Mobile app attribution allows acquisition marketers to understand how users find out about and begin using apps. This allows marketers to pre-plan data points for specific actions users take, from clicking an advertisement to installing the app to making in-app purchases.
In this article, we glance at what mobile app attribution is. Then we discuss the characteristics you have to look for in a mobile app attribution analytics platform.
Additionally, we compare AppsFlyer and Branch, two most popular mobile app attribution platforms. Hopefully, this comparison will help you determine the right solution for your business.
What Is Mobile App Attribution?
Mobile app attribution is the process of identifying how and where users learn about your app. It allows you to map interactions across platforms. Ultimately, this lets you monitor and optimize the journeys people take to becoming your customers.
Advertising platforms can offer a good deal of data on the effects your ads have on your conversion rate. However, these platforms are more interested in reporting conversions than in conveying information that could be more useful to you.
What's more, if you are your high-growth environment, you are likely running campaigns on several networks at once. Therefore, there's quality value in having the opportunity to consolidate reporting in a single place.
Ideally, mobile app attribution allows app marketers to collect unbiased data about their roi (ROI) from their various marketing efforts. This data gives insight into what led a person to set up your app. Also, it enables you to determine precisely what caused an increase or fall in app installs. This information is helpful in optimizing marketing campaigns. Additionally, technology-not only when you’re scaling up a company. Also, technology-not only to maximise your ROI.
To this end, here are some features you need to consider when searching for a mobile app attribution platform:
Mobile App Attribution Across Channels
Mobile app attribution across channels typically involves advanced technologies such as universal deep linking, fingerprinting, and secure postbacks for data sync.
Marketing Engagement Analytics
This involves combining mobile business and app use insights with mobile app attribution. This can help marketers to higher understand and optimize sources of real value. For instance, app marketers look at metrics such as user engagement, revenue, lifetime value, and ROI.
Integrations
It's vital that you know which media sources,
retargeting networks, third-party analytics platforms, and marketing automation
providers your mobile app attribution platform offers integration with.
Data Integrity
Your mobile app attribution platform needs to collect its very own data. Further, that which you don’t want is a mobile app attribution platform that merely aggregates data that ad networks provide. Therefore, you need to select a platform that's GDPR-compliant and follows industry security standards.
A Comparison of AppsFlyer and Branch
Now that we have a definite understanding of what mobile app attribution is, let's compare two mobile app attribution providers, AppsFlyer and Branch. These are two leading providers in the market. We’ll take a look at the important thing features of each. Where you can see how they stack up against each other when it comes to features and functionality.
Factor #1: Mobile App Attribution Across Channels
We're residing in a multi-device, multi-channel world. Therefore, app marketers have to promote their products virtually everywhere a potential customer might be active.
This can make it hard to know which specific marketing activities are driving conversions. That’s because the audience's journey often spans a variety of “walled garden” digital environments. Therefore, since the customer’s journey is directed within those environments, it is difficult to monitor.
On the other hand, cross-channel mobile app attribution helps marketers understand which areas of their marketing strategies are most effective and which of them need to be scrapped. Without it, marketers might have no way of understanding what drives prospective users to do something on the conversion goal.
AppsFlyer and Cross-Channel Mobile App Attribution
With AppsFlyer, you'll be able to monitor every app install and connect it to the promotional campaigns and media sources that drove it. This makes it easy to see which media sources work most effectively. That’s because AppsFlyer’s granular dashboards inform you which channel or network, ad group, ad type, and ad creative drove individual users.
Additionally, the platform's deep-linking feature enables you to direct users to the right app store. You'll be able to display a welcome message following the app is installed. This improves your customer’s user experience and increases conversion rates.
Most users interact with multiple ads before they choose to install an app. AppsFlyer's multi-touch attribution allows you to know exactly which ads helped nudge the consumer in the right direction. Moreover, you’ll also know which ad was the driving factor behind the ultimate install.
In addition, AppsFlyer can help you attribute new users coming from TV campaigns. This enables you to market your app via its deep integrations with TVSquared, Adalyser, and others. Also, it enables you to generate reports about which marketing campaigns drive the very best user re-engagement and reactivation results.
