How Mobile Measurement Partners Improve App Marketing

Why do app developers like us track mobile analytics? You probably already know the answer: to see our download numbers go up! But as app marketers, downloads are not our end goal. Our questions are: Where did those users come from? Why did they click to install? And what is their app retention like? Thousands of installs may sound impressive, but what good does it do your business if those users disappear the next day?

This is where a mobile measurement partner (MMP) can provide the most value. Marketing teams can evaluate their return on investment (ROI) and performance of campaigns with attribution. With an MMP, marketing teams can address user acquisition and retention.

What is a Mobile Measurement Partner?

A mobile measurement partner (MMP) is a trusted, independent third-party company that helps you gauge the performance of your user acquisition campaigns. MMPs have industry leading Attribution technology. They provide access to better data to help determine the customer journey and maximize your user retention.

What is Attribution in Mobile Measurement?

Attribution is determining the credit for a mobile app install, and touchpoints in the user journey deserve credit. Attribution partner companies solve this challenging problem. MMPs give marketing teams the insights they need to increase the ROI for their user acquisition spending.

How Much Can a Partner Measure?

• Installs and where they came from

• How each campaign performs across channels

• In-app events (registrations, purchases, etc.)

• Who comes back and engages with the app, versus who doesn’t

• What you spent vs. what you got back (ROAS)

• Traffic that seems fake or suspicious

Without a MMP, you’re stuck using each individual ad platform and can’t normalize data, which means you can never quite get the numbers to add up. A MMP gives everyone the ability to view the same data.

How Does Mobile Measurement Work?

A MMP is essentially a collection of campaign and in-app events that form a unified view of the user journey from their first ad click to their first in-app purchase.

1. Campaign Tracking

During this step, you're mostly setting things up. This includes creating tracking links for campaigns, adjusting your measurement settings, and connecting your ad partners. Once everything is set, links are generated that the MMP uses to tie various events back to the corresponding campaigns and ad partners. Get anything in this set up wrong and your tracking will be off.

2. App Install Attribution

After the initial setup, the MMP is able to use various signals to determine which ad partner should be given credit for a new install.

It depends. Usually, it uses something like deterministic matching to connect a specific ad interaction to a specific install. For other cases, or if consent hasn’t been given, it would use other methods supported by the platform, like privacy-preserving aggregated measurement. Ultimately it depends on the situation. What you’re able to measure is determined by the platform, the user’s consent, and the available data.

One thing to be totally honest about: there are cases where an install can’t be connected to a single ad interaction. That happens sometimes and any company that claims they can provide that for 100% of the installs should make you skeptical.

3. Post-Install Event Measurement

 Tracking continues after an install. Users who have previously installed your app and then opened it are considered active users. You get to determine which actions to track. These actions are dependent on the purpose of your app. Most teams start broad and then narrow down later, which is completely alright.

This tracking is useful because two campaigns can produce the same number of installs, but that's where the similarities end. The users from one campaign make the purchase. The other campaign's users don't even return a second time. Event data can illustrate these differences where install data can not.

4. Reporting and Optimization

 All this data is reported in dashboards by MMPs. Other partners can be evaluated by acquisition cost, conversion rate, retention, and revenue. It's clear who the winning partners are.

This brings us to the most important and skipped part, which is acting on it. If a channel converts well but loses 50% of its users within two weeks, then you need to find the reason. The same goes for a channel that has a high volume but a low cost. If it loses your best buyers, increase its budget. Change one thing and then wait for the next report.

5 Ways Mobile Measurement Partners Improve App Marketing

1. Improve Marketing Attribution

Usually, multiple ads are needed for a user to download your app. Most users come across a number of ads and then perform the final action (i.e. download) many days or weeks later. With mobile apps, this final action (i.e. installation) is often reported many weeks after the last ad was shown. Therefore, you often can’t explain why users performed a final action (i.e. installed your app).

A mobile measurement partner helps explain this by defining attribution windows and rules in advance. For e-commerce, this allows brands to see which ad channels (i.e. sources) helped the most in driving sales, and which ones weren’t as effective. As a result, marketers no longer need to rely on hunches for important decisions.

2. Optimize Advertising Budgets

Not knowing what your return on investment is, leads to wasted marketing dollars. Mobile attribution gives you the numbers to check including CPI, CPA, conversion rate, ROAS, revenue per user, customer LTV and others.

Let’s see how this impacts your marketing decisions. You run two campaigns. Each brings in 1,000 installs. Going by the numbers, Campaign A is the clear winner. However, the users from Campaign B are of higher quality. They buy more and/or last longer, making Campaign B the better of the two. You only know that if you look past the install.

Once you know what happens post-install, marketing decisions like shifting your budget and adjusting your targeting, to even creating new marketing materials, all become second nature.

There’s one thing to keep in mind. Attribution shows you which campaign Source was the responsible party for bringing in a user. It doesn’t prove campaign X caused the growth. For that, you’d need to run some kind of marketing campaign control experiment.

