Resource Label: mobile attribution

What do modern marketers need from mobile attribution in 2020?

There’s not a lot of history to guide mobile marketers on what to do in a global pandemic and a worldwide recession. Mobile is now a massive part of our lives and our industry, but it’s still incredibly young: barely more than a decade old. The App Store wasn’t launched until 2008, and smartphones didn’t achieve 50% penetration until 2014. Mobile attribution itself is just eight or nine years old, and the mobile growth stack as a whole is a very recent invention. 

That means mobile, mobile marketing, and mobile attribution have never gone through a major economic recession or depression. 

It also means that we have few precedents to understand how they’ll react, and that we don’t fully know how all this will impact modern marketers. The good news for mobile marketers is that COVID-19 has made mobile even more important for business, for connection, and for almost every other activity we engage in. That bodes well for mobile continuing to not just be a viable space, but doing well and possibly even growing, even if the wider economy shrinks.

The bad news is that if the quarantine and shutdown efforts shrink the wider economy enough, even a good news story will turn negative. Mobile can’t grow enough to stay in the black if the economy craters too hard.

Ultimately, like everything else in 2020, expect change.

What we’ve seen from mobile attribution

We know the historical impact. Singular customers have demonstrated the result that mobile attribution which unifies spend and return in a single platform can have.

One retail customer boosted sales 2X with attribution. Another boosted sales 72% with 24% less ad spend. A gaming customer doubled installs. Another saved 15-20 hours a week in data management. A delivery customer grew conversion rates almost 200%. The average customer that leverages Singular’s granular insights boosts conversions 2X.

All pre-Coronavirus.

All before the shutdown boost in app installs. Before working from home and a massive jump in gaming, retail, and social. And before we saw retention rates suffer from COVID-19 mobile trends.

What about now?

 

Mobile marketing: key challenges TODAY

Mobile marketing in general is hard. Mobile user acquisition at scale is one of the more challenging tasks in our modern economy. 

That was true long before anyone ever heard about COVID-19 or there was an inkling of Coronavirus, a shutdown, or a virus-driven economic recession. In 2019, mobile marketers told us the key challenges in their jobs included managing scale, understanding cross-platform measurement and incrementality, unifying siloed data, fraud detection, and more.

None of those challenges magically disappeared in the last four months. But now we have a whole new set of problems to join them. Finances are tighter. Funding is less certain. Monetization is less dependable. All bets are off when hundreds of millions of people globally are out of work or locked into their homes. 

In addition, post-Coronavirus, you’re probably getting fewer resources. You likely have less budget. You might have fewer people. And even if you’re in one of the categories that are way up, your CEO is worried about long-term financial stability and is therefore probably more risk-averse than ever before.

All of which is to say: for marketers, driving exponential marketing impact has never been more urgent or important. 

And, most likely, it’s never been harder. 

What you desperately need from mobile attribution now

It’s pretty simple, isn’t it? You need exactly what you needed before, but more.

And less.

You need the same boost in performance that got Home & Shopping a 73% increase in ROI on 24% less ad spend and a 15% decrease in cost per purchase. You need double the installs with 22% less cost. You need more automation and less busywork so you can save 15+ hours/week. You need 85% more growth with less time spent on marketing data management.

How?

Straight-up, it starts by being smarter than your competition. The best of them are marketing scientifically. They might be saving literally six figures monthly thanks to deterministic fraud prevention. They are probably using custom dimensions to tailor attribution and marketing analytics in real-time automatically to their specific vertical, business model, and company KPIs. They also use creative analytics to instantly tell which ads get the highest click-through rate and the best conversion rate across all their ad partners … without having to calculate a single parameter.

It is all about exposing opportunity and minimizing risk.

You need a fast and painless way to measure marketing activities at very granular levels in order to quickly identify top-performing channels and make optimizations. You need to reveal previously inaccessible insights on performance, so you can quickly shift budgets away from under-performing initiatives and optimize top-performing channels. You need to monitor marketing budgets across campaigns in real time to effectively track performance to goals and avoid overspending.

Report: 7 things your mobile attribution doesn’t do (but should)

Right now, every last dollar has to count. Everything that can be optimized must be. And anything that can be automated needs to be. If you’re not using Singular to boost ROAS and manage spend, now’s the time to try. There’s a free option for SMBs, and there are amazing plans for enterprise and at-scale marketers.

