Mobile platforms might be facing unprecedented change. Device IDs might be going away.
But marketers should never lose the ability to accurately measure marketing, forecast growth, and make intelligent advertising investments. That’s why every marketer needs next-generation attribution: attribution that works in a privacy-safe world, is multi-platform, granular when ethical, aggregate when necessary, and always future-proofed against the massive change we see in 2020, 2021, and beyond.
Mobile marketers have never faced more change. If 2020 and the economic impacts of COVID-19 weren’t enough … we also had significant changes released with iOS 14 and the deprecation of the IDFA. Plus, the entire industry faces ongoing and escalating legal struggles over app stores’ role in payments. And the upheaval continues: governments worldwide are sharpening their focus on big tech and antitrust, and any changes they recommend, legislate, or otherwise require will likely impact mobile marketers.
Today’s marketers need next-generation attribution: privacy-safe mobile attribution that is fully customizable to your apps’ unique customer journeys. Mobile attribution that’s holistic and full-funnel to capture performance insights needed to acquire, monetize, and retain high-value users at scale. Next-gen attribution offers proactive fraud protection, meaning fraud is rejected before it’s ever attributed, and gives you full access to your data in multiple ways (including a fully-managed ETL). In short: next-gen attribution is mobile attribution that fits your needs now and goes above and beyond to meet the evolving needs of the future.
It’s also attribution that makes switching providers painless.
The best solution in the world for optimizing growth might be out of reach if it takes your teams too long and too much effort in migration. Enter the Singular switcher’s guide, which lays out requirements for quick turnaround time, data continuity, complete support for all your marketing partners, no impact on internal BI operations, and comprehensive onboarding and training support.
Look, we get it.
Bringing on an attribution provider isn’t something you do every day. Switching isn’t something you ever want to have to do.
But delivering unprecedented growth and truly astonishing results — while transitioning with far less effort than you probably think it will take — is worth it. Our new No Bull$h!t Guide to Mobile Attribution gives you the whys and the hows without any of the WTFs.
The result is that you future-proof your growth with unmatched attribution flexibility, the most accurate data, and completely accessible data.
Get the guide today, and you’ll find a special gift just for you (check the last page).
The revenue-generating power of ad monetization isn’t anything new for mobile publishers. On Monday, Apple shared that $45B was generated by in-app advertising just last year. And with people spending more time in apps, particularly gaming apps, ad monetization remains resilient to the impacts of COVID.
Granular ad revenue is critical to informed user acquisition
But as with anything, executing a lucrative ad monetization strategy isn’t a walk in the park. Historically, user acquisition teams struggled to get the granular data needed to calculate their campaigns’ “True ROI” — return on investment calculation that accounts for both in-app purchase revenue and ad revenue. This hindered marketers from being able to make informed decisions about the actual performance of their campaigns as ROI could look completely different once you factor ad revenue into the calculation.
“Granularity is critical in mobile ad monetization,” says Singular COO and Co-founder Susan Kuo. “Understanding the relative ad revenue generated per user helps mobile publishers optimize their apps for maximum results. It also helps them improve user experience by making decisions that can minimize irrelevant and wasted ads.”
Now, AppLovin is providing revenue data to mobile app publishers for every single user through MAX. This is extremely powerful!
With this data, you can understand the ad-based life-time value of your users. That’s increasingly important because just 2% of mobile app users are converting to paying customers via in-app purchases.
Haven’t thought about testing MAX yet? Here are just a few reasons you should:
In-app bidding at scale enables advertisers to bid simultaneously in an unbiased and competitive auction for every impression driving higher an LTV for publishers.
Visibility into user ad revenue for each impression to optimize towards true ROI.
A/B testing in a few clicks powered by real-time analytics to drive continuous revenue lifts for each app.
Cohort analysis lets you view the lifecycle of your users. Monitor LTV, ROI, and engagement by cohort.
Singular + MAX = Better Together
We are excited to announce our new granular ad revenue integration with MAX by AppLovin. The combination of MAX’s device-level ad revenue data with Singular’s proficiency to connect that ad revenue to in-app purchase data and acquisition cost unlocks the most accurate and complete view of your true ROI yet.
This is a game-changer for User Acquisition and Monetization teams alike:
User Acquisition teams can finally account for Ad Revenue in their ROI formula.
With the ability to see the true ROI figures – User Acquisition Managers will be able to make better decisions about the actual performance of their campaigns and channels and scale their marketing efforts efficiently and more intelligently. Channels and campaigns that you thought had a specific ROI could look completely different once we factor Ad Revenue into the ROI calculation.
A centralized snapshot of all your Ad Revenue enables better insights and scaling app ad revenue down to the placement level.
