App Annie’s Marketing Intelligence will make $87 billion in user acquisition spending smarter

Mobile market research firm App Annie is launching its Marketing Intelligence tool today to drive better results for user acquisition ads, which accounted for $87 billion in annual ad spending last year.

San Francisco-based App Annie said that Marketing Intelligence is for companies looking for data to improve user acquisition campaigns and to execute a cost-efficient, data-driven marketing strategy to scale their app business.

As consumers spend more time engaging with their devices, businesses — both mobile-first and mainstream — are investing more resources toward acquiring and engaging mobile users. But with a lack of transparency both in paid and organic channels, app publishers are facing challenges in effectively improving app discovery, user acquisition, and ad monetization to keep up with industry growth. In short, they don’t know if that spending is really doing a lot of good.

“Executing a well-designed user acquisition strategy is a key component of a successful app launch,” says Walter Driver, the CEO of leading mobile gaming publisher Scopely, in a statement. “Marketing Intelligence provides detailed insights that are crucial for us to determine how to drive our organic and paid campaigns in the future.”

“As every business expands into mobile apps, App Annie is evolving its products to help clients succeed within the app economy,” says Bertrand Schmitt, CEO and cofounder at App Annie, in a statement. “With ever-changing mobile ad spend and monetization options and strategies, there was growing demand among leading app publishers for more transparent, readily-accessible data. Marketing Intelligence allows our clients to benchmark and execute well-informed, efficient user acquisition strategies to better scale their app businesses.”

Marketing Intelligence provides insight into app store optimization (making an app more discoverable in the app stores); creative gallery, which tracks an app’s ad creatives and network partners in one place; and competitive insights, or details of a competitor’s app advertising strategy.

Dean Takahashi

Dean Takahashi is editorial director for GamesBeat at VentureBeat. He has been a tech journalist since 1988, and he has covered games as a beat since 1996. He was lead writer for GamesBeat at VentureBeat from 2008 to April 2025. Prior to that, he wrote for the San Jose Mercury News, the Red Herring, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and the Dallas Times-Herald. He is the author of two books, "Opening the Xbox" and "The Xbox 360 Uncloaked." He organizes the annual GamesBeat Next, GamesBeat Summit and GamesBeat Insider Series: Hollywood and Games conferences and is a frequent speaker at gaming and tech events. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.