Here’s what you need now more than ever (get the full report here):

Make marketing data simple

1. Automatic collection and combining of your most important datasets
2. No more tedious data transformation tasks
3. Marketing data that matches every time across all your ad partners
4. Unified upper-funnel campaign data with lower-funnel attribution data
5. Standardized and normalized data
6. Comprehensive ROI reporting at all dimensions
7. Accurate, timely and actionable insights
8. ETL to get your data wherever you need it, ready to go

 

Unlock granular and aggregate analytics

1. Pockets of profitable growth identified quickly
2. Less wasted spend
3. High-level snapshot of all your data at once
4. Ad creatives side-by-side with metrics 
5. Creative clustering to automatically group similar ads across sets and partners
6. Holistic view of ad monetization
7. Better decisions about campaign performance and channels 
8. Easier scaling of marketing efforts efficiently and intelligently

 

Customize data views automatically

1. Unique analytics for your unique KPIs
2. Easy custom grouping of data by dimensions that matter (to you)
3. Simple breakouts by geo and market
4. Automated custom reports
5. Business unit breakdowns
6. Funnel stage breakdowns
7. Custom metrics including aggregated metrics and calculated metrics
8. Custom events

 

Connect cross-platform web-mobile journeys

1. Unified cross-platform journeys
2. Connected spend/return on every dollar on every platform
3. Touchpoints for custom MTA models
4. Digital and non-digital platforms
5. Retargeting

 

Prevent fraud

1. Deterministic, not probabilistic fraud prevention
2. Proactive, not reactive days, weeks, or months later
3. Real-time
4. Transparent: you and ad partners get user-level decision logic
5. Built-in, no extra cost
6. Customizable, not hard-coded
7. Most powerful in the industry with documented savings for named clients in the six figures per month

 

Activate near-real-time segments

1. World-class audiences capability
2. Precision generation of specific audiences
3. Automated distribution of audience segments across all media sources
4. Regular and automated syncing of audiences
5. Highly customizable

 

Inspire trust

1. Used by top-10 global companies
2. Trusted by the best data-driven marketers on the planet
3. Used by top brands who are winning in their categories

For more details, get the full report or talk to us. 

It’s about survival. And it’s about winning

Your category has a lot to say about your results right now. Gaming’s up. Retail’s up. Business services and social media are up right now too. But travel has challenges — with some recovery. And other categories are feeling the impact of COVID-19.

So you might be focused on just surviving right now.

Or you might be doing fairly well, all things considered, and focusing on beating the competition. 

Either way, you need to simplify marketing data and rationalize different datasets from partners. You need clean data that’s standardized and collected for you to make your team more efficient, and to make testing new partners relatively easy and painless. You need to expose full funnel performance metrics that are custom to your business. You need to optimize each channel and each campaign, and shift budgets from poor performers to top performers.

Ultimately, that’s going to result in positioning yourself best in tough economic times, if they persist, as well as in recovery, as it continues. 

Get the full report here!

In this first article in a series on cross-device attribution, we describe why marketers should leverage the web as a meaningful acquisition channel, even with app-only products.

Introduction

Traditionally, mobile attribution providers have outright avoided the web. Or, they’ve offered limited solutions built with problematic assumptions and mobile-centric design that lack the technical depth to properly address the web as a meaningful acquisition platform—even for entirely mobile apps.

This is changing. As advertisers get smarter, tools get smarter, and vendors are looking to expand and provide better solutions as they continue to compete with each other in the busy SaaS MarTech space.

Interestingly enough, while the above is clearly relevant for products that contain both mobile and web—whether it’s mobile web or desktop—it’s also becoming more relevant for “pure” mobile apps that aim to acquire users through mobile search, web-based registration flows, and other web-focused acquisition strategies.

Why web?

Almost all user acquisition teams today end up running campaigns on the web. For products that support both mobile and web, running web ads that lead to your web-based product typically yield higher conversion rates, which then provide easier paths for having users download your app. However, even app-only products end up having ads showing on mobile web inventory, with links typically leading to app stores. This leads to poor conversion rates.

However, arguably the biggest missed opportunity by not running paid ads or other types of web campaigns is Search. Search is a great way for people to find your app or website. And, the ability to optimize your acquisition by understanding how different campaigns, keywords, and content work is vital to maximizing your budget.

Sadly, most mobile attribution providers are as their name suggests—focused on mobile. Solutions are very limited and lack the technical depth to support the variety of user flows between web and mobile.

Web-to-app tracking: just one use web/mobile case

Web-to-app tracking is a great use case to start with, as we begin to unfold the variety of user journeys between web and mobile. The term commonly refers to the situation where someone visits a web page while using their mobile device.

Perhaps this web page is the full-blown product. It could also be a simple landing page. In both cases, users see a link to install the app. Most often, this appears as a banner at the top or bottom of the page.

In most cases, marketers would rather let the user convert first, for example by making a purchase of the product they originally searched for. This would intuitively increase the chances of a user wanting to download a new app. In some cases such as mobile gaming, the user’s intent is higher (they’ve reached this page after their search), and direct download may be ok.

The first scenario of a user converting on the web requires the attribution provider to support web attribution. We’ll get back to this later. 

Let’s focus on the second use case, where the user came in from Search or from a web ad, to then click a link and download the game. The important question we ask ourselves as marketers here is what do I know about this user? Which campaigns did they come from? Which ad groups or ad sets, and how much did I pay for them? What are the keywords that work better for me, and what terms result in higher click-through rates?

