mobile attribution

Advertisers worried about MFA could take a cue from the mobile app ecosystem and focus on performance instead of viewability. 

In today’s newsletter: The CMA outlines plans to fix competitive concerns in Google’s Privacy Sandbox; media mix modeling’s comeback continues; Snap’s Q1 earnings illustrate its attribution-driven turnaround.

Now, advertisers have more flexible access to the MTA’s four million daily riders while they’re inside the stations, waiting for their trains.

In today’s newsletter: The New York Times is rolling out a generative AI ad product; the current state of adoption of Apple’s SKAdNetwork 4; Google seeks explicit consent for retargeting and personalization in the EU.

To make sense of changes to mobile campaign reporting, marketers need to understand postbacks ­– the most essential element of mobile attribution.

To get the most out of SKAN 4 and prepare for future advancements, advertisers should focus on these four areas.

Less than two weeks after finally ramping up its adoption of SKAdNetwork 4, Meta is rolling back to version 3 following a bug in Apple’s system that messed with conversion values.

Among streaming ad providers, there is a temptation to make streaming ad ROI look better than it really is (and definitely better than linear).

“On TV & Video” is a column exploring opportunities and challenges in advanced TV and video. Today’s column is by Jeff Sue, GM, Americas at Mintegral.  Connected TV (CTV) is rapidly emerging as an enticing channel for advertisers looking to increase their campaign reach and tap into new channels of ad inventory. The mobile ad […]

The recent bonanza of mobile M&A has more to do with the maturity of the market than it does with any defensive measures related to Apple’s new privacy features, according to Paul Müller, CEO and co-founder of mobile measurement company Adjust. Müller knows a little something about M&A. He sold his company for roughly $1 […]

Facebook has been selling itself short. A bug in Facebook’s measurement system caused Facebook to undercount app install campaigns on iOS 14 via SKAdNetwork (SKAN) for nearly seven months. The bug, which Facebook identified on August 20, only impacted iPhone 12 users that were using the Facebook app. Instagram users and Audience Network partner apps […]

Sayonara self-attribution. Apple is making a tweak to SKAdNetwork in iOS 15 that will strip the big ad platforms, including Facebook, Google and Twitter, of their status as self-attributing networks. Starting with the next version of iOS, slated for release sometime this fall, advertisers will be able to opt in to get copies of the […]

AppTrackingTransparency enforcement officially began in late April. But advertisers, publishers and mobile ad tech vendors are still grappling with a lot of head scratchers – and the dust is far from settled. Until the release of iOS 14.5 last month, among the biggest unknowns consuming the mobile ad ecosystem was the agita-inducing question of timing […]

It’ll be hard to beat the drama that surrounded the release of iOS 14.5 on Monday. But the beat goes on, and the beta of iOS 14.6, which includes a feature update for the third version of SKAdNetwork, is waiting in the wings. SKAdNetwork is Apple’s limited (and therefore privacy preserving) solution for attribution on […]

And so it begins. Apple started rejecting app updates on Thursday that conflict with its App Tracking Tracking Transparency (ATT) framework. ATT prohibits user tracking without explicit consent and bans developers from using fingerprinting to try and identify a device or user. The news was first reported by independent analyst John Koetsier in Forbes. Specifically, […]

AppLovin has struck again. Bloomberg scooped late Wednesday afternoon that AppLovin is on the cusp of acquiring mobile app attribution startup Adjust for $1 billion. The news was confirmed by AppLovin in a press release. [Read the release]. AppLovin is an app marketing platform that helps advertisers automate their user acquisition and re-engagment campaigns. Adjust, […]

So few publishers and advertisers are ready for Apple’s forthcoming IDFA changes that mobile DSP Jampp had to develop its own app just to run live tests of SKAdNetwork. SKAdNetwork is Apple’s privacy preserving attribution API for iOS 14. Once Apple implements its AppTrackingTransparency (ATT) framework, which will require advertisers and publishers to get an […]

The more the merrier. App attribution company AppsFlyer has a late breaking addition to its $210 million investment round, which closed in January: Salesforce Ventures. Although Salesforce is only taking a small percentage of AppsFlyer as part of the round extension – less than 1% of the company, according to AppsFlyer CEO and co-founder Oren […]

SKAdNetwork could become the de facto way to attribute mobile app installs on Apple devices with the release of iOS 14 in September. But when Apple first introduced its SKAdNetwork API in 2018, only a handful of industry insiders paid attention. At the time, the low-key rollout of a privacy-focused test API that would allow […]

“Data-Driven Thinking” is written by members of the media community and contains fresh ideas on the digital revolution in media.  Today’s column is written by Hilit Mioduser Ames, vice president of growth, reengagement, at YouAppi. The great benefit of digital marketing is that we can measure everything, or so the experts said in the 1990s. […]

Adjust raised $227 million in funding – and there’s no need to adjust your screen on the amount. The monster round, announced Wednesday, brings the Berlin-based mobile measurement company’s total funding to $250 million. It was led by new investors Eurazeo Growth, Morgan Stanley Alternative Investment Partners and Sofina, and existing investor Highland Europe. Previously, […]

For the last four years, mobile measurement company TUNE has been “fighting with one hand tied behind its back,” said Alex Austin, CEO and co-founder of California-based deep-linking outfit Branch. In 2014, TUNE lost its Facebook marketing partner badge for allegedly retaining user data for too long. “But we’re giving TUNE both its arms back […]

Deep-link startup Branch earned its Facebook mobile marketing partner (MMP) stripes on Wednesday and launched an attribution tool for paid media called Universal Ads. Branch is the first MMP added to Facebook’s marketing partner program since around 2013. When the company launched in 2014, it focused on deep-linking across owned-and-operated content – for example, tracking clicks […]

Mobile app install ads are still a multibillion-dollar business for Facebook. But is Facebook taking too much credit? It’s hard to say, because Facebook is what’s known as a self-attributing network, i.e., a walled garden. A self-attributing network is just what it sounds like: a platform that, usually because of its scale, has the power […]

While mobile app advertising is in dire need of standards, that prospect is easier said than done. Confusion and wrongheadedness in the industry is rife, even among user acquisition specialists. “Ask a room full of UA managers to explain how mobile tracking works and I think most won’t be able to explain the whole process,” […]

Singular and Apsalar are consolidating, and they’ve got their collective head in the marketing cloud. On Tuesday, the duo announced that they will become one and marry their respective technologies – Singular’s mobile marketing analytics tech and Apsalar’s mobile attribution and DMP offering – to take on the likes of Adobe, Oracle and Salesforce on the mobile […]

It seems crazy that a marketer at Match Group, which reported $295 million in dating-service revenue in the fourth quarter of 2016 alone, would spend half a day each week downloading and collating CSV files. But that’s just the way it’s been, said James Peng, head of mobile and social acquisition at Tinder and OKCupid […]

FuturePlay Games relies primarily on advertising to monetize. But it had a devil of a time attributing ad revenue to specific campaigns. “We knew that an ad had been watched on a device, but we didn’t know how much money we got back from it,” said Camilo Fitzgerald, a games analyst at the Helsinki-based game […]

Why a user deletes an app is just as important as why that person decided to download in the first place. “Uninstalls are a huge issue and we’ve been trying to get an understanding of what’s really happening there,” said Sudarshan Gangrade, VP of marketing, analytics and partnerships at Ola Cabs, India’s answer to Uber. […]

When the head bean-counter at Brand X walks into the CMO’s office and wants proof that TV spending works, the CMO needs a better answer than “My gut tells me it does.” “Ask anyone in charge of a TV budget, and they’ll tell you that they intuitively know it works,” said David Staas, president of […]