure, not any surge in performance. Essentially, ad dollars in 2026 won’t stretch as far as they did in 2025. Higher CPMs and CPIs mean paying more just to achieve the same results. So budgets may be bigger, but teams won’t have more freedom; those funds are already eaten up by inflation in ad costs.

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Budgets are increasing but largely just so app marketers can tread water. The cost of reaching users keeps climbing, so that ‘extra’ budget isn’t buying growth, it’s just covering inflation and increased competition. In 2026, every marketing dollar will have to work overtime when each dollar will buy less than it used to.”

Dennis Mink, CMO of Bidease

2026 Outlook: AI, Creative & Other Trends Will Define Growth

Marketers overwhelmingly pointed to AI adoption as 2026’s defining mobile growth trend, with 40% of respondents choosing AI-driven workflows as the top game-changer. After a challenging 2025, teams are betting big on tools like generative AI, neural networks, and machine learning to drive efficiency and unlock new opportunities. One of our respondents hit the nail on the head, stating, “AI will change everything, it already has. Colleagues who have learned to leverage AI have a distinct advantage right now."

However, the remaining 60% of marketers made it clear that AI will not define their 2026 strategy. They highlighted a set of other defining challenges and growth drivers that includes:

• Creative Innovation (21%): A significant number of marketers pointed to creative innovation as a key growth driver, emphasizing the need for fresh, standout concepts that cut through increasingly competitive channels. According to one respondent, focusing on creative “increases accessibility, engagement, and convenience for mobile users.”
  
  
• Ongoing Privacy and Measurement Challenges (18%): Navigating the privacy-first landscape and evolving measurement techniques was also highlighted as a defining factor for success in the year ahead. As one UA marketer saw it, privacy policies and challenges ”'will continue to rise.”
  
  
• Retention & Lifetime Value (5%): One respondent emphasized a focus on retention, stating: "As the cost to acquire new users continues to climb… focusing on increasing user attention is the most sustainable and cost effective mobile growth trend to drive higher lifetime value.”
  
  
• Expanding into New Geos (2%): For a small share of respondents, geographic expansion was a key growth lever. These marketers noted that entering new markets can unlock incremental scale when domestic performance plateaus. As one stated,”I don’t see AI being useful or unique enough to be competitive just yet. Other/new markets seem to be more immediately lucrative."

In short, 2026 will reward those who can marry machine intelligence with human creativity while navigating a privacy-first landscape. The marketers who successfully balance all three will be the ones to leap ahead of the pack.

AI is the engine that will power the next era of user acquisition. But like any engine, it needs the right fuel. The marketers who combine AI with a smart retention strategy will be the ones driving performance in 2026.

Dennis Mink, CMO of Bidease

We Recommend: Integrate AI Tools and Shift Focus Downstream

2025 delivered its share of surprises, and 2026 won’t be any easier. But while channel volatility and rising costs will continue, the strongest UA teams are concentrating on systems that maximize value after acquisition and streamline work within their teams. Based on what we heard from marketers, these are the levers to prioritize now:

• Make AI work for you across targeting, segmentation, and creative. Marketers who use AI effectively will replace those who don’t. From audience targeting to bid optimization to generative creative tools, AI is becoming a connective tissue across UA workflows. Start integrating where it can drive efficiency, and pressure-test what “automation” means in your stack.
  
  
• Shift strategy toward downstream engagement and value. With acquisition costs rising and reliable channels becoming less predictable, performance now hinges on what happens after the install. Invest in strengthening post-acquisition engagement, optimizing onboarding flows, improving personalization, and building programs that grow meaningful LTV. Teams that focus on deepening user value will be the ones who maintain efficiency as costs climb.
  
  
• Diversify before you’re forced to. Social and search aren’t going away, but our data shows they’re no longer the automatic winners of the media mix. With more marketers citing these channels as underperformers, the time to diversify is now. Test new inventory sources, explore geo expansion, and build a mix that spreads risk instead of compounding it.

New Year’s Resolutions

In hindsight, the story of 2025 was about realizing the urgency of AI adoption and the pain of leaning too heavily on traditional channels. At the same time, 2025 underscored the value of creative innovation and retention fundamentals as growth levers. Therefore, the mandate for 2026 is to combine AI efficiency with creative ingenuity at the core of UA strategy. Use those tools to focus on downfunnel performance gains, and you’ll have stronger footing for whatever challenges may come your way.

Finally, it’s worth noting that solutions are already at hand to support this AI-and-creative driven approach. At Bidease, we use built-in AI optimization and automation to acquire and retarget your best users, and also offer complementary creative services to keep ads fresh. Our AI-driven user acquisition and re-engagement solutions combine machine learning, customized creative, and high-quality traffic to help teams scale smarter in 2026. Contact us today to learn more.