3. User Behavior and Retention

Mobile attribution gives you numbers to help check your marketing efforts; however, an install doesn’t tell you if a user is of value. To truly understand value, you look at if users come back, if users find and engage with your key feature, and if users ultimately lead to a sale.

With an MMP, features such as event tracking and cohort analysis allow you to follow users of a campaign beyond the install. Let's say a fitness app has 2 main sources of users: influencer posts and paid search. After a few weeks, the 2 cohorts would hardly resemble each other. The influencer cohort would have a higher conversion rate to the trial as they are more motivated to complete the first workout and sign up. The paid search cohort, on the other hand, might unsubscribe after 7 days. Look at revenue over a few months, and the difference would be more pronounced.

 You learn something about your users and your product from this analysis. If a lot of users from an influencer post are dropping off before their first workout, maybe the issue isn't with the ad, but perhaps the onboarding process or the workout itself.

4. Eliminate Advertising Fraud

There are many ways to commit advertising fraud. Some forms of fraud are obvious. Others are extremely difficult to detect. The user activity reports for your ads are examples of rich sources of data, but installs climb, budgets drain, and nobody looks into what users did. The usual forms of fraud include: click spamming, click injection, duplicate activity, and SDK spoofing.

A mobile measurement partner (MMP) allows you to verify rules to identify activity that is clearly not real-user activity. This allows you to assess the quality of traffic for a given source.

It won’t catch everything, and no vendor can guarantee their solution will. So, when you’re evaluating providers, ask how much of the traffic their detector covers, how clearly do they signal what they caught, and how do they substantiate it?

5. Support Smarter Campaign Retargeting

You’ve likely experienced this first hand: a lot of users install your app, and then never come back. Of those that do come back, a lot of them only view a couple of products and leave. Others sign up and immediately uninstall the app. Sending all of them the same message is a waste, because they’re in very different places.

If you track and prioritize the right events, and connect your audience tools, you can segment your users based on their actual behaviors and target each segment with unique messages. For example, you could run different campaign retargeting efforts for a shopping app to a user who:

• Viewed a product and did not make a purchase

• Added a product to their cart, but did not check out

• Placed their first order

• Has not opened the app in a while

Each of the above requires a different message to be effective. Someone who left a jacket in their cart isn’t similar to someone who hasn’t opened the app in a month.

You’ll have a better chance at retaining and re-engaging your users if your app has a "memory" and brings users back to where they left off.

How to Pick the Right Mobile Attribution Platform

Of course you'll compare features, but there are only so many ways to differentiate. These are the questions that will really help distinguish the platforms.

Attribution

Find out what attribution models the tools support and where do they fall short, if at all, on each. Learn what the tools support on iOS and Android, because the two platforms behave differently.

Integrations

Make a list of the tools that you utilize (ad networks, analytics tools, CRMs, etc). After that check to see that the attribution platforms support integrating with those tools. A lack of an integration means you'll be doing manual exports.

Privacy and Compliance

Find out what data the platform collects. Your legal and/or privacy team will appreciate these being answered early on.

Reporting

See if you can create your own events and build cohort reports. Check to see what kind of reports can be created without filing a support ticket.

Fraud Prevention

Ask what rules the provider validates against and how transparent is the platform in reporting what it flags.

Pricing and Scale

Find out how each provider structures their pricing and what affects your bill as attributed installs increase. Also find out what kind of support is provided and how long the support is valid.

Your situation, objectives, and developers dictate the right choice. Faster development may take precedence over configuration options if your developer headcount is low.

How Apptrove Helps App Marketing Measurement

Apptrove aims to simplify fractured marketing reports. With attribution, performance, and retention data unified in a single system, marketing teams can quickly assess the success of their campaigns and build confidence in their data. The solution helps track installs and in-app events, provides campaign performance data, segments users into various audiences, identifies fraud, and more.

Let’s say you partner with multiple ad networks to run campaigns on Google and Facebook. All the networks show excellent results. In Apptrove you can see the campaigns side by side, unified with the same rules across all, and also see what users did once they opened the app. Which campaign brought the best segment? Who keeps coming back? When did something break? These questions become easier to answer.

The same rules also help establish benchmarks that you and your team believe in. When someone asks why you moved the budget last month you can justify that with the data.

Conclusion

Many apps reach their install targets, but remain unprofitable since install data does not indicate revenue or user retention. Users weren’t sticking around, buying, or paying back what it cost to acquire them.

An MMP (mobile measurement partner) ties ad spend to what people do once they’re in the app, so you can understand what campaigns are justifying their budget, versus campaigns that are merely padding installs.

The tool is useful, but has limits. Before launching campaigns, agree on what KPIs (key performance indicators) really matter to your business. Then, set a consistent time (e.g. monthly) to review campaign quality and reallocate budget accordingly. Consistent review of campaign quality will stop your team from focusing on number game and start focusing on the quality of work.