Attribution helps mobile app marketers know where their visitors come from and what they do once they arrive at their display ads. Mobile app attribution helps to measure how effective your marketing campaigns are. The measurement of user events as a result of marketing activity is known as attribution.
Some popular MMPs
There are many platforms today that help with attribution in the field of mobile app marketing. Some of the popular ones are:
- Appsflyer – This is a SaaS mobile marketing analytics and attribution platform, which helps to know how each app install has contributed to a marketing campaign and also analyzes the media source that drove it
- Branch – With the help of this app, you can use custom attribution windows, right to the individual link level, to assess the impact that your campaigns have
- Adjust – This platform helps with attribution and also detect fraudulent activities through Deep Linking, thus helping marketers to analyze campaigns more effectively
- Kochava – One of the leading mobile app attribution providers, its comprehensive model helps to measure growth quite accurately
- Singular – Singular helps to find out the impact that marketing campaigns have in the entire journey that each user takes
Advantages of Mobile Attribution
Instead of just relying on Google Analytics, mobile attribution has become important because it helps to make important business decisions on ad budgets for paid campaigns such as ASA. Here’s why marketers increasingly rely on MMPs for maximum ROI from their mobile marketing efforts.
Better View of the Purchase Process
When marketers use attribution they are able to:
- Find more information about how their marketing strategies have been working
- Know which channels have been most effective in influencing the sales funnel
- See the entire purchasing process – right from when the person was a lead to when the purchase was made
Know the Best Strategies
By using attribution, you will be able to assess which of your campaigns and advertisements are performing the best on your mobiles. This will help you to:
- Easily connect initiatives taken at the top of the funnel to those at the bottom, thus getting rid of the ideas that are not working and tweak that one whose performance can be improved
- Target certain users and build your campaigns accordingly and also practice effective retargeting strategies. By using the data that is gathered from mobile measurement partners (MMPs), marketers can improve retargeting strategies. Research has shown that buyers who have intent on purchase enjoy re-targeted ads and the CTR is 10 times more, in such cases, than it is with the usual display ads.
Track the Value of the Users
Attribution’s importance to the mobile ecosystem lies in the fact that it helps to track installs and conversions, thus helping marketers to know the journey of users from the time they click an ad to when their journey is completed. Thus, by measuring the success of each campaign from each network, decision-makers can understand how ad spends have resulted in growth and which networks are bringing in high-value users.
By using attribution you will also be able to determine if the user is a new or existing one. For a new user, the attribution provider matches the engagements with an ad that visitors’ have with their installs
Helps to Detect Fraud Clicks
A study carried out by Juniper Research in 2019 showed that advertisers lost over $40 billion of their ad spend due to fraud in various online channels, including mobiles. Some fraudulent methods include Click Injection, Click Spam, bots, and others. Mobile attribution is able to detect such fake clicks.
Issues in Measuring Mobile Attribution
Not Always Easy to Measure Effectiveness
When a marketing campaign is launched, a marketer wants to know its effectiveness since each campaign involves an expenditure. When it comes to web-based advertising, one can use cookie-based tracking to find out visitors are coming from which sources. However, there is no standard tracking methodology to measure attribution for mobiles. This is the issue that mobile marketers face.
Not Easy to Measure Attribution in iOS
It is not easy to measure attribution in iOS phones. Usually, two methods are used to track iOS but they do not give perfect results.
- Unique Identifier Matching: In this method, attribution is done by using unique identifiers wherein the identifiers from the install to a click are matched in real-time.
- Device Fingerprinting: In this method, a user is redirected through a tracking link to collect information that is available to the public like HTTP headers about the device. Although not completely unique information, by using this method, one can pull out a user’s device headers so as to connect the user from click to app install.
No Standard Measurement
There are competing mobile app attribution models wherein each considers different data points as important. Also, not all attribution models are able to use multi-touch modeling. Hence, there are models that give revenue credit for a sale to a single touchpoint, which is not always entirely correct. There are dedicated attribution models today that are trying to use multi-touch modeling to overcome this challenge.
Our Final Thoughts
According to a study done by CNBC, mobile phones account for nearly 50% of internet traffic, and the shift toward mobile is projected to continue to grow in the years to come. Hence, despite the challenges, marketers are using attribution more and more to understand the journey of users. It is attribution models that help businesses to drive more efficient campaigns, thus leading to higher user growth and retention.