Streamline work with finance, and have a true end-to-end view of your marketing profit and loss.
The result: better data precision, more accurate and complete LTV models, superior user acquisition and monetization strategies, and ultimately, the potential to earn more revenue – all of it, of course, right inside your Singular dashboard.
Granular ad revenue data from MAX is now supported in our User Acquisition ROI reports and is easily accessible through our ETL product directly to your warehouse. Want to run and measure multiple mediation partners simultaneously? No worries! We support all of them, so measure away. 😊
If you’re like most people, you dumped your New Year’s resolutions on January 19th. But if you’re a growth marketer, you’re just getting started. This year has a lot in store for our customers—and, we’re right there with them as they try new things and look to scale.
We touched base with marketing leaders from the industry to find out new tactics on the horizon and ones they discarded with the old year.
First, we checked in with Mary Kim, Head of Growth at Game Hive located in Toronto, Canada. Mary currently leads the growth team in UA and Ads Monetization, working on titles such as Tap Titans, Beat the Boss, and Tap Tycoon. Mary entered the mobile gaming industry working at one of Europe’s largest gaming studios, acquiring users for desktop and mobile.
What marketing strategies or tactics will you start to test in 2020?
One of the biggest struggles we’ve had for a long time is attributing impression-level ad revenue in our reporting. Now we’re finally getting to a point where we’ll be able to do this. Our mediation partner, AdMob, is enabling this for us and we’re in the process of kicking things off. So now, whatever impressions we get on our ad side will be tracked more accurately at the user level. Along with the cost data from Singular, we’ll be able to get the whole 360° picture.
Are there any new ad channels you’ll start testing?
This is something we’re constantly doing. In fact, I’d say it’s really difficult to not test, given that the duopolies take the majority share of ad spend. We wouldn’t want to be in a position where something happens on the back end with the algorithms and performance suffers. So, we always like to allocate part of our budget to testing.
Last year we dipped our toes into more DSPs. Now, we’re getting much more comfortable sharing data with our new networks. With some partners, it’s been going extremely well. For instance, we’ve found that with the DSPs we’ve had the most success with—although we’re getting the same inventory as we would with, for example, a rewarded video network—performance is better because they use different machine learning algorithms that optimize for high-value users, rather than optimizing for ad placements.
We’ll continue to do this in 2020 for sure!
We’re finding that the marketers leading the way in full-funnel performance marketing are doing exactly what you’re doing. They’re setting aside budget specifically for testing, on a quarterly if not monthly basis.
Are there any other ad channels you’ve been testing?
TikTok’s one that we’re trying out. In the past, we thought maybe the audience would’ve been too young. But we realized that these days, the platform has evolved and the audience is not all that young. Since many of our users are male and there are more females on the TikTok platform, we were also worried that it may not be a good fit if we couldn’t reach our target demographic. Interestingly enough, we’ve discovered that there are more female content creators but more men watching the content. So we thought okay—we sure don’t have a problem with that!
Interesting. One of our industry analysts looked at aggregate data across industries to see what’s working and what’s not, so that we’re providing that information to our customers. One thing he discovered was that ad spend on TikTok tripled from May to November 2019. And obviously, marketers allocate budget like that when something’s working. Our ROI Index speaks to that as well. What about creatives? Are there any new tactics you’re trying out, like creative optimization, using new ad formats, or something else?
Yes! At least for us, 2019 was a huge year for creatives. We were able to crank out so many, so I guess you could say it was more a matter of quantity over quality in 2019. This year, we want to focus on quality over quantity. That includes getting more 3D assets, and coming up with faster video creation but with quality in mind.
Everyone’s been talking about video, video, video for the last 5-7 years. Obviously it’s the most engaging ad format. But, I think for a very long time teams struggled with the production aspect of it because it’s costly and time-consuming. It feels like you guys are figuring out ways to streamline production and get your 3D templates ready to not only raise the quality, but to also get more high-quality assets out there.
Are there any new incentives you’re thinking of testing? Things like referral codes—we know you already do rewarded video. Which ones are you already doing that you’d like to buckle down on more? Or new ones you’d like to try out?
We’ve really started to invest more in re-engagement, especially because Tap Titans 2 has developed a wide user base. Keeping that in mind—and since re-engagement works so well—for those players that are coming back, we asked ourselves, what can we do to make them continue to do so? Right now we have deeplinks, but it doesn’t actually pinpoint a specific moment in the game or give them an actual incentive to come back. So, that’s been something we really want to highlight and focus on: giving them an undeniable reason to return, so we’ll give you some diamonds, or give you some rare legendary equipment so that you come back and you enjoy the game even more.