Branch and Cross-Channel Mobile App Attribution
With Branch, you should use automatic cross-platform identifiers to trace your users web in apps. Importantly, this can be done even if they're logged out. Therefore, even if customers first find out about your app on a blog after which communicate with your ad on Facebook, you can connect touch points from each channel. Also, it enables you to customize attribution windows based on your marketing campaigns, right down to individual links.
Additionally, Branch's view-through attribution provides you with understanding of you who viewed your ads, even if they did not interact with them (for instance, by clicking the ad). This gives a better idea about the ROI of the marketing efforts. That’s because views can help a great deal with brand awareness, despite the fact that CPM (cost per thousand) campaigns are measured differently across different networks.
Also, Branch aims for accurate attribution across all channels. It will this by using links to seamlessly track user engagement. Therefore, prospective customers will be able to view your ads making purchases across multiple platforms.
Factor #2: Marketing Engagement Analytics
One of the key benefits of marketing engagement analytics is that they empower marketers to create informed decisions. Essentially, these analytics answer two important questions: Which marketing campaigns should you be purchasing, and how should you prioritize them?
How AppsFlyer Performs with Analytics
With AppsFlyer, you will get useful insights regarding your marketing performance and user retention. That’s because its powerful cohort and retention reporting tools show you places that marketing campaigns are doing great and where there's glaring requirement for improvement.
Additionally, you are able to customize AppsFlyer's dashboard using their drag-and-drop interface. By doing this, you can easily build and view dashboards based on your particular campaigns.
Additionally, the AppsFlyer mobile app enables you to monitor analytics data in real time and share it together with your team members. You can also receive live alerts regarding your key performance indicators (KPIs). Plus, you’ll get other information that’s important for your business.
What’s more, AppsFlyer’s Pivot tool also uses the drag-and-drop interface. This lets you quickly save, edit, clone, and collaborate together with your team. Plus, you can do all this without having to download data or rebuild pivot tables. By doing this, marketers can better manage and understand complex data. For instance, technology-not only for aggregating performance by media source. Or you can run deep campaign analyses.
How Branch Provides Analytics
One from the practical-use installments of Branch's detailed analytics reporting is it makes it easy to identify top-performing influencer campaigns. For instance, when you are aware which of them are driving probably the most app downloads, you are able to deepen your most lucrative relationships. Then you can also forge more of them with similar figures.
Although Branch
does offer a cohort analysis tool to help marketers understand the ROI of their
campaigns, it does not support retention monitoring or reporting.
Branch’s Content Analytics section enables you to discover which content is most successful at driving app installs. By doing this, you'll be able to promote that particular content with marketing campaigns or deep linked sharing. With Branch, you can repeat this tactic to identify new content that drives app downloads.
Additionally, Branch's Data Feeds feature enables you to import analytics data using several integrations. For instance:
- Webhooks let you send Branch events to any endpoint you want
- Data integrations provides a quantity of analytics and marketing features
- The query API can help you programmatically query analytics data
- Data export API provides you with access to all of your Branch data
However, unlike AppsFlyer, Branch doesn't allow you to create custom dashboards to view specific information sets based on your marketing campaigns.
Factor #3: Integrated Partners
The mobile ecosystem calls for many types of reports that have an impact on acquisition. These could include metrics from the services you utilize for attribution. Also, they can include product analytics, A/B testing, and marketing automation.
Integrating with third-party platforms provides more quality to advertisers. That’s because you can make use of the insights you glean for optimizing marketing efforts or running retargeting campaigns.
Using AppsFlyer Mobile App Attribution with Integrated Partners
With the AppsFlyer software development kit (SDK) you can experiment with different integrated partners. This lets you identify the ones that provide the finest ROI from your marketing campaigns.
Here are a few of
the different sorts of integrated partners you can get use of using the
AppsFlyer platform:
Ad Networks
These networks connect advertisers to apps seeking to host ads. Ad networks act as consolidations of a big ad space supply from publishers and match it to fulfill advertisers’ demands.
