Mobile Measurement Partner (MMP)

A Mobile Measurement Partner (MMP) is a third-party marketing measurement and 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 marketing data from various sources, MMPs such as Singular provide app marketers with a single source of truth to analyze the overall ROI of mobile user acquisition campaigns and other marketing efforts.

Focused on mobile

As the “mobile” part of MMP makes clear, these companies have their roots in the mobile world, and often have access to exclusive advertising results measurement tools and datasets from major platforms.

Today, however, most mobile measurement partners now measure much more than just mobile marketing. Singular measures campaigns on the web, CTV and streaming media, consoles, out-of-home, email, and multiple other platforms in addition to mobile.

Where “MMP” comes from

Tiny history lesson: “MMP” was originally the name of Meta’s mobile measurement partnership program.

It has since become synonymous with most major mobile measurement and attribution partners for major platforms over time.

MMP technology

MMPs use a mix of technology to measure and attribute mobile events. The most important are probably postbacks, whether generated via IDFA, GAID, SKAdNetwork, or on the web (yes, you can get postbacks on the web from Singular!). Singular also helps marketers track and analyze ad views, clicks, app installs, in-app engagement events as well as purchases, and more.

In addition, it’s increasingly important that measurement partners understand privacy protocols such as SKAdNetwork (morphing into AAK) and Privacy Sandbox. Singular has been a leader here, and also leads in AI and data science to make partial information from privacy-safe sources accurate and actionable.

Integrations everywhere

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, Snap, X, Google, Pinterest, and TikTok. Plus, Singular has integrations with thousands of other ad networks for complete coverage of the mobile advertising ecosystem.

This allows MMPs like Singular to track ad engagements and link them to app installs and in-app events.

Having an MMP is crucial for accurately measuring key metrics and the success of mobile marketing campaigns.

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 generally includes a software development kit (SDK) installed in your app, but it could be done via server-to-server connections.

Combining multiple datasets from multiple sources is the key

Singular’s case combines attribution data from multiple sources in multiple ways build out Unified Measurement analytics. We also combine marketing campaign and cost data from the source with actual conversion data from insight your app, yielding deeper insights and data, including user lifetime value (LTV).

As TapJoy highlights in its guide to choosing an MMP, the marketing campaign data includes signals around “viewability, time in view, non-human traffic, and user behaviors (such as click-throughs, installs, and purchases).”

Combining multiple datasets from multiple sources, including LTV, is key to understanding the success of your marketing campaigns.

Plus MMM and incrementality

Recently, Singular has added technology like media mix modeling or marketing mix modeling, allowing marketers to perform privacy-safe marketing measurement via a seamless, out of the box, no setup-required MMM product — unprecedented in the industry. Singular’s data is also key for incrementality measurement, which is increasingly important these days.

Mobile Measure Partners are particularly useful for marketers that want to measure performance from multiple ad networks and compare their performance across channels.

By providing deeper insights across multiple platforms, MMPs enable marketers to compare the performance of each network. For example, MMPs often deliver accurate data that is inaccessible from an ad network such as third-party verification, customer lifetime value (CLV), true ROI, downstream conversions, and more, allowing for a better understanding and optimization of the partner performance for fraud prevention and smart budget allocation decisions. This data can be easily accessed and analyzed through a single MMP dashboard, eliminating the need for countless spreadsheets and saving time and resources.

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.

Challenges of Google/Apple and other ad networks’ analytics?

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

The biggest challenge, however, is that the world of ad networks and exchanges is large. Mobile marketers would waste too much time looking at every single ad partner’s analytics interface. An MMP gives you all the information in one place.

One SDK for all your attribution

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%. Providing third-party analytics solves most of those challenges. MMPs, such as Singular, not only help marketers verify performance from each advertising partner, but also serve as one of the safest attribution partners in the industry.

This fosters trust between app publishers and ad networks, as user privacy is a top priority.

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. And Singular’s new MMM product allows marketers to easily check for incrementality and lift without doing costly and time-consuming studies.

Saving time and resources

Ultimately, choosing the right MMP allows you to save time and resources, and scale more intelligently by investing more in the best-performing platforms.

Normalization and standardization are critical

In addition, as an independent third party, your MMP is able to standardize metrics across platforms.

Each platform has its own slightly different set of definitions for what counts as a view, a click, an assist, or other metrics and KPIs in performance marketing. Thanks to Singular, marketers can use these standardized and normalized 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.

Thousands of partners

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. Singular has more integrations than any other MMP.

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.

You need independent verification

While many platforms offer built-in analytics 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 (attribution platforms) are an invaluable resource for providing independent verification and aggregation of cost data and conversion insights that highlights their most effective ad partners, which helps intelligently scale ad budgets where they are most effective on an accurate platform.

With the heavy lifting of measurement and attribution taken care of by the MMP’s SDK, advertisers can save time and focus on optimizing their campaigns.

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 …

• Global-best SKAdNetwork measurement providing smarter growth insights than any other MMP
• Global-best cost aggregation platform offering widest compatibility and most accurate and up-to-date data for internal BI teams
• Global-best scaling capability providing analytics for the largest games, apps, and brands
• Complete measurement and reporting on performance across all channels, including apps, web, SMS, referrals, email, and Connected TV with our open integration framework
• Full life-cycle ROI metrics by combining mobile attribution with cost aggregation and first-party data
• Global-best ad fraud solutions, 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.

Want to learn more? Check out this video with more details.