Is there any new KPI you’d like to start measuring and optimizing against?
Yes—we’ve been trying to test this already, but you know how many advertisers like to optimize towards purchases and transactions? We feel that even before the users get to that, those who indicate that they’re going to be high-value is by whether they’re using hard currency in our game. So, a first-time hard currency user, or even someone coming in on a transaction-by-user basis, will be higher value for us. Hard currency is the main one we’re trying to test now.
You’re obviously automating your reporting with Singular. Are there other automations, like bidding optimizations, that you’re either already doing or plan to do?
Yes—at the moment we’re leveraging other partners to help us do this, but right now it’s only based on rules that we set. For example, here are my KPIs and the benchmarks I want to reach. If it doesn’t reach it, then decrease the bid by X, or lower the budget caps. However, it only goes so far if it’s just based on rules and sometimes dangerous if there are extreme outliers. This goes alongside a bigger project we’re working on, which is rebuilding our pLTV models to leverage user-level data to detect behavioral trends. This will allow us to predict which users will become high-LTV players by understanding what it means to have a particular session length or if they unlock certain achievements. By doing this we can increase our accuracy and feed our own algorithms more data. Ultimately, identifying this on a user level will really help our marketing automation.
Are there any marketing strategies or tactics that you’re doubling down on in 2020, such as creative optimization, or anything else?
I think we’ll be doing much more partner testing. It’s interesting how a partner can surprise you once you give them a lot of love and care. And then, they tend to be one of the highest performers when some of your larger partners don’t perform well. Also, we’ll be testing more aggressively, and “failing fast” to learn quickly.
Are there any strategies/tactics that you’re going to leave behind in the last decade?
I think we’ll be focusing less on optimizing towards CPI. That was somewhat the case during 2019, but every user is worth a different amount in terms of LTV. Every channel is different, too, as well as every environment. So, we do want to get away from thinking we have to have a low CPI because the risk is so high, and just be a little bit more lenient on that. Even if the ROAS isn’t there but they’re hitting the in-game event, then we know that’s a signal to them being a better user eventually. So, what we want to avoid is looking too short-term on a CPI basis, and use that less as a strategy in 2020.
This is a bit controversial, but are there any channels you want to stop testing?
I won’t mention which partner, but there are certain networks you hear in the industry are performing really well, and sometimes you have to accept that your game or app isn’t the right fit for that audience or inventory and move on. We’ve also tried really hard and spent a lot of budget on some networks where we realize it’s just not going to work. In that case, we learn to let go and instead, invest in other platforms.
Have there been ad networks that you’ve decided to stop working with because you found that they have a lot of fraud?
Actually, we’re pretty good in terms of fraud detection. The networks we’ve been working with have also been pretty understanding whenever there’s a fraud claim. I wouldn’t say that’s the reason why we’ve stopped using an ad network. We’re lucky to say that! But we did work with some networks in 2019 where fraud was a big issue, where up to 30% of the total traffic was fraud. In that case, you really have to try to get that money back. But, as long as the network is willing and accepting of those changes, and hear you out, I don’t think there’s any reason to pause them if they’re otherwise providing good traffic.
That makes complete sense. And I think that a lot of the ad networks are interested in fraud prevention and what other industry leaders are doing around prevention as well, because they don’t want networks to be fraudulent. For the most part, these ad networks know that fraud can impact their reputation and they want help to stop it. Fraudsters are constantly evolving. We have to be willing to share your solution with ad networks—teaching them, presenting data. That’s the best bet for everyone in the industry, especially marketers.
To add to that, Singular has been amazing, because we’ve detected so much fraud, like APK fraud especially. We have so many APK downloads out there, in aggregate. To be able to have that capability and categorize these as a separate source—to be able to see all the installs that aren’t from Google Play, we’ve been able to detect fraud down to the version. So, if your app version is at 4.0 but you’re still seeing installs coming from 3.0, then you know there’s something really, really fishy going on. To be able to customize that? Oh my gosh—it’s helped a lot. I really, really like that feature.
Love it! That’s music to our ears. Mary, this has been a great conversation. Thank you so much.
About Game Hive: Founded in 2009, Game Hive is a pioneer in creating the best game experiences across multiple mobile platforms. With hit titles generating 200+ million downloads, Game Hive strives to simply make games the way they dreamed about when they were kids.
Our partners sit at the core of our technology, providing data excellence that drives the industry’s leading ROI and performance analytics to marketers around the world.
That’s why we’re excited to announce that Aarki, Jampp, Digital Turbine, and Lifestreet are the newest members of the Singular Certified Partner Program!
