South-east Asian marketers spend US$244m to acquire users as demand for fintech apps rise in 2020

MARKETERS in South-east Asia spent over US$244 million to acquire users, with investment apps the most aggressively pushed, according to a report by marketing analytics and attribution platform AppsFlyer.

South-east Asia's spending constitutes 8 per cent of the global total of US$3 billion in 2020.

Marketing spend in South-east Asia largely relies on trends in fintech app demand, said the report titled 2021 State of Finance App Marketing.

About 65 per cent of their marketing budgets are dedicated to gaining users through non-organic installs, which are downloads that occur when the company rewards the user for doing so. Organic installs are when users download an app because they find it interesting without any prompting.

Investment apps were pushed the most aggressively, making up more than 65.5 per cent of non-organic installs in the region, according to the report.

It also found that the pandemic had led to more users in South-east Asia turning to loan apps, which made up 58.3 per cent of non-organic installs.

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Coming in last was financial services with non-organic installs at 37.3 per cent. AppsFlyer attributed this to the fact that many in South-east Asia had switched to using contactless payments due to social distancing measures.

On the whole, lockdowns in Q2 2020 had an impact on marketing in most South-east Asian countries, with non-organic installs in Indonesia and Vietnam both plunging about 50 per cent, compared to the first quarter.

Accordingly, marketers also reduced spending by 46 per cent from Q1 to Q2 in 2020. However, Indonesian marketers increased spending by 31 per cent from Q2 to Q3, while Vietnamese ones raised theirs by 52 per cent.

Overall, the region's overall demand for fintech apps grew over the past year, according to the report. Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam all saw higher demand in Q1 this year, compared with the same period last year.

Meanwhile, significant improvements in anti-fraud solutions have helped bring mobile fraud down by 20 per cent from Q1 2020 to Q1 2021, said the report, noting that mobile fraud has traditionally been high in the region.

The report tracked 2.7 billion app installations in the Asia-Pacific region from Q1 2019 to Q1 2021, out of 4.7 billion globally.

On the whole, the average number of downloads in developing markets was 70 per cent higher than that in developed markets; India, Brazil and Indonesia made up almost half of the global number of downloads.

This could be because of the large number of unbanked or underbanked people in these countries, said the report.