Retargeting should be an essential part of your mobile advertising strategy, especially if you’re tapping into a massive mobile app market such as Japan. Mobile internet advertising expenditure in Japan is forecasted to reach ¥1.6 T ($12.4 B) as more and more advertisers are competing for high-quality users. To gain more insights into running retargeting campaigns in Japan, we brought together mobile marketing experts from the country’s top agencies for a roundtable discussion:
- Hiro Kurata of Aarki
- Ryuji Yamane of Remerge
- Takuya Miura of YouAppi
Watch the full roundtable discussion here.
Mobile Retargeting Landscape in Japan
Retargeting over the last couple of years has undergone a massive shift due to Apple’s privacy changes and the removal of the identifier for advertisers (IDFA), which makes it much more challenging to retarget iOS users. In Japan, the impact of the loss of the IDFA is quite considerable, as almost half of the mobile ads in the country are run on iOS devices. Despite this, the speakers explain, retargeting is still very effective in Japan, as most users still have an IDFA and have not opted-out of targeted ads.
The speakers shed light on the uniqueness of the Japanese mobile marketing landscape, especially when compared to neighboring countries. Advertisers in China and South Korea run ads internationally, but in Japan, most advertisers focus their budgets only on domestic markets. In an overly saturated app market with targeting limited to only Japanese users, retargeting should be an essential part of your app marketing campaign.
The Importance of Retargeting
In 2021 alone, Japan witnessed $2.56 B mobile app downloads with $20.71 B spent on in-app purchases (IAP). This is a 2% YoY change in consumer spending and IAP compared to 2020. With so many new apps entering the market, retargeting allows you to re-engage your lapsed users and bring them back to your app. It also acts as a defense to prevent users from churning, resulting in high lifetime value (LTV) users that drive up your ROI.
The speakers further discuss that several advertisers in Japan prefer to focus on user acquisition campaigns, but they all agree that improving user retention rate through retargeting is a more effective way to grow your app's gross revenue, as opposed to focusing primarily on acquiring new users. This is especially important in Japan as about 60% of Japanese users who don’t use an app for a week become inactive. So, keeping your user base engaged is more important than attracting new users, and we should anticipate more privacy changes to come soon.
The Future of Retargeting in Japan
Due to the restrictions of the IDFA and the loss of third-party cookies, the speakers predict that the term “retargeting” will be replaced with another term that will put more focus on re-engaging and re-capturing current users. They also see that more Japanese mobile apps will expand their reach overseas, especially with the encouragement of several global and foreign-based media companies.
Watch the roundtable discussion to learn more about retargeting campaigns in Japan, with case studies presented by the speakers. They discuss actionable insights for retargeting strategies such as: incremental lift analyses, IDFA vs non-IDFA testing, ghost bidding, valuable advice on MMP settings, and many more.
Level up your retargeting campaigns in Japan now.
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