Just use 1 ad network? 15 reasons why you still need an MMP

Do you need an MMP if you just use one ad network? There’s more than a few mobile marketers and new app publishers that think so.

At first glance, it’s pretty understandable: there’s limited confusion, there’s only 1 ad partner to integrate, there’s no need to de-dupe attributions between multiple partners, and there’s the simplicity of just dealing with 1 partner, 1 dashboard, and 1 system.

Naturally, if you have 5 ad partners, or use 10 ad networks, you need an MMP. And we’ve discovered that more ad partners are generally better: using more ad networks is highly correlated with lower CPI, higher ROI, and higher retention.

But do you need an MMP for just 1 or 2? Or 3?

In a word, yes. (And it can be entirely free, by the way.)

I chatted with Owen Farmer, who’s been publishing apps since the age of 14, about why. Hit play and keep scrolling …

You need an MMP for more data

Farmer is the founder of Word Power, a vocabulary app that he started as a teen. He kicked off marketing with just one ad channel: Apple Ads. But he soon learned that the data Apple provided wasn’t really enough:

“There’s some people in the industry who advise against using an MMP in the beginning, which to be honest, blows my mind,” he told me. 

“Apple Search Ads only tells you what happens up to the download, but it doesn’t tell you how many people install, how many people start a trial, or how many of those trials convert,” he added. “Having that data is essential. And if we’d been flying blind using just cost per download as our primary KPI, we’d be well underoptimized.”

A key thing you need is to see how different keywords perform in terms of user behavior after the click and after the install.

So Farmer uses Singular to measure all of his campaigns and sees far beyond the install event. And that’s exactly what most apps, even early ones, need.

But there’s more, much more

It’s pretty easy to kick off marketing with 1 partner, and then expand. Maybe you start with Meta or Google, but TikTok looks so tempting for a bit of influencer marketing juiciness.

With an MMP, adding partners is incredibly easy. And now you’ve got 1 place to look, not 2 or 3, and if there are conflicting claims, you can de-dupe them.

But there are plenty of reasons you still need an MMP even if you just use 1 ad partner:

