Beat the 4 Bosses Holding Back Your App’s Growth

This blog is a tactical recap of the session delivered by Avi Das, CRO at Aarki, at App Growth Summit Berlin 2025.

Welcome to Level 2025.

You spawn with a full war chest and a shiny MarTech stack, but the map is rigged.

The enemies are familiar: sky-high CPIs, sluggish creatives, broken data, and privacy walls tall enough to block half your line of sight, and every move feels like fighting blindfolded.

The grind won’t save you. Marketers who keep smashing the “increase budget” button end up farming the same users for less return. The real winners master four boss fights—UA Inflation, Creative Gridlock, Data Loss, and the Privacy-Performance Barrier.

Ready to clear these stages?

Boss Fight #1: UA Inflation and The Never-Ending Loop

User Acquisition (UA) costs are up 12% year over year. Budgets have jumped 26%, but user growth? Just 2%. That’s not expansion, it’s a bidding war dressed up as progress.

Most marketers think their UA engine is solid. They’ve got installs, they’ve got retention partners, and they think that’s enough. But what they’re not seeing is how many of those “new users” are actually old ones—reinstalls showing up under fresh attribution.

We’re talking about people who churned months ago getting counted as first-time acquisitions. It’s happening because the user pool isn’t growing. You’re just recapturing the same players through a more expensive portal.

Now here’s the real eye-opener: you could’ve reactivated those lapsed users via retargeting for just 20% of the cost.

Yet Retargeting (RT) still gets sidelined. AppsFlyer says that paid remarketing conversions are growing 10x faster than paid installs. However, budgets keep leaning on UA. That’s a tactical miss.

This isn’t about slashing UA, it’s about rebalancing. If your attribution window is 90 days, and you’re reacquiring churned users after that? Then plug retargeting into your mix, reach them sooner, and reclaim value before your CAC stacks up. You’ve got the gear. Now play smarter.

So Why Start Retargeting from Day 1?

Because installs don’t equal impact. Real ROI kicks in after Day 1, and retargeting makes every other channel work harder.

But here’s the trap too many apps fall into: they wait. They delay retargeting until users have lapsed for 60 or 90 days. By then, intent has faded, and you’re paying more to reheat a cold lead. The smartest move? Start early, while memory, interest, and momentum are still alive.

Here’s how we’ve seen early RT make the difference:

• Don’t Let UA Spend What Retargeting Should Handle: Many marketers are unknowingly reacquiring churned users through expensive UA. By catching them earlier with retargeting—at a fraction of the cost—you reclaim value without bloating your CAC.
• SMS + Retargeting > SMS Alone: One client carved out a small slice of their SMS budget for RT and saw immediate uplift. SMS drove reach, but RT caught the drop-offs and brought them back into flow. The combo outperformed SMS on its own.
• Offline Activations with Mobile Follow-Through: Live events shouldn’t stop at foot traffic. We help brands extend offline touchpoints into the mobile ecosystem, retargeting attendees with creative that turns awareness into action.

Start early. Build momentum. Don’t let Day 1 be your high score.

Boss Fight #2: Creative Gridlock

Creative should be your biggest superpower, yet most teams are firing blanks. But as budgets scale, most teams end up generating more assets than they can optimize—firing faster, but not smarter.

Output is exploding. Apps now push out dozens of fresh variants every month, and production is rising double-digits across every spend tier. Only 10–20% of marketers actually turn data into creative performance. That’s like unlocking a legendary weapon and never equipping it.

AI promised to solve this, but it only scales quality if you feed it quality. That’s where partners like Aarki can step in, with a dedicated in-house creative lab and the AI infrastructure to turn feedback into firepower. We help partners build a creative feedback loop, powered by performance data and informed iteration.

When the right system clicks, it shows.

Creative stops being expensive guesswork and starts farming actual wins. Here’s how a few partners cleared the stage:

The play is to build modular creative pipelines. Run tests with purpose. Feed your AI actual signal, not vanity metrics. Treat every concept like a mini-boss—launch, learn, upgrade, and keep pushing until it clears.

Boss Fight #3: Signal Loss – Data Is The Old Oil

Data used to be the fuel. Now, it’s friction.

Privacy shifts have cut collaboration along with signal. Advertisers are sitting on mountains of first-party data but are hesitant to share it. Now, everyone’s running in silos, working off partial maps, and guessing where users might go next.

It’s time to upgrade your radar.

At Aarki, we’re plugged into billions of signals across the app ecosystem. Our owned data centers process 220 billion bid auctions a day and crunch 6 million user behavior queries per second. That gives us radar-like visibility—tracking where users come from, where they go, and how to redirect them back seamlessly.

We call this ecosystem the App Hive, where users hop from fitness trackers to food delivery to games in minutes. For example, we’ve seen fintech users consistently hop from checking their portfolio balances to puzzle games, and used that insider knowledge to shape puzzle-style ad creatives that convert.

With the right info, you’re no longer guessing. You’re retargeting the moment attention shifts. You’re retaining more, wasting less, and turning churn into comeback stories.

Boss Fight #4: Privacy vs. Performance – The False Choice

This level isn’t broken, you just need a better build.

Apple shut the gate. Google’s closing theirs next. ATT opt-ins are at 9.3%, postbacks drift in 35 days late, and SKAN compresses your revenue insight into 64 tiny slots. It’s no wonder marketers feel stuck between two paths: protect privacy or chase performance.

But that’s a false choice.

SKAN 4.0 is the middle ground, and the biggest brands are already deep in SKAN-only mode. Why? Because it can deliver if you know how to map your conversion values, tune your postback settings, and train your systems to think probabilistically. And if it still feels like performance is slipping through the cracks? Talk to partners like us, who have built for scale inside a SKAN-led world.

That’s the real boss fight with SKAN: it’s complex, technical, and resource-heavy. Setting up conversion values, mapping postbacks, dealing with lockWindow timers—none of it is plug-and-play. And most teams don’t have the bandwidth to figure it out while still hitting performance goals.

That’s where Aarki steps in.

We’ve already done the heavy lifting to build SKAN-native infrastructure that drives performance at scale. Our team doesn’t just support integration—we actively guide it, optimize it, and build supervised AI systems that make sense of messy signal. Think of it like stepping into an Ironman suit: we power the system, you steer the mission. Faster decisions, sharper targeting, no wasted firepower.

Privacy means playing smarter. Master the mechanics. Equip the right tools. Step back in with confidence.

You’re Geared Up. Now It’s Time to Play to Win.

The old tactics—overbidding for the same users, endless creative churn, clunky attribution hacks—aren’t built for 2025. But when the strategy clicks, the results speak for themselves. Aarki partners have more than doubled their spend in just 6 months. Not because they threw money at the problem, but because the math worked.

They fought the bosses. They beat them. Now it’s your move. Ditch the legacy playbook. Build smarter. Scale sharper. And let’s unlock your next level of growth together.