The Certified Partner Program (CPP) is our commitment to the industry to set the standard for data integrity within our partner ecosystem. Therefore, we raised the bar high with strict requirements to be considered for the program. We categorized these requirements into three main areas of focus:
Data excellence: The partner is passing both aggregated campaign data and user-level attribution data
Data governance: The partner is passing all campaign analytics data via an API, has complied with GDPR, and has committed to combating mobile app fraud.
Service commitment: The partner has a minimum designated list of mutual customers, is receiving training across relevant business teams on the Singular platform, and has committed to ongoing market development and account mapping efforts.
We initially launched the Certified Partner Program last year with 12 launch partners, including Facebook, IronSource, Google Ads, and Twitter, who went through an extensive audit process to ensure they met the program’s requirements.
Aarki, Digital Turbine, Jampp and Lifestreet went through the exact same audit process, and we’re excited that they met the requirements and are dedicated to providing marketers with timely, granular and actionable performance insights.
Let’s take a look at each partner…
Aarki is a leading AI-enabled mobile marketing platform that helps companies grow and re-engage their mobile users, using machine learning (AI), big data, and engaging creatives.
Providing complete and granular transparency of advertising spend and performance to our advertisers has always been a key pillar of Aarki’s commitment to our advertisers. We welcome all industry initiatives that help champion a better and more transparent ecosystem as a whole as they are key to driving growth and trust in mobile performance marketing adoption.” – Nicol Cseko, Vice President of Product, Aarki
Digital Turbine works at the convergence of media and mobile communications, connecting mobile operators and OEMs with app developers and advertisers worldwide. We bypass the traditional app ecosystem by powering new revenue streams for carriers, a frictionless app discovery experience for end-users, and quality new user acquisition and brand impressions for advertisers.
We are pleased to partner with an innovator like Singular. Together we share a deep commitment to customer growth and fraud prevention. Because our software platform is active on millions of devices worldwide, we can help app advertisers and developers reach new users at scale while also delivering a frictionless and fraud-free experience. Our unique approach and Direct to Device ad units represent a new category of mobile advertising that is refreshingly transparent, and bypasses much of the legacy noise.” – Matt Tubergen, Executive Vice President, Digital Turbine Media
Jampp is the growth platform of choice for on-demand apps worldwide. They unlock programmatic marketing to drive incremental performance through User Acquisition and App Retargeting.
We are excited to further grow our partnership with Singular through this CPP initiative, and continue working together to offer our customers more transparency, improved performance, and actionable granular insights.” – Rafael Lima, Product Manager, Jampp
Lifestreet is a programmatic marketing platform that is deeply trusted by app developers because of our full transparency, granular controls and unrivaled integrity.”
LifeStreet is excited to be joining Singular’s Certified Partner Program, and share their commitment to data integrity, transparency, and trust. Compromised data has real costs to marketers, and efforts like Singulars are beneficial to our partners and the industry as a whole.” – Kristen Perry, Head of Sales and Business Development, Lifestreet
We will be working closely with all our integrated partners to build everyone to the same level of excellence as our Certified Partners. Together we are the trusted source for marketing performance analytics and look forward to further setting industry standards.
For more information on how to become a Singular Certified Partner, reach out to partners@singular.net.
Since launching Singular 4 years ago, we’ve worked tirelessly to become the de-facto Marketing Data Platform for the top mobile brands around the world. Our clients use Singular to unify their core marketing data sets into a single source of truth. And we take pride in helping them sort through the complexities of the ecosystem and uncover insights to help grow their business.
Singular is dedicated to helping marketers uncover ROI across their entire customer journey. A lot of marketers have a single source of revenue, in the form of in-app purchases, but many others have an additional source of revenue called “Ad Revenue” (similar to how a little company named Facebook makes their money 😉). As a result, ROI shouldn’t solely factor “App Revenue”, but must also “Ad Revenue”.
At Singular’s first annual growth marketing summit, UNIFY, our CEO Gadi Elishav announced the launch of our Ad Monetization Reporting. This product addition is in direct alignment with our vision is to help marketers uncover their business’ unique customer journey and understand every touch point within that journey.
Singular’s Ad Monetization Reporting collects, aggregates and standardizes your ad revenue data from all of your monetization partners into a single reporting view. We’ve taken the same approach and technology that Singular is known for with our new Ad Monetization Reporting. For customers who also use Singular attribution – we will soon provide deeper insights into granular ROI, accounting for both Ad Revenue and In-App Purchases, commonly referred to in the industry as True ROI. We’ve already integrated the most popular monetization partners, and are consistently adding new partners.
This is a game-changer for User Acquisition and Monetization teams alike:
User Acquisition teams can finally account for Ad Revenue in their ROI formula.