All of these questions are what a capable attribution provider should answer.

When tracking web-to-app conversions, the ideal report is one that allows you to focus on a specific channel, dive into each and every campaign, and understand what the campaign is yielding in terms of app installs, post-install conversions, and eCPI and eCPA for different components within the campaign or the campaign as a whole. This allows us to compare it to other paid campaigns and activities. 

There are even more fundamental questions such as:

• How should I create the right links?
• What UTM parameters should I use and how?
• Can I link a UTM parameter to an app install? 

Unfortunately, traditional tools today lose this context and as a result, reporting options are either not showing any context previous to the web page visit, or a very limited one.

Fortunately, the solution needed to solve the problem isn’t that complex. But it does require an understanding of both web tracking—how partners work and what UTM parameters should contain—and mobile. And, most importantly, how to tie the two together.

What’s next?

In the following articles we’ll dive deeper into the mechanics of how web-to-app tracking works, as well as continue to more advanced topics such as web tracking and the Holy Grail—cross-device attribution.

If you’d like to learn more about Singular’s web-to-app and cross-device capabilities, please reach out to schedule a demo.

 

Will we soon be living in a post-IDFA world? It’s hard to say, but there are some reasons to prepare for it, which is why Singular has established the Mobile Attribution Privacy working group.

In 2019 so far there have been over 1,000 privacy breaches exposing over 146 million records. That’s just one reason why privacy and data security are becoming increasingly important, both from a regulatory standpoint and a customer trust point of view.

As I shared with you a few months ago, Singular has already started making steps towards a more privacy-safe attribution model.

Recently, we met with representatives from companies including Lyft, AirBnB, Twitter, WB Games, Jam City, DraftKings, Oracle, Branch, Unity, the Mobile Marketing Association, LUMA Partners, and many others as part of a Mobile Attribution Privacy (MAP) working group. Our goal as advertisers and vendors: talk about options for measuring marketing while serving the privacy needs and desires of customers and users … even if the IDFA goes away.

Post-IDFA: what we talked about

In our first meeting, we talked about whether this was mobile and web, or mostly just mobile. The consensus: we’re going to keep this primarily focused on mobile attribution.

We also talked about Google advertising ID, and whether that should be part of the conversation. Though it seems that Google would be much less likely to abandon their primary identifier than Apple, we decided that we should look at global solutions for both Android and iOS.

One of the things we unanimously agreed on: we need to be focused on the needs of people: users and customers. If something doesn’t matter to users, it shouldn’t matter to us, and conversely, if it does, then it needs to be a core concern for marketers and marketing technology vendors.

This is one of those things that sounds simple but is actually complex.

For example, Apple cares first and foremost about their users, but to get these users to the iOS platform they need content providers to thrive and have an economic incentive to build for it. As one participant said: “People choose a phone based on where they can play Fortnite.”

And while big content creators could survive removal of device identifiers (by switching to something else – like an email address), many smaller ecosystem players would struggle to survive, as this will greatly deteriorate people’s ability to know who their users are and where they came from.

Broadening the conversation

Two interesting ideas that have legs came up. And they’re both ways to broaden the conversation.

One is to bring this discussion to the IAB, the Interactive Advertising Bureau, and perhaps create a working group focused on Mobile Identifiers. The IAB, after all, is dealing with other privacy-related topics. Another is to view this area as an extension to the GDPR and CCPA (California Consumer Privacy Act) legislation. Both are valid suggestions, and we’ll be looking into both options.

And finally, we spoke about multiple device identifier options:

• Auto-rotating (short-lived) IDFAs
  If the IDFA auto-rotated, say weekly or monthly, Apple would limit how long you can track any particular user. This should permit proper advertising attribution. One question yet to answer: can an app developer stitch the rotating IDFAs together as long as the user is active within their app? Some would consider that app activity as a “meaningful relationship” which may permit doing so; others might consider it a violation of privacy.
• Google Play Referrer equivalent
  Google has an excellent mechanism for passing referrer context into Google Play that the app can then query upon installation. Again, this would enable attribution. The obvious problem here is that enabling this type of link tracking makes it impossible to prevent vendors from appending a device ID, click ID, or other form of identification that could be connected to a specific person.
• SKAdNetwork
  This is somewhat of a similar concept: you pass info to the App Store, but it’s not exposed to the installed app. The data is controlled by the operating system, and the amount of data you can pass along is greatly limited. In its current form this feels immature, but that could change with serious interest from major players.

And the conversation continues

Ultimately, we’re going to continue the conversation. We’re also going to broaden it to new players, and we invite anyone who is an interested party to be part of the next meeting of the Mobile Attribution Privacy group, either in person or via videoconferencing.

If you’d like to be part of the Mobile Attribution Privacy (MAP) Coalition, please join us in the MAP Slack group. There, you’ll be able to connect with other industry folks who are working to move the digital marketing community forward in this new, more privacy-safe world.