How Can Performance Marketing Strategies Turn Your Super App into a Real Growth Engine? How Can Performance Marketing Strategies Turn Your Super App into a Real Growth Engine?

Super Apps Are a Strategic Priority for Telcos and Acquisition Is the Entry Point

The role of Telcos is shifting. Connectivity alone is no longer a differentiator. It is a commodity. The operators winning the next decade are those repositioning themselves as digital service platforms, using their subscriber base as a springboard into content, payments, commerce, and beyond.  

The Super App is at the heart of this transition. It becomes the single-entry point into a broader digital ecosystem, consolidating services that users would otherwise access through a dozen different apps. The scale of the opportunity is significant: Gartner projects that by 2027, more than 50% of the global population will be daily active users of multiple Super Apps. The market itself is expected to grow from $75.5 billion in 2023 to over $706 billion by 2032¹. 

But none of that value is accessible without users. And getting the right users into the app, quickly and at scale, is where App Install campaigns become a strategic growth lever rather than a simple volume exercise. 

The gap between installed and engaged is already wide. According to Simon-Kucher’s Global Telecommunications Study 2025, 81% of Telco customers have their provider’s app installed, yet only 52% engage with it on a weekly basis. Nearly half use it for nothing more than administrative tasks². Closing that gap requires more than traditional user acquisition. It demands an integrated performance marketing approach, focused on user quality, activation and long-term value. 

To understand the context and how to successfully plan these campaigns, Addict Mobile, Digital Virgo’s integrated performance marketing agency, give us some tips.

The Fundamental Shift: From CPI to Qualified Acquisition

The most common mistake in Super App marketing is treating App Install campaigns as a volume game. The metric that drives this mistake is Cost Per Install (CPI). It is intuitive, easy to report, and measures the wrong thing entirely. 

A cheap install from a low-intent user who opens the app once and never returns generates no revenue, no engagement, and no data worth acting on. It inflates your numbers while quietly draining your budget. On average, 74% of users who install an app do not return after the first 24 hours. They are installed, but never activated³. 

The shift that separates high-performing acquisition strategies from the rest is moving the success metric from CPI to cost per activated user, or better yet, cost per user who completes a meaningful post-install action such as a subscription, a first transaction, or a content play. All in all, enhancing lifetime value (LTV) 

In practice, this means:

• Using conversion-based bidding on platforms like Google UAC (tCPA), configured around post-install events that reflect real business value rather than the install itself 

• Feeding the algorithm with meaningful signals. The richer and more relevant your conversion data, the better Google’s machine learning will identify and target high-intent users at scale 

• Leveraging the full Google ecosystem across Search, YouTube, Display, and Discover to reach users at different stages of intent, not just those already searching for your app 

The goal is not to reach everyone. It is to reach the users most likely to activate, subscribe, and generate long-term revenue. That precision is what turns App Install campaigns from a cost line into a growth engine. 

Activation: Where Acquisition Investment Is Won or Lost

Even the best targeted install campaign fails if the onboarding experience lets users down. Activation, the moment a user first experiences real value inside the app, is where acquisition investment is either validated or wasted. 

The activation gap across industries shows how steep the challenge is. In Fintech and Banking apps, only 32.8% of installs result in an activated user. In Entertainment, that figure drops to just 14.5%⁴. 

For App Install campaigns to deliver real business value, they need to be designed with activation in mind from the start: 

Direct users to value, not to a homepage. Deep linking allows campaigns to drop users exactly where the ad promised: a specific service, an offer, or a piece of content. Deep-linked activations drive up to 40% higher Day 30 retention than generic home-screen landings⁵.  

Eliminate friction in the first 90 seconds. User patience is finite. If a new user cannot find value within 90 seconds, the app risks becoming permanently dormant. Every unnecessary step in the onboarding flow (a mandatory registration, a lengthy tutorial, a generic welcome screen) is a drop-off risk. 

Make the first interaction count. Lead with the service, the content, or the offer that motivated the install. The onboarding experience should feel like a continuation of the campaign, not a reset. 

The acquisition campaign and the onboarding experience are not separate responsibilities. When they are treated as one connected journey, activation rates follow. 

Creative Strategy: The Performance Variable Most Teams Underestimate

In mobile App Install campaigns, creative quality is not a brand consideration. It is a performance variable with a direct impact on reach, relevance, and cost. 

Platforms like Google UAC use creative assets to identify and reach relevant audiences. Poor or repetitive creatives do not just underperform, they actively limit the algorithm’s ability to find the right users. This makes creative strategy as important to acquisition performance as bidding strategy or audience targeting. 

What works in practice: 

• Build creatives around real use cases, not abstract brand messaging. Show a user paying a bill, streaming content, or redeeming an offer. Tangible, specific value outperforms aspirational positioning in app install advertising. 