With the ability to see the true ROI figures – User Acquisition Managers will be able to make better decisions about the actual performance of their campaigns and channels and scale their marketing efforts efficiently and more intelligently. Channels and campaigns that you thought had a specific ROI could look completely different once we factor Ad Revenue into the ROI calculation.
A centralized snapshot of all your Ad Revenue enables better insights and scaling app ad revenue down to the placement level.
Streamline work with finance, and have a true end-to-end view of your marketing profit and loss.
Are you interested in next-level Ad Monetization Reporting and analyzing more accurate ROIs? Let’s connect! Reach out to your Customer Success Manager today or contact us.
Quietly rolled out by Apple on March 29th, 2018 with their iOS 11.3 release, SKAdNetwork is an API that validates advertiser-driven mobile app installs. In Apple’s documentation, it’s stated that SKAdNetwork’s objective is to help marketers to measure the success of an ad campaign while maintaining user privacy.
What’s different about the SKAdNetwork API?
SKAdNetwork is a class that belongs to the StoreKit framework; Apple’s In-App Purchase Payment System that manages transactions for In-App Purchases. After installing the app, Apple shares only 5 items with the advertiser: ad network ID, transaction identification, ad campaign ID, app ID installed, and attribution code to link all.
There are two key postbacks associated with SKAdNetwork:
Initiating Install Validation: This Informs an ad network when users install and launch an app after viewing an ad. Ad networks initiate validation by providing signed information, including a campaign ID, when displaying the ad. Later, if the ad results in a conversion, Apple notifies the ad network with a postback that includes the same campaign ID.
Verifying an Ad Conversion: When a user installs and launches an app as a result of your ad, you receive a postback request that validates the installation. The request is sent to the ad network URL provided in registration.
What does this mean for advertisers?
It’s still too early to predict how SKAdNetwork will play out. Adding to the mystery, Apple has been very hush-hush about their motives and the rollout of SKAdNetwork. However, we think there are a few possible ways this could play out:
1. Apple doesn’t actively push SKAdNetwork, it doesn’t garner significant adoption, and nothing changes in the mobile marketing space.
One possible scenario could be that Apple doesn’t actively push SKAdNetwork to advertisers, resulting in minimal adoption. In this scenario, there wouldn’t be any significant change in the way that app marketers manage their attribution.
2. Apple pushes SKAdNetwork and Google follows suit with their own version.
Another scenario is that Google follows suit with its own version of the ad network API. This scenario could play out a few different ways:
Apple and Google don’t build out a robust attribution solution, which results in a lack of adoption by app marketers. Apple has made its mark in the world thanks to being an extraordinary and innovative hardware company, but they have never been accountable for providing analytics and insights to app marketers. If Apple and Google do not develop all the features that are necessary for an end-to-end attribution solution, (e.g. data extraction, all postback types, flexible attribution windows, easy BI integrations) then the industry will not adopt their solutions.
Apple and Google develop all the functionality needed for a robust attribution solution, leaving third-party mobile app attribution providers to potentially die-off in their current form. Who can compete with the operators of the mobile app stores we attribute from anyway? However, advertisers may still lose out in this scenario because they might encounter more complexities coming from running attribution on two separate platforms. The winners in this scenario would be third-party mobile app attribution providers that offer value-added services such as connecting multiple networks into a single view and aggregating all necessary features into a single API.
3. Apple pushes SKAdNetwork but Google does nothing.
In a third possible scenario, Apple could actively push SKAdnetwork to advertisers, while Google doesn’t follow suit with their own version. This would still result in complexities for advertisers who would need to manage attribution programs in silos across different OSs.
In this scenario, marketers would turn to attribution providers who could help them gather data from multiple sources, standardize it, and aggregate it into a single ROI dashboard.
So what’s going to happen?
It’s unfortunately too early to say, but one thing is clear: Apple wants to enhance users’ privacy. Apple has clearly positioned itself as a top privacy-conscious company and will continue to hold this stance as data privacy becomes more top-of-mind in the industry.
The European Union General Data Protection Regulation — GDPR is top of mind for many businesses, especially for those that engage in online advertising. This new privacy-driven regulation requires that all companies collecting, accessing, and processing personal data for EU residents must comply with new standards that will be enforced starting May 25, 2018.
Understandably, we’ve been getting many questions related to the GDPR over the past few months. To help shed light on the questions you may have, we’ve compiled the top FAQs for the GDPR.
General GDPR FAQs
1. When is the GDPR coming into effect?
May 25th, 2018.
2. Who does the GDPR affect?
It applies to all companies processing and holding the personal data of European Union residents, regardless of the company’s location.
