Marketplace Marketing: The Complete Playbook for User Acquisition, Liquidity, and AI Search

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Global app marketing spend reached $109 billion in 2025, including $78 billion on user acquisition (up 13%) and $31.3 billion on remarketing (up 37%). Attention keeps getting more expensive, and marketplaces have to buy it twice. A marketplace isn’t one product. It’s two, a supply side and a demand side joined by a transaction. Grow one without the other and you get either buyers facing empty shelves or sellers with no one to sell to.

Here’s what works in 2026, from solving the cold start problem to the unit economics that tell you when to scale.

Solving the Cold Start Problem

Build Supply Before Demand

Every marketplace launches with nothing on either side. Buying traffic for an empty marketplace wastes budget and burns trust, because a first visit that ends in “no results” rarely gets a second chance. Seed supply first. Suppliers have a direct financial reason to join early, especially when onboarding is easy.

Single-Player Mode: Give Suppliers a Reason to Join Early

The strongest supply strategies give providers a tool that’s useful even with zero buyers. Zillow’s Zestimate gave homeowners a reason to visit long before agents paid to reach them. Square solved card payments for small merchants from day one. Today that tool might be scheduling, inventory management or an AI listing assistant. It earns daily use, and the data it generates sharpens matching once demand arrives.

Win a Beachhead Before You Expand

Density beats breadth. DoorDash built its early business around suburbs and smaller metro areas that competitors underserved. Etsy’s founders recruited early sellers in person at craft fairs. Pick one city, category or customer type, make it work, then replicate the playbook.

Subsidize Liquidity, With an Exit Plan

Subsidizing the hard side can jump-start a market, whether through guaranteed earnings, waived commissions or free listing photos. Set exit criteria before you launch any incentive, and tie them to a metric that shows when organic network effects can take over.

Liquidity Is the Metric That Matters

How to Measure Marketplace Liquidity

Liquidity is the likelihood that a listing or request turns into a completed transaction. Track it by category and by market. When it’s low, fix matching and friction before you buy more traffic.

Reducing Transaction Friction With AI Discovery and Smarter Market Design

Natural language search and AI shopping assistants let buyers describe what they need instead of wrestling with filters. Market design can unlock liquidity too. Waymo opened parent-linked accounts for riders aged 14 to 17, which widened demand without adding supply. Incredible Health flipped hiring so hospitals apply to nurses.

Where User Acquisition Budgets Are Going in 2026

iOS Surges While Android Flatlines

According to AppsFlyer, 2025 UA growth came entirely from iOS, which rose 35% while Android slipped 1%. iOS paid installs climbed 31% in the US, 64% in the UK and 80% in Canada. Android paid installs fell 9% in Australia.

Category Winners: Shopping, Non-Gaming, and Generative AI

Non-gaming UA spend grew 18% to $53 billion, while gaming grew just 3% to $25 billion. Shopping jumped 70% overall and 123% on iOS, driven largely by China-based e-commerce apps. Generative AI apps reached $824 million in UA spend, up roughly 50%.

Running Two Strategies: Western iOS vs. Emerging-Market Android

UA spend rose 127% in Spain and 70% in Italy. Meanwhile, AppsFlyer expects the next billion users to come mainly from Android in non-Western markets. Global marketplaces increasingly run two playbooks: a retention-heavy iOS strategy for North America and Western Europe, and a volume-focused Android strategy for emerging markets.

Measuring Growth Without Deterministic Tracking

ATT, SKAdNetwork, and the 64-Value Constraint

Apple’s App Tracking Transparency requires user permission before you track people across other companies’ apps and websites. iOS attribution runs through SKAdNetwork and AdAttributionKit, where your conversion signal is a value from 0 to 63. Apple only sends that fine-grained value when a campaign clears its privacy threshold. Map those 64 values to your key milestones: signup, first listing, first purchase.

What the End of Android’s Privacy Sandbox Means

Google deprecated Privacy Sandbox on Android on October 17, 2025. Don’t build plans around it. Confirm what’s currently supported with your measurement partner before changing SDKs or attribution setups.

Media Mix Modeling and Incrementality Testing

The question that matters is causal: would this user have found you anyway? Geographic holdouts and ghost-ad tests answer it directly, and media mix modeling guides budget allocation across channels. Scrutinize brand search hardest, because organic cannibalization can inflate its reported performance.

Web-to-App Funnels After Epic v. Apple

Many marketplaces now send paid traffic to a mobile web page instead of straight to the app store. The page explains the offer, captures an email or phone number and gives you first-party measurement before the install. It can also move payment off Apple’s standard 15% to 30% in-app commission. In the US, Apple hasn’t collected commission on external-link purchases since an April 2025 ruling. However, it has proposed a 15% fee for standard apps, and the court has not set a final rate. Model your margins for a range of outcomes rather than assuming zero.

AI Search, AEO, and Creative at Scale

Why Traditional Organic Search Traffic Is Declining

Nearly 30% of marketers report lower search traffic as consumers turn to AI tools. Buyers increasingly ask an assistant for a recommendation. If your inventory isn’t legible to that assistant, you’re not in the answer.

How to Make Your Marketplace Visible to AI Assistants

Over 92% of marketers plan to optimize, or already optimize, for both traditional and AI search. Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) changes what you’re optimizing for:

In practice, that means three things: schema markup on listings and category pages, plain-language answers to the questions buyers actually ask, and AI crawlers allowed in your robots.txt.