Agency Reports
There are companies that manage marketing campaigns with respect to advertisers. They might work with all types of apps or focus on a particular area, for example gaming apps.
Analytics Platforms
These are third-party solutions that provide in-app analytics reporting. Interestingly, these integrations can push data back and forth. Therefore, you can perform behavioral analysis according to various segments of your end users.
Affiliate Networks
These networks enable publishers to obtain a share from the revenue advertisers earn that result from people to the publisher's app. Alternatively, publishers earn a fee for each visitor who performs a particular action.
Retargeting Networks
These are ad networks specializing in retargeting. Retargeting engages users who interacted with an ad but didn’t yet install the app. You can also begin using these networks for re-engagement. With re-engagement, you allow targeted discounts to users who've already installed your apps to make them active users. Also, begin using these networks for re-attribution. These are campaigns targeted at users who've uninstalled the app to obtain these to reinstall it.
Direct Publishers
These are app owners who integrate their apps
directly with AppsFlyer for superior in-app monitoring.
Facebook Marketing Partners/Twitter Official Partners
These are partners who adhere to Facebook and Twitter's criteria and obtain their approval. For instance, this may be a particular technology for example automated posting apps. Or they could be media-buying platforms that allow marketers to reserve ads on Twitter and facebook.
Programmatic Advertising
This refers back to the ability of the ad network to buy spots for ads from different platforms without involving a 3rd party.
Branch and Integrations
With Branch, you get a quantity of integrations to make sure your attribution workflow runs smoothly.
These include:
Universal Ad Partners
With Branch Universal Ads, you can try
out ad networks with unique segmentation algorithms to reach a targeted
audience. This is available as a pre-configured and ready-to-use integration.
Universal Email Partners
These services enable you to seamlessly integrate email marketing campaigns within your workflows. For instance, you can use leading email service providers without losing your current analytics.
Data Integration Partners
This integration enables you to use
pre-formatted webhooks to automatically send Branch data to your analytics and
marketing tools.
Factor #4: Data Integrity
When it comes to mobile app attribution, it's important to make sure you're keeping customer data secure. Failure to do this may cause serious data breaches. These can cause serious harm to your logo and could even familiarizes you with potential lawsuits or fines from regulators.
AppsFlyer and Data Integrity
AppsFlyer maintains full compliance with industry standards. This means AppsFlyer keeps its data centers secure. Moreover, it enforces strict physical, environmental, and hosting controls.
Additionally, AppsFlyer uses multi-layered controls to safeguard the data infrastructure. What this means is it actively monitors the advance of applications, systems, and procedures regularly.
This continuous monitoring lets AppsFlyer take care of the ever-changing security ecosystem and it is challenges.
This mobile app attribution platform also isolates each customer's account data from those of some other clients. Additionally, it encrypts the information resting. Also, AppsFlyer's web servers use strong encryption protocols. These protocols secure the connections between its users' devices and it is own web services and servers.
Every change made at AppsFlyer is measured, reviewed, and approved by following a strict process. This method ensures that operational changes meet AppsFlyer's business goals and compliance guidelines. Included in this are GDPR, TRUSTe, and ePrivacyseal.
Branch and Data Integrity
Branch ensures strict compliance with GDPR to secure the information it holds. This data security directive gives specific guidelines, including the right to object to information systems. However, to submit a GDPR end user request, you will need to go through the Branch GDPR portal. Then you definitely must specify the end user's advertising identifier (for instance, IDFA or GAID). Also, you must specify the date when you received their request.
Just keep in mind that despite Branch stops tracking customers, they'll still be able to generate and share Branch links. In addition, basic deep-linking functionality will also still work.
However, end users who object to information systems won't be able to take advantage of seamless customer journeys across multiple platforms. (Branch enables marketers to provide their opposite end users these seamless journeys.)
Which Mobile App Attribution Platform Fits your needs?
With the right
mobile app attribution platform, you can find out how a user first
learns regarding your app, what drives them to do the installation, and how they interact
with it. These details will help you optimize your marketing campaigns and
convert more customers.
After reading
this article, between AppsFlyer and Branch, which mobile app attribution
platform are you leaning toward and why?