1. See more of the user journey
   As Farmer noted above, you need to see the whole user or customer journey, including what happens post-install. An MMP like Singular gives you that activity, that engagement data, any purchases, and more.
2. Get holistic cohorts and LTV analysis
   When you get purchases and engagement data, you get cohort analytics that tell you which campaigns were profitable long term. Now you’ve got LTV and can make smarter marketing, bidding, budgeting, and optimization decisions.
3. Measure organics
   Meta isn’t going to measure organics for you. But based on your vertical, organics can be a major source of installs and revenue. That’s SEO, that’s web, that’s AI recommendations on ChatGPT, that’s social, and more …
4. Measure owned media
   Depending on your vertical, skills, size, and interests, you’re likely to have owned marketing channels including your website, social media, email and maybe even real-world or out-of-home options. With Singular you’ve got weblinks, deeplinks, QR codes, and much more, all with analytics hooked up to them.
5. Better attribution with Unified Measurement
   As hard as it may be to believe, Meta regularly under-reports its own effectiveness. View-through and brand awareness that results in later activity account for most of that, while some probably is just due to the fact that no 1 measurement methodology is perfectly accurate. So Singular’s Unified Measurement that looks at many different datapoints including SKAN, store data, first-party data, and more, shows you a more accurate picture. (Importantly, Unified Measurement also shows you all the component datapoints that add up to its decision, giving you valuable insights from multiple perspectives.
6. Fraud protection
   Yes, fraud exists. What used to be FAN (Facebook Audience Network) and is now MAN (Meta Audience Network and GDN (Google Display Network and AdMob bring in advertising on millions of publishers’ sites and apps, and guess what: not everyone is an angel. Singular’s fraud protection looks at 51 different parameters to judge the safety and reliability of reported clicks, installs, and conversions.
7. AI-powered creative analytics
   It’s no secret that we just dropped Creative IQ, which gives you a creative-to-ROI visual gallery to instantly spot winners and losers. In the case of some fairly black box platforms that mix-and-match your creative elements on the fly, Singular also reports effectiveness data that you literally can’t see on the platform. Which means you get more data in Singular than in their dashboards … not to mention the data governance that helps you keep track of all your creative and campaigns easily.
8. Deeper, more granular data access
   For some programs, like Meta’s AMM or Google’s ICM, you simply can’t get additional granular data any other way than via an MMP. Meta and Google rely on MMP’s like Singular to safeguard the data and ensure that it’s used safely and properly. This is huge, because now you have privacy-safe access to data that gives you 2020-like powers, similar to when IDFAs were easily accessible.
9. Future-proofing for growth
   When building a startup, it’s a good idea to set up the foundations of future growth, as long as you can do so without over-indexing on things you don’t know for sure that you’ll need. Setting up an MMP — perhaps on the free tier — is a good way to future-proof for growth. As you grow, you won’t always just have 1 or 2 ad partners, and with Singular, it’s super-easy to add new partners with a few clicks.
10. AI assistance
    Singular recently released MCP integration for major LLMs, and marketers are already asking Claude for deep insights on their marketing data. ChatGPT is around the corner. This is a super-simple conversational way to get all the data and insights you need to grow.
11. Alerts & notifications
    Have you overspent on a campaign when you’ve put in guardrails against it? I have. When campaigns break parameters, Singular can provide alerts and notifications.
12. Record of bids and budgets
    Singular captures and stores all campaign execution information such as historical bid changes, creatives trafficked, and more, establishing a system of record. When you want to know why something happened or changed in your marketing results, you have a place to look.
13. Deep linking, smart links, and measurement
    You want a great user experience as people come into your app from multiple places. Firebase is shutting down its Dynamic Links solution next month, so you’re going to need a deeplinking solution. Singular’s is built in, and best in the industry. And yes … it even works for branded QR codes.
14. Web banners
    Need smart banners for your website (mobile or desktop) that incorporate website-to-app measurement and work with your publishing solution? Done.
15. Better reporting tools and interface
    Ever need to share reports? Manipulate or customize a dashboard? Do simple pivots with your data? Use custom dimensions that align with your KPIs that you know drive revenue? It’s all in your Singular MMP dashboard.

That’s 15 reasons why you need an MMP, even if you’re just starting out. And even if you have precisely $0 budget for it.

Custom KPIs can be super helpful

I know I buried it in #15 above, but custom KPIs unlock huge opportunities.

UA all-star Hannah Parvaz calls it your north star metric. It’s the 1 key thing that if you hit it, you know you’re going to get revenue, be cash-flow positive, and make money. It takes some time and deep understanding of your app and users and their journey to know, but once you know it, you can optimize all your marketing campaigns around it.

As she told me recently:

“This is a metric that represents both what the customer wants — they’re getting value, so they’re coming back — and it also represents what the business wants: they want that usage. So your North Star metric, it’s really important that you’re balancing both of these.”

For Farmer, as a bootstrapped founder without millions in VC funding, his north star metric is oriented around early profitability.

“Day 14 ROAS is our main success metric because we’re a seven-day free trial … as a leading indicator, we’re always looking at cost per trial.”

A key reason you need an MMP is because you can set up custom dimensions in your reporting to orient all your dashboards around that key thing, making it easier to know when you’re approaching it, meeting, and hopefully, eventually, exceeding it.

So much more in the full podcast

Yeah, you need an MMP. But you also need much more.

I think you’ll enjoy this episode which follows a solo founder (well, with some freelancer help) on his journey to significant success at a pretty young age.

Here’s a preview of what you’ll find:

• 00:00 Do you really need an MMP?
• 01:46 Owen’s Journey: From Timer App to Vocab Success
• 04:59 Marketing Strategies: From Organic to Paid
• 06:15 The Role of Meta Ads and Campaign Optimization
• 08:22 Subscription Models and Monetization
• 15:34 Balancing Product Development and Marketing
• 20:51 The Importance of Focus and Product-Market Fit
• 22:50 Conclusion and Final Thoughts

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