New Frontiers for UA in In-App and OEM Traffic
In the mobile UA world, a growing tension has emerged. Meta and TikTok once offered seemingly endless scale. Their sophisticated auctions, huge audiences, and tight optimization loops made them the backbone of many performance strategies. Today, however, the story has shifted. Saturation, rising costs, and diminishing incremental returns mean that growth teams can no longer rely on “just pumping more budget” into these hubs. For anyone tasked with sustainable scaling, this reality is both a challenge and an invitation to rethink where true scale lives.
Why Scale Got Hard on Meta and TikTok
There are a few overlapping reasons that explain this shift:
Crowded Auctions. When every advertiser is bidding on the same audiences with similar creative strategies, cost per action rises and volume becomes volatile.
Signal Saturation. With increasing privacy constraints and limited identity signals, optimization feedback loops slow down — making early value signals noisier and less reliable.
Diminishing Incrementality. After heavy spend, the audiences that remain are smaller, more expensive, and less predictable. For many teams, incremental installs come at a disproportionate cost.
The net effect is familiar: scale becomes more expensive before it becomes more effective. That means UA managers need to unbundle the old assumption that more spend equals more value.
In-App Traffic Isn’t a Copy of Social, but It Still Scales
When we talk about in-app sources, we mean placements inside third-party mobile applications — whether it’s rewarded video, interstitials, native banners, or header banners. These environments offer a different psychological context compared to feeds and stories:
- Users are already engaged and may be receptive to relevant offers.
- Traffic is often tied to sessions with a purpose (e.g., entertainment, utility), not passive scrolling.
Despite having more contextual intent than social, many UA teams hesitate to treat in-app channels as core scale drivers. Instead, they test conservatively and retreat when familiar benchmarks (like CTR or install velocity) don’t behave as expected. But when teams align expectations with behavior — for example by prioritizing downstream events — in-app surfaces can deliver high-quality users at scale.
In short, in-app traffic scales differently, not worse.
OEM Traffic: A Different Kind of Scale
OEM sources go beyond traditional app inventory. These include:
- Device setup screens
- Recommended apps in system launchers
- OEM app stores
- System recommendations (e.g., device notifications or folders)
These placements do not exist within user entertainment loops. Instead, they appear during purposeful moments when a user is customizing or discovering device features. That context attracts a different type of intent — one shaped by choice and utility rather than distraction.
This has meaningful consequences for scale:
- Less Competition. Because fewer advertisers think to buy system-level placements, cost signals tend to be more stable and less subject to bidding wars.
- High-Intent User Moments. While CTR and early funnel metrics may look conservative, users that install from these surfaces often demonstrate more deliberate engagement patterns.
- Complementary Demand. OEM taps into discovery paths that social and traditional in-app cannot reach, effectively widening the addressable user base.
In market climates where social costs spike, OEM surfaces act as expansion paths, not just fallback options.
What It Means for UA Strategy
Understanding these sources is one thing; operationalizing them is another. UA teams working with in-app and OEM channels in 2025-2026 should consider the following strategic shifts:
Refocus Benchmarks. Traditional social benchmarks are not portable to in-app or OEM. Expect different curves and align outcomes accordingly — for example, optimizing toward retention or revenue events rather than front-loaded installs.
Creative Tailoring. Creative that lives well in a social feed may underperform in a device setup context. For OEM surfaces, messaging that conveys value, utility, and relevance early tends to resonate better.
Event-Driven Optimization. Signals like onboarding completion, first purchase, or subscription activation should be treated as optimization goals, not just early install metrics. These events correlate more closely with downstream ROI.
Unified Orchestration Tools. Aggregating dozens of SDKs and placement opportunities manually leads to inefficiencies. Platforms that unify in-app and OEM inventory and orchestrate spend across them help UA teams scale with less operational overhead.
Platforms like Qi Ads, with machine learning optimization layered across distinct surface types, exemplify this approach by aligning campaign objectives with behavioral signals instead of surface assumptions.
Looking Ahead: A More Resilient UA Stack
Scaling exclusively on Meta and TikTok was never a sustainable long-term strategy. Today’s market demands diversification, deeper understanding of user context, and a willingness to embrace placements that behave differently.
In-app and OEM sources are not replacements for classic channels. They are complementary pillars that unlock incremental reach, relief from auction pressure, and a broader spectrum of user intent.
When UA teams build strategies that recognize the inherent differences in audience behavior — and when they set expectations and creative approaches accordingly — they unlock new engines of growth that are resilient to the volatility of any single channel.
Real scale in 2025–2026 will come from understanding where users are and what they are trying to achieve, not from assuming that the channels of yesterday will always carry the growth of tomorrow.