3. What constitutes personal data?
Any information that can be used to directly or indirectly identify a user. It can be anything from a name, a photo, an email address, bank details, posts on social networking websites, medical information, device IDs, or a computer IP address.
4. What are the penalties for non-compliance?
Organizations can be fined up to 4% of annual global turnover for breaching GDPR or €20 Million. This is the maximum fine that can be imposed for the most serious infringements (i.e. not having sufficient customer consent to process data or violating the core of Privacy by Design concepts). There is a tiered approach to fines; a company can be fined 2% for not having their records in order (article 28), not notifying the supervising authority and user about a breach or not conducting an impact assessment. It is important to note that these rules apply to both controllers and processors — meaning ‘clouds’ will not be exempt from GDPR enforcement.
5. What is the difference between a data processor and a data controller?
A controller is an entity that determines the purposes, conditions, and means of the processing of personal data, while the processor is an entity which processes personal data on behalf of the controller.
6. Do data processors need ‘explicit’ or ‘unambiguous’ data subject consent – and what is the difference?
Consent must be clear, unambiguous, and provided in an intelligible and easily accessible form, using clear language. It must be as easy to withdraw consent as it is to give it. Explicit consent is required only for processing sensitive personal data – in this context, nothing short of “opt-in” will suffice. However, for non-sensitive data, “unambiguous” consent will suffice.
7. What about users under the age of 16?
Parental consent will be required to process the personal data of children under the age of 16 for online services; member nations may legislate for a lower age of consent but this will not be below the age of 13.
8. Does my business need to appoint a Data Protection Officer (DPO)?
DPOs must be appointed in the case of (a) public authorities, (b) organizations that engage in large-scale systematic monitoring, or (c) organizations that engage in the large-scale processing of sensitive personal data (Art. 37). If your organization doesn’t fall into one of these categories, then you do not need to appoint a DPO.
9. How does the GDPR impact policy surrounding data breaches?
Proposed regulations surrounding data breaches primarily relate to the notification policies of companies that have been breached. Data breaches which may pose a risk to individuals must be notified to the Data Processing Addendum (DPA) within 72 hours and to affected individuals without undue delay.
10. Will the GDPR set up a one-stop-shop for data privacy regulation?
The discussions surrounding the one-stop-shop principle are among the most highly debated and are still unclear as the standing positions are highly varied. The Commission text has a fairly simple and concise ruling in favor of the principle, the Parliament also promotes a lead DPA and adds more involvement from other concerned DPAs, the Council’s view waters down the ability of the lead DPA even further. A more in-depth analysis of the one-stop-shop policy debate can be found here.
Source: https://www.eugdpr.org/gdpr-faqs.html
GDPR FAQS for Singular Users
1. Is Singular a Data Processor or Data Controller?
Singular is a Data Processor — we do not determine the purposes, conditions or scope of how data is collected. You, our customer, who will often determine these will be defined as a Data Controller under the GDPR, but you should consult with your legal team to make such a determination.
2. What data does Singular collect and is it affected by the GDPR?
When using Singular for mobile attribution, Singular will track device data such as advertising IDs, IP addresses, and other device identifiers. We may also collect user-level events that advertisers send us through the Singular SDK. Under the GDPR, all of the aforementioned data is deemed as personal data and will be treated appropriately per regulations set by the GDPR.
3. How does Singular use personal data?
We use the personal data identified above for two purposes: a) to determine the attributed network, campaign, etc. b) provide our customers with analytics and reports based on the data we collect for them such as retention, ROI, etc.
4. Does Singular transfer this personal data anywhere?
By nature of providing mobile attribution, we need to report attributed installs and events to the marketing channels you’re running with, per the agreement you, the advertiser, has with these marketing channels. As a Data Controller, you are always aware of what data Singular sends to said marketing channels, and can be assured that Singular will never share your data with any other entity.
5. What are common GDPR-related requests that advertisers may get from users?
Under the GDPR, data subjects have several rights that need to be honored:
Right to Access and Right to Data Portability – both of these rights speak to the user’s (data subject) ability to request all data that has been collected on them in an easily readable format.
Right to Erasure speaks to the user’s ability to ask for their data to be deleted and is also commonly referred to as Right to be Forgotten.
Right to Rectification speaks to the user’s ability to request for their data to be corrected or completed.
6. How does Singular allow Data Controllers to honor such requests?
To easily comply with requests related to the GDPR, we’ve built several new REST API endpoints to accept requests in a programmatic and scalable manner. The API documentation is provided in our Developers Portal.
7. Are you compatible with the OpenGDPR initiative?
Yes. We are fully compatible with OpenGDPR.