• Diversify asset formats systematically. Provide video in portrait, square, and landscape formats, across multiple durations (up to 10s, 15s, and 30s), alongside static and HTML5 formats. Format diversity gives the algorithm the flexibility to serve the right asset in the right placement, maximising reach and efficiency. 

• Refresh creatives continuously. Creative fatigue is measurable and costly. A rotating pipeline of new assets, even incremental variations, maintains engagement, feeds the algorithm with fresh signals, and prevents performance decay. 

• Adapt messaging by audience and by market. A creative that converts in one country may fall flat in another. Local adaptation is not a production overhead. It is a direct performance input. Here, a strong test and learn approach make the difference (A/B testing) 

Let’s take as an example one of Addict Mobile’s recent campaigns. For Orange Max it, Addict Mobile tested a wide range of creatives to maximize results, from statics to videos and various languages, call-to-actions and formats. This lead to +55% installs with -25% CPI thanks to the introduction of videos between Q2 2025 and Q4 2025 in Guinea. Overall, the campaign delivered +47% more volume than initially forecasted. 

This is the power of testing and iterating. 

Engagement and Retention: The Proof That Acquisition Is Working

App Install campaigns generate the first interaction. What happens next determines whether that interaction was worth the investment. 

This is why the most effective Telco Super App strategies do not treat acquisition as a standalone activity. They build an integrated approach where install campaigns feed into an engagement and retention layer designed to keep users active, move them across services, and increase their long-term value. 

The difference in outcomes between passive and active users makes the business case clear. While a typical billing app averages 1.5 sessions per month, Super Apps and engagement hubs average 15 to 20 sessions per month. Users who engage with three or more services show a 25% lower churn rate, and multi-service engagement is associated with a 43% uplift in Customer Lifetime Value⁶. 

The mechanisms that drive this transition from install to active user include: 

• Bundles and packaged offers that give new users a reason to explore beyond the first service they came for 

• Gamification and reward mechanics that make service discovery engaging. Weekly in-app incentives have been shown to drive session frequency up to 10 times higher than standard utility apps 

• Push notifications and retargeting to re-engage users who have gone quiet, and to drive cross-sell into adjacent services. Remarketing now accounts for nearly 30% of total app marketing budgets, reflecting how much more cost-efficient reactivation is compared to new acquisition 

• Frictionless payment experiences where carrier billing and integrated wallets remove the last barrier between intent and conversion 

Each of these elements reinforces the acquisition investment. The data flowing from engaged users also feeds back into campaign targeting, improving the quality of future installs. The loop is self-reinforcing but it only starts with a well-designed App Install campaign. 

What Gets in the Way of a Campaign That Actually Works

Even well-resourced teams repeat the same mistakes. The most damaging ones in Super App acquisition: 

• Optimising for install volume over user quality. CPI-driven campaigns generate downloads. Activation-driven campaigns generate users. 

• No alignment between acquisition and product teams. When the campaign promises one experience and the app delivers another, activation fails at the handoff. Acquisition, product, and CRM need to operate as one connected journey. 

• Relying on a limited set of creative assets. Without format diversity and regular refresh cycles, algorithm performance degrades and costs rise. Creative is a media efficiency lever, not just a communication one. 

• Copy-pasting strategies across markets. Creatives, offers, and messaging that work in one market rarely transfer without local adaptation. Building that flexibility into the process from the start saves significantly more than it costs. 

• Tracking only short-term KPIs. Install numbers look good in a weekly report. Cost per activated user, 30-day retention, and LTV tell you whether the campaign is building a business. 

The Bottom Line: Downloads Are Just the Beginning

A Super App’s success is not measured by how many times it has been downloaded. It is measured by how many of those users activate, return, use multiple services, and generate revenue over time. But none of that starts without acquisition, and not just any acquisition. Acquisition that is built around business outcomes from day one. 

For Telcos, this means treating App Install campaigns not as a top-of-funnel volume exercise, but as the foundation of the entire growth strategy. When acquisition is designed with activation in mind, supported by the right creative strategy, connected to onboarding, and followed by an engagement layer that keeps users coming back, the Super App becomes what it was always supposed to be: a sustainable revenue engine. 

That is the shift. And it starts with how you run your next install campaign. 

Sources

[1] Gartner Predictions Series: https://www.gartner.com/en/information-technology/insights/gartner-predictions-webinar-series

[1] S&S Insider Super App Market Report: https://www.snsinsider.com/reports/super-app-market-4365

[2] Simon-Kucher Global Telecommunications Study 2025: https://www.simon-kucher.com/en/insights/turning-engagement-tangible-customer-value-insights-global-telecommunications-study-2025

[3] Adjust App Retention Handbook: https://www.adjust.com/resources/guides/user-retention/

[4] RevenueCat State of Subscription Apps 2026: https://www.revenuecat.com/state-of-subscription-apps

[5] AppsFlyer State of App Marketing 2025/2026: https://www.appsflyer.com/resources/reports/state-of-app-marketing/