Mobile app growth comes with its own language.
CPI, LTV, incrementality, OEM, attribution, retargeting, DSP. Some terms describe metrics, others describe technologies, channels, or strategies, and many only make sense when you understand how they connect.
Rocket Lab is an App Growth Hub that integrates multiple solutions to help companies and their apps achieve their business goals through attraction, acquisition, and engagement strategies. Its solutions include Apple Ads, OEM advertising, programmatic media, and ad networks, supporting brands across the entire app lifecycle.
Working across these areas means looking beyond individual channels or isolated metrics. Growing an app involves attracting new users, keeping them engaged, bringing inactive users back, understanding their value, and measuring which marketing efforts are actually contributing to growth.
That is why we created this Mobile App Growth Glossary.
Whether you work in user acquisition, performance marketing, product, or growth, here are the key terms you need to know and how they connect.
➜ App Growth Partner: An app growth partner helps mobile apps plan, execute, measure, and optimize growth across different channels and stages of the user journey.
➜ App Growth Strategy: The overall plan used to grow an app’s users, engagement, retention, and revenue based on its business objectives, audience, and market.
➜ Full-Funnel App Growth: An approach that works across acquisition, engagement, retention, and reactivation instead of treating each stage separately.
➜ User Acquisition (UA): The process of attracting new users to install and start using a mobile app. It is one part of app growth, alongside engagement, retention, and reactivation.
➜ User Engagement: How actively users interact with an app after installing it, through actions such as sessions, purchases, registrations, or content consumption.
➜ User Retention: The percentage of users who continue using an app over time, often measured at intervals such as day 1, day 7, or day 30.
➜ User Reactivation: The process of bringing back users who previously used an app but later became inactive.
➜ Retargeting/ Remarketing: Advertising aimed at users who have already interacted with an app, usually to bring them back or encourage a specific action.
➜ High-Value Users: Users who generate greater business value through revenue, purchases, subscriptions, engagement, retention, or other important actions.
➜ Churn: The rate at which users stop using an app during a given period. It is one of the main indicators of retention performance.
➜ Audience Segmentation: The process of dividing users into groups based on behavior, value, lifecycle stage, or other characteristics to make campaigns more relevant.
➜ Attribution: The process of determining which marketing touchpoint receives credit for an install or conversion.
Attribution answers who gets credit for a result.
➜ Reattribution: When an inactive user returns to an app after interacting with a campaign and that return is attributed to the new marketing touchpoint.
➜ Incrementality: Incrementality measures whether a campaign generated users, conversions, or revenue that would not have happened otherwise.
Unlike attribution, it focuses on the campaign’s causal impact.
➜ Incrementality Test: A controlled experiment that compares a campaign group with a control group to measure the additional impact generated by advertising.
➜ Control Group: A group of users that does not receive the campaign being tested, providing a baseline for what would have happened without it.
➜ Holdout Group: A portion of an audience deliberately excluded from a campaign so its behavior can be compared with users who are eligible to receive advertising.
➜ Daily Active Users (DAU): The number of unique users who actively use an app on a given day. DAU helps measure how frequently users return and interact with the app.
➜ Monthly Active Users (MAU): The number of unique users who actively use an app within a given month. MAU provides a broader view of the size of an app’s active user base.
➜ Stickiness: A measure of how frequently users return to an app, typically calculated as DAU divided by MAU. A higher stickiness ratio generally indicates more frequent app usage.
➜ Incremental Revenue: Revenue generated because of a campaign, beyond the revenue that would have occurred without it.
➜ Incremental Conversions: Conversions caused by a campaign that would not have happened otherwise.
➜ Statistical Significance: A measure of how confident we can be that the difference observed in a test reflects a real effect rather than random variation.
➜ Mobile Measurement Partner (MMP): A third-party platform used to measure installs, conversions, reattributions, and mobile campaign performance.
➜ Cost Model: The method used to determine how an advertiser is charged for media, such as CPM, CPC, CPT, or CPA.
➜ Cost per Click (CPC): The average amount paid for each click on an advertisement. CPC is commonly used to evaluate the cost efficiency of traffic-generating campaigns.
➜ Cost per Mille (CPM): The average cost of delivering 1,000 ad impressions. CPM is commonly used to evaluate the cost of reaching an audience, especially in awareness and display campaigns.
➜ Cost per Tap (CPT): The average amount paid for each tap on an Apple Ads ad. CPT is a key Apple Ads metric used to measure the cost of generating traffic from an ad.
➜ Cost per Install (CPI): The average advertising cost required to generate one app install. CPI measures acquisition efficiency, but not the quality or long-term value of the users acquired.
➜ Cost per Acquisition (CPA): The average cost required to generate a specific action, such as a registration, purchase, subscription, or booking.
➜ Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC): The total cost of acquiring a new paying customer. It is commonly evaluated alongside Lifetime Value.
➜ Conversion Rate (CVR): The percentage of users who complete a desired action, such as installing an app or making a purchase.
➜ Return on Ad Spend (ROAS): The revenue generated in relation to advertising spend.
ROAS measures efficiency, but it does not show whether that revenue was incremental.
➜ Lifetime Value (LTV): The total value a user is expected to generate throughout their relationship with an app.
LTV helps marketers evaluate acquisition based on long-term value rather than install cost alone.
➜ Apple Ads: Apple’s advertising platform for promoting apps across the App Store and reaching iOS users at different moments of app discovery and search intent.
➜ App Store Optimization (ASO): The process of improving an app’s store listing to increase visibility and organic installs.