8. Is Singular’s SDK GDPR-compatible?
Yes, Singular’s SDK is GDPR compatible. We are also releasing an additional update soon to further support explicit methods for opt-in (for when a consent is explicitly provided), opt-out and unload options in the SDK to give you more control for user privacy.
9. I’m not using Singular for attribution or event tracking. Does GDPR apply here?
If Singular doesn’t collect personal (user level) data for your mobile app users, it is not technically a Data Processor in the GDPR context.
10. Do you have an updated Data Processing Agreement I can sign?
Yes, please reach out to your Customer Success Manager to get our latest DPA.
11. What else is Singular doing around the GDPR?
Built by security experts, Singular has always been security and privacy driven by design. We treat encryption, security, and privacy as core principles that determine how every new system is defined and built, and these are inherently embedded in the platform.
At Singular we welcome the EU’s initiative for increased transparency, ownership, and trust around personal data processing activity. We remain committed to these principles when working with our customers as their data processor. As such, we have made extensive investments to ensure that both Singular and our customers meet GDPR compliance standards, which you can read more about in our article “Hello GDPR: Stay Compliant with Singular”.
Disclaimer: The information provided by Singular is for informational purposes only and not for the purpose of providing legal advice. Please contact your attorney to obtain advice on specific issues or questions.
Digital ad fraud is estimated to have cost US marketers $6.5 billion in 2017 (Marketing Week 2017). Fraud prevention is not only a nice to have but a necessity nowadays.
Ad fraud is when an individual or group attempts to defraud advertisers, publishers or supply partners, by exploiting advertising technology with the objective of stealing from advertising budgets. It is particularly challenging for marketers to deal with because it comes in variable forms and it has the capacity to evolve and bypass the latest prevention methods.
Today, there are two forms of fraud in particular that app marketers are grappling with: Fake Users and Attribution Manipulation.
Fake Users
Fraudsters use bots, malware and install farms to emulate clicks, installs, and in-app events, causing advertisers to pay for an activity that is not completed by a real user.
Fake User fraud is most commonly perpetrated via:
Install farms, which consist of humans who are paid to manually install and engage with apps across a large number of devices.
Mobile device emulators that simulate a large number of unique device IDs used in fake installs.
Data centers that host scripts to generate fake installs and other types of events at massive scale.
Proxy servers that are used to reset IP addresses and spoof device-level information (like location, to emulate installs in other countries)
Attribution Manipulation
Fraudsters steal credit for installs by sending fraudulent clicks, which results in attribution systems recording sent clicks as the last engagement prior to the first time an app is opened, thus assigning credit to the fraudulent source and removing credit from an app’s organic or paid sources.
Attribution manipulation is a particularly harmful form of fraud because it not only costs marketers their spend, but it also corrupts performance data, causing marketers to make misguided acquisition decisions.
For example, the damage inflicted by a fraudulent source poaching organic users is twofold: an event reduces the number of organic users in a marketer’s analytics, as well as the perceived impact of organic user traffic on revenue growth. This can cause organizations to shift marketing away from efforts that target organic acquisition such as ASO or content marketing. Additionally, this can make a marketer invest more money in the fraudulent source, thereby diverting spend away from high-performing channels that drive legitimate traffic.
Attribution Manipulation is most commonly perpetrated via:
Click Injection
When fraudsters create apps that are legitimately downloaded by a user but, unbeknownst to the user, monitor the user’s device for installs and insert fake clicks before an app is first opened.
Click Spamming
This occurs when fraudsters send large numbers of fraudulent click reports with real device IDs in an attempt to poach organic users by delivering the last engagement prior to an install. Because attribution windows are typically limited to finite time periods, fraudsters often re-send fraudulent click reports in order to maintain their clicks as the last engagements within the attribution window.
While click injection is focused on sending clicks at the moment immediately before an app is first opened, click spamming is focused on sending clicks that contain a unique device ID in the hope that an ID matches that of an organic user who subsequently downloads the app. Compared to click spamming, click injection is a more sophisticated form of fraud that is easier for fraudsters to control and to hide. Because click injection receives signals that an app has been installed directly from a user’s device, click injection attacks are more targeted and therefore deliver better results for fraudsters.
Thankfully there are indicators to detect such scenarios. Since click injection generates a click after installation is complete, it tends to result in a short click-to-install time. Click spamming, on the other hand, results in abnormally long click install time, due to clicks lingering in the attribution system until a device with a matching ID organically installs the app. TTI analysis is one of the leading mechanisms to fight attribution manipulation and fraud in general.
Other forms of Attribution Manipulation also exist, including:
Network Click Fraud
Networks that report a click when only an impression occurred.
