Mobile Measurement Partner (MMP)

A Mobile Measurement Partner (MMP) is a third-party attribution company that collects, organizes, and presents data from marketing campaigns in order to provide brands with a unified view of their campaign performance. By tagging and standardizing mobile app data from various sources, this provides marketers with a single source of truth to analyze the overall ROI of marketing campaigns.

Tiny history lesson: “MMP” was originally the name of Facebook’s mobile measurement partnership program. It has since become synonymous with most major mobile measurement and attribution partners for major platforms over time.

MMP’s use a mix of technology to measure and attribute mobile events such as clicks, app installs, engagement, revenue, and so on. With this technological capability and after an extensive review and assessment period, MMPs are granted certification and special access to data that allows them to perform attribution for brand marketing campaigns on the largest networks and platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Google Measurement Partners, Pinterest, Snap, Apple Search Ads, TikTok, and more.

The attribution performed by MMPs is typically done through special access to data and marketing activity in a brand’s own app and the platform they’re marketing on. That could use a software development kit (SDK), or it could be done via server-to-server connections. In Singular’s case, that includes combining attribution data with marketing campaign data at the source, yielding deeper insights and data. As TapJoy highlights in its guide to choosing an MMP, the data includes signals around “viewability, time in view, non-human traffic, and user behaviors (such as click-throughs, installs, and purchases).”

Mobile Measure Partners are particularly useful for marketers that want to measure performance from several ad networks. By providing deeper insights across multiple platforms, MMPs enable marketers to compare the performance of each network. For example, MMPs often deliver data that is inaccessible in native ad networks such as third-party attribution, customer lifetime value (CLV), ROI, downstream conversions, and more.

There’s a time in every successful app’s lifecycle when it goes from the production and product-market fit stage to a period of high growth. This is the time that many mobile businesses move beyond the internal tools provided by large ad networks and implement a third-party mobile attribution tool.

Apple’s App Analytics and Google’s Play Console are not without their challenges. Specifically, they both have several limitations that MMP’s address, including:

• They do not provide an indication of the medium of each install (i.e. paid traffic, organic, etc.)
• They do not distinguish between the source of each install (i.e. specific campaigns, ad groups, or keywords)
• They do not provide a source ID of the campaign or the user ID, both of which are used to optimize future ad campaigns

Another major limitation of using an ad network’s SDK for attribution is that multiple networks will often serve ads to the same user, which can lead to inaccurate and inflated numbers across networks. Incipia notes that they have seen discrepancies in the number of app installs reported by ad networks compared to MMPs ranging from 10% to 400%.

MMPs address these limitations by allowing marketers to measure the initial click, attribute that click to an app install, and notify partners about other in-app events that occur later on. Ultimately, choosing the right MMP allows you to save time and resources, and scale more intelligently by investing more in the best performing platforms.

Another use case of MMPs is verifying performance on each advertising partner, which fosters trust between app publishers and ad networks.

In addition, as an independent third party, your MMP is able to standardize metrics across platforms. Marketers use these standardized metrics to evaluate and optimize individual campaigns while comparing cross-platform performance.

Singular is one of the few MMPs that has the technological capability and certifications from all major ad networks to provide the performance and attribution data that’s required for growth. A few of the ad networks that Singular partners with include Apple, Facebook, Google, Twitter, Quora, and many more—you can find our full list of partner integrations here.

The importance of working with an official MMP is summarized in our guide to Facebook MMPs:

Facebook Mobile Measurement Partners are vetted for excellence in exactly the things you need to get more from your marketing. Whether it’s managing campaigns at scale, improving measurement, reaching new audiences or more. What you need is what they do best.

While Facebook offers a built-in platform for mobile measurement, this is often insufficient for advertisers that are looking for deeper insights into campaign performance. Additionally, for advertisers that need to measure aggregated performance across multiple platforms, MMPs are an invaluable resource for intelligently scaling ad budgets.

Singular’s advanced mobile attribution ensures that marketers are keeping users engaged and driving higher levels of ROI across their entire customer journey. A few of Singular’s core capabilities as an MMP include:

• Measuring and reporting on performance across all channels, including apps, web, SMS, referrals, email, and TV with our open integration framework
• Tracking and analyzing granular ROI metrics across the entire customer lifecycle by combining mobile attribution with cost aggregation
• Preventing ad fraud and keeping ad budgets focused on real users with detection and pre-attribution fraud rejection methods

In summary, the services provided by an MMP provide mobile marketers with deeper insights into campaign performance across multiple platforms. Furthermore, MMPs provide marketers with the cross-platform data they need for growth including accurate attribution, granular ROI metrics, customer lifetime values, and more.