ASO can work alongside paid acquisition strategies such as Apple Ads.
➜ OEM Advertising (Original Equipment Manufacturer Advertising): Advertising delivered through inventory owned or operated by device manufacturers such as Samsung, Xiaomi, or Huawei.
It allows apps to reach users at different moments within the device experience, including before they actively search in an app store.
➜ Programmatic Advertising: The automated buying and selling of digital advertising inventory through technology platforms.
For app marketers, it can support acquisition, retargeting, and reactivation.
➜ Demand-Side Platform (DSP): The technology advertisers use to buy digital advertising inventory programmatically across publishers, exchanges, and advertising networks.
➜ Supply-Side Platform (SSP): The technology publishers use to make their advertising inventory available to advertisers through programmatic marketplaces.
➜ Connected TV (CTV): Advertising delivered through internet-connected televisions and streaming devices instead of traditional broadcast television.
➜ CTV Performance: Using Connected TV advertising with measurable performance objectives such as installs, purchases, or conversions, rather than awareness alone.
➜ In-App Advertising: Advertising displayed inside mobile applications in formats such as banners, native ads, interstitials, or rewarded video.
➜ In-App Event: An action a user completes inside an app, such as registering, purchasing, subscribing, or booking a service. These events are commonly used to measure and optimize campaign performance.
➜ Mobile Analytics: The collection and analysis of data about how users behave inside a mobile app, from installs and sessions to purchases and other in-app actions.
➜ Deep Link: A link that takes a user directly to a specific destination inside an app instead of only opening its home screen.
➜ User Experience (UX): The overall experience a user has while interacting with an app, including usability, navigation, speed, design, and ease of completing actions.
➜ App Tracking Transparency (ATT): Apple’s privacy framework that requires apps to ask users for permission before tracking their activity across other companies’ apps and websites.
➜ Media Mix: The combination of advertising channels and solutions used within a growth strategy. For app marketers, this can include Apple Ads, OEM advertising, programmatic, CTV, and retargeting.
➜ Budget Allocation: The process of deciding how advertising investment should be distributed across channels, campaigns, audiences, or markets.
➜Campaign Optimization: The continuous process of adjusting bids, budgets, audiences, placements, creatives, or targeting based on campaign performance and optimization goals.
➜ Optimization Goal: The outcome a campaign is configured to prioritize, such as installs, conversions, revenue, or a target cost per acquisition.
➜ Learning Period: The initial phase when an advertising platform or algorithm collects data to optimize campaign delivery.
➜ Cool-down Period: A period after a significant campaign change during which marketers allow performance to stabilize before making additional adjustments or evaluating results.
➜ Target CPA: An automated bidding approach that aims to generate conversions around a chosen average cost per acquisition.
Understanding the terms is only the beginning.
A successful app growth strategy is not just about knowing what each metric, channel, or technology means. It is about understanding how they work together, which ones matter for your business, and where the biggest opportunities are.
At Rocket Lab, we help brands navigate that process, from exploring new channels and identifying the right solutions to measuring what is actually contributing to growth.
Talk to our team to find the right approach for your app.
Mobile app growth is the practice of increasing an app’s users, engagement, retention, and revenue through connected acquisition, reactivation, optimization, and measurement strategies.
It goes beyond generating installs by considering what happens throughout the user journey and the long-term value those users create.
User acquisition focuses on attracting new users to install and start using an app.
App growth is broader. It includes acquisition as well as engagement, retention, reactivation, measurement, and long-term user value.
Incrementality measures the additional users, conversions, or revenue generated because of a marketing campaign.
Its purpose is to distinguish results caused by advertising from results that would have happened anyway.
Attribution determines which marketing touchpoint receives credit for an install or conversion.
Incrementality asks whether that marketing activity actually caused an additional result that would not have happened without it.
They answer different measurement questions.
The right metrics depend on the business objective.
CPI and CPA measure acquisition efficiency, ROAS measures revenue relative to advertising spend, retention shows whether users continue using the app, and LTV measures their long-term value.
Incrementality can help determine how much of the observed growth was actually caused by marketing.
No. CPI only shows the cost of generating an install.
It does not show whether users remain active, convert, generate revenue, or whether the campaign created incremental growth.
OEM advertising is advertising delivered through inventory associated with device manufacturers such as Samsung, Xiaomi, or Huawei.
It gives apps another way to reach users during the device experience, beyond traditional app stores and programmatic media.
An App Growth Hub brings multiple mobile growth solutions together under one strategy.
Instead of treating acquisition, retargeting, media, technology, and measurement as separate efforts, it connects them around the app’s business objectives.
An agency may specialize in one or several marketing channels.
An app growth partner focuses specifically on mobile app growth and starts with the business challenge before deciding which combination of strategy, media, technology, and measurement is needed.
They reach users in different contexts across the mobile journey.
Apple Ads reaches users within the App Store, OEM advertising reaches users through manufacturer-owned inventory and the device experience, programmatic reaches audiences across apps, websites, and other digital environments, and SDK inventory provides access to placements within third-party apps through integrated software development kits.
Together, they can complement each other by connecting with users at different moments, from discovery and acquisition to re-engagement.
Rocket Lab is an App Growth Hub helping brands build more connected mobile growth strategies across user acquisition, re-engagement, retention, and other key stages of the app journey.
By combining technology, strategic expertise, and specialized solutions in one place, we help clients manage growth with a broader view of performance and business impact.
Becoming a founding partner in Moloco’s Agency Partner Program reinforces that approach and expands the tools, expertise, and collaboration available to the brands we work with.
-1.png)