Fingerprinting Fraud
A technique that targets organic users for fraudsters to send clicks with no advertising IDs, causing attribution systems to fall back on fingerprinting — which relies on identifiers like IP address, device model, and OS version — to perform attribution. If an organic user on the same network installs the app, and other identifiers match up, the fraudulent source steals credit for the install from the organic source.
More info
Want to get the full scoop on mobile ad fraud prevention, including a list of the most secure ad networks for app marketers, and the most effective fraud prevention methods?
Check out the Singular Fraud Index; the first of its kind to utilize mobile fraud data collected from multiple attribution providers and fraud prevention tools.
Mobile app attribution is one of the cornerstones for growth-oriented apps and a critical layer in the mobile marketing stack. Roughly 80% of the top 500 mobile apps on iOS have implemented an attribution solution, according to a study by mobile app analytics software Mobbo.
Briefly, mobile app attribution allows you track the source of incoming app installs or engagements. To identify the channels of user acquisition that work best in the long-term, attribution also measures in-app events that occur after the download, also known as post-install events.
Yet when it comes to mobile app attribution, there are “gotchas” that can trip up even the most seasoned digital marketers, leading to wasted time, skewed or opaque analytics and under-performing campaigns.
App opens vs. app installs
Marketers have to keep in mind that mobile app attribution systems define an “install” as the first time the app is opened on a user’s mobile device. But actually, a mobile app open is just the earliest time a third-party attribution platform can track a new user, so they take this first open and call it an install.
The reality is that the only systems that know about actual installs at the precise time of app install are the app store owners, Google Play and Apple.
As a result, discrepancies often exist between the statistics in your attribution platform and App Store dashboards. For instance, a user might have installed the mobile app on Tuesday, but launched it a few days later on Friday. The App Store dashboard would attribute the install to Tuesday, while the attribution platform would attribute the install to Friday.
Or if a user installed the app, but never launched it — attribution platforms wouldn’t register the download, while App Store dashboards would.
(And, of course, we’re not even talking about the situations when a self-attributing network claims an install via view-through attribution but the install is actually more directly caused by a click on another ad network’s ads. More on that later.)
While marketers should seek to reduce mobile app install data discrepancies wherever possible, it’s important to recognize that a host of reasons make minor data discrepancies inevitable. Marketers, then, are tasked with identifying thresholds for acceptable levels of discrepancies. When a discrepancy between two data sources — for instance, your attribution platform and your network dashboard — exceeds a certain threshold, it usually means something is wrong and needs fixing.
What’s my app attribution window?
The Attribution Window is the amount of time that can pass between a user’s click or view of an ad and their install. Consider the example of a user who clicked a mobile ad on the 10th of December, but didn’t install the app until the 13th of December.
If the attribution window is set for 3 days or more, the install will be attributed to the ad. But if the attribution window is set for only 1 day, the install will not be attributed to the ad. Instead, it’ll look like an organic install.
Data discrepancies can also arise when the attribution window in your attribution platform is not aligned with the attribution window in your network. In many cases, networks will set as a default an attribution window that is different than the attribution window in your attribution platform. It is advisable to first work with an attribution platform that allows you to customize your attribution window and second, to ensure that you have the same attribution window set up in your ad network and attribution platform.
Whose click is it anyway?
Advertising networks don’t know about user interactions with ads on other ad networks. As a result, the same mobile install might be attributed to two or more ad networks.
Consider the following example: yesterday the same user clicked on a Facebook ad and then a Google AdWords ad before installing the mobile app today. In this instance, Facebook will take credit for the install in the Facebook dashboard, while AdWords will also take credit for the install in the AdWords dashboard.
Attribution platforms that operate according to a “last click” attribution model will “de-duplicate” the conversion and attribute the install to AdWords activity. That means you know which ad network had the last and presumably most important impact, but it also means a discrepancy can arise in the number of Facebook-driven installs that appear in your attribution dashboard and the number of installs that appear in your Facebook dashboard.
To monitor such discrepancies, marketers should work with attribution providers like Singular.
Singular displays both figures: the statistics reported by the network and the statistics reported by our attribution solution alongside each other. Now marketers don’t have to toggle back and forth between their attribution platform and their network dashboards to see what’s actually happening. In addition, using Singular, marketers can customize which source they want to use as the source of truth and set alerts when discrepancies between sources exceed a given threshold.
Summing up …
In sum, mobile attribution is complex … with plenty of “gotchas” that can create major headaches when attempting to perform data analysis and optimizations based on inaccurate or misleading data. In order to succeed, marketers must stay cognizant of the intricacies and leverage partner tools that are both transparent and make it easy on marketers to spot broken campaigns and illegitimate data.
Need some help?
Give us a shout and book some time. We’ll be happy to listen and suggest options.
