Analysis: Mobile marketers pulling the plug too soon
April 13, 2026
Kochava is calling on mobile marketers to rethink how they evaluate campaign performance, warning that ingrained short-termism has become one of the least-discussed problems in app marketing.
With the digital market becoming increasingly crowded, the biggest threat to app growth in 2026 is no longer just competition or budget, but impatience. Kochava’s analysis suggests that the intense pressure to demonstrate returns within days or weeks is causing brands to misread early signals and abandon viable growth channels before they’ve had the chance to scale.
“Marketing teams are frequently benchmarking new tests against fully mature campaigns that have had years of optimisation. This is a structurally unfair comparison that reliably produces false negatives,” commented Jordan Shaver, Client Partnership Manager at Kochava. “When pulling the plug too early, brands are effectively starving their own growth and making a measurement error rather than a strategic call.”
A primary driver of this trend is the continued reliance on last-touch attribution (LTA). While easy to track, LTA often makes mid-funnel engagement invisible, even when it’s driving meaningful influence upstream. Furthermore, since the introduction of Apple’s App Tracking Transparency (ATT) and SKAN frameworks, iOS performance data inherently takes longer to stabilise. Teams that misinterpret this initial volatility as channel failure risk missing out on significant portions of the market.
To combat this, Kochava recommends that marketers allow a minimum of 30 to 60 days before performance data is considered directionally reliable.
“You can’t evaluate success on the first day or even the first week,” Shaver continued. “It takes time for algorithms to learn and for data to become statistically significant. Over-segmenting budgets and audiences only further starve campaigns of the data they need to optimise. To find true value, you have to give your strategy the space to actually work.”