AI Creative: Volume Is Cheap, Usable Output Isn’t

About 94% of marketers plan to use AI in content creation, so volume alone is no longer an edge. Judge AI tools on usable output: finished quality, review time and true production cost. Keep videos short. In a Wyzowl survey, 51% of people said 30 to 60 seconds is the ideal length, and 91% preferred videos under two minutes.

User-Generated Content as a Trust Engine

UGC shows real buyers and real sellers in one frame, which makes it a natural fit for marketplaces. Across its network, Bazaarvoice reports 144% higher conversion and 162% higher revenue per visitor when shoppers engage with UGC. Those shoppers chose to engage, so treat the figure as a strong signal rather than a guaranteed lift. The category is growing fast: market.us forecasts the UGC marketing market will grow from $9.3 billion in 2025 to $86.6 billion by 2035.

Acquisition Channels Beyond Meta and Google

OEM Pre-Install Partnerships

Manufacturers such as Samsung, Xiaomi, Oppo and Vivo run their own app stores and device setup flows. Placements there reach users outside the Meta and Google auctions. The channel is worth testing, especially in Android-heavy markets. Judge it on downstream user quality, and be skeptical of blanket CPI-savings claims from vendors selling the inventory.

Rewarded Ads That Attract High-Intent Users

Rewarded UA works when rewards are tied to meaningful milestones, not a single app open. Adjoe, which sells rewarded inventory, cites a survey in which 77% of developers had run a reward-based campaign and 68% saw improved ROAS. Respondents skew toward games, so validate with your own holdout test before scaling.

Designing for Cross-Platform User Journeys

Mobile anchors 60% to 80% of user activity, even as people move between devices. AppsFlyer’s preliminary data shows two patterns:

• Non-gaming users alternate between mobile and connected TV in an M-shaped pattern and end on mobile.
• In gaming, a loop between mobile and PC accounts for 79% of final-stage activity.

Judge CTV by its lift on mobile search and web-to-app entries, not by direct installs alone.

B2B Marketplaces Play by Different Rules

Embedded Payments and Infrastructure Drive Liquidity

B2B marketplaces win on infrastructure: invoicing, payment terms, approvals and integrations with buyers’ existing systems. Platforms like Marketplacer power EE’s trade-in program, Woolworths’ marketplace and Medcart, a B2B and B2C marketplace for protective equipment. These marketplaces work because they fit into how businesses already buy.

Pipeline Over Clicks

Longer sales cycles mean B2B demand should be measured in CRM pipeline and revenue, not click-through rates. LinkedIn, account-based outreach and content that answers buyers’ due-diligence questions usually outperform consumer-style campaigns.

Unit Economics: The Numbers That Decide When to Scale

Why CPI Is a Vanity Metric (and What to Optimize Instead)

Bidding for the cheapest install trains ad platforms to find people who install and leave. Optimize toward the deepest event that happens often enough to feed the algorithm, like a purchase or booking. When volume is thin, use a correlated proxy such as registration.

LTV:CAC Ratio and Payback Period

The familiar 3:1 target is a rule of thumb from David Skok’s SaaS metrics work, not a marketplace law. Calculate it on contribution margin, and do it separately for each side of your marketplace. Pair it with payback period, which tells you whether your cash can survive the wait.

Retention Is an Acquisition Channel

Remarketing’s share of app marketing spend rose from 25% to 29% in 2025, and iOS remarketing conversions grew 34% to 94% in Western markets. Reactivating a dormant user is often cheaper than winning a new one. If early cohorts churn fast, fix onboarding before raising paid budgets.

The Four Core Marketplace Metrics

Read these four together:

• If supply grows while fill rate falls, buyers can’t find what they want.
• If GMV grows while bookings stay flat, rising prices are driving the growth, not the network.

Choosing the Right Growth Partner

Match the Agency to Your Bottleneck

Start with your constraint, not the agency’s pitch. A B2B marketplace needs a partner fluent in CRM-based pipeline measurement. A consumer app needs app store optimization, creative testing and privacy-safe attribution. Ask who will run your account and how results will be measured.

What the 2026 App Growth Summit Circuit Is Signaling

The App Growth Summit runs free, practitioner-focused events in more than a dozen cities, including Los Angeles and San Francisco. The shift growth teams are working through this year is AI moving into decision-making. AppsFlyer reports that 57% of marketers use technical AI agents, and 32% already use agents to optimize campaigns.

Your 2026 Marketplace Growth Checklist

• Seed supply first, with a tool suppliers would use even without buyers.
• Launch in one beachhead market and prove liquidity before expanding.
• Track fill rate, bookings, supply growth and GMV together.
• Map SKAN conversion values to your most important milestones.
• Run incrementality tests before scaling any channel, especially brand search.
• Test a web-to-app funnel, and model margins for a range of link-out fees.
• Structure listings and content so AI assistants can understand and recommend them.
• Bid toward purchases or bookings, not installs.
• Calculate LTV:CAC and payback period for each side of the marketplace.
• Fix early retention before raising paid budgets.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the cold start problem in a marketplace?

It’s the chicken-and-egg challenge of launching with no buyers and no sellers. Buyers won’t come without supply, and suppliers won’t stay without buyers, so most marketplaces seed supply first.

Should a marketplace launch supply or demand first?

In most cases, supply. Suppliers have a clearer financial reason to join early, and acquiring buyers for an empty marketplace wastes budget and damages trust.

What is a good LTV:CAC ratio for a marketplace?

3:1 is the common rule of thumb, borrowed from SaaS. Calculate it on contribution margin and separately for each side of the marketplace, and pair it with payback period.

What is Answer Engine Optimization (AEO)?

AEO means structuring your content, schema markup and entity information so AI assistants and AI search engines can understand, cite and recommend your business in their answers.