The news: Privacy regulations and platform changes are creating blind spots for mobile marketers and forcing them to rethink how they attribute app installs and measure performance.

• 41% of mobile growth, marketing, and product leaders worldwide say privacy measures online are leading to difficulties with cross-channel attribution, per Branch’s 2025 State of App Growth report.
• 39% cite higher costs with data collection and analysis, and 37% say it’s harder to optimize campaigns in real time.

Zooming out: To adapt to changes on privacy platforms—including the end of Google’s Privacy Sandbox—marketers are prioritizing tools that close visibility gaps. That includes server-side tracking (38%), first-party data strategies (15%), and privacy-centric attribution vendors (13%).

The opportunity: First-party data is an ideal route as it enables personalization that can reduce acquisition costs and lift ROI.

• Personalization drives a 10% to 30% increase in marketing ROI, per McKinsey & Co., and can cut customer acquisition costs by up to 50%.
• That’s key given that 36% of marketers cite high acquisition costs for new app users as their biggest growth challenge, per Branch, a pain point that’s magnified by lost visibility in a privacy-focused world.

AI is also playing a bigger role: Nearly half of marketers (46%) use AI in the app growth process for personalization and 48% use it for predictive analytics.

Zooming out: Prioritizing contextual ad targeting is another high-priority strategy as third-party identifiers disappear. Forty percent of Branch’s respondents are putting more focus on contextual targeting to boost performance without relying on user-level data.

Collective view: Fragmented visibility is a silent killer for performance as many marketers rely on a patchwork of tools that produce disjointed data and silos between teams. Only 8% of marketers say they have a fully unified view of app performance across channels, and 38% say it’s “partially unified.”

What marketers should do:

• Unify marketing and product data into a single, trusted performance dashboard.
• Make cross-channel measurement a strategic KPI.
• Use AI for contextual analytics and smarter targeting to find signal gaps left by privacy-driven data loss.