5 Questions to Ask When Choosing a Mobile Measurement Partner
Mobile measurement partners (commonly referred to as “MMPs”) give app marketers a way to evaluate in-app user activity and act as a “one-stop shop” to track the performance of various user acquisition and re-engagement campaigns.
MMPs enable marketers to better understand how their users interact with their apps, and in turn, make more informed decisions on based on that data. This knowledge can benefit both user experience design (e.g., is that new user onboarding flow really helping prevent drop-off?) and marketing effectiveness (e.g., which campaign is driving the most conversions?).
Of course, no two MMPs are exactly alike-- they differ in pricing, features, and attribution models. If you’re interested in measuring the lifetime value of your app users and thinking about launching a retargeting campaign, it’s important to consider the full suite of capabilities that a mobile measurement solution offers around re-engagement.
Below are a few questions to ask, and why they’re important:
Do you support full event postbacks to other vendors, or only attributed events?
Support of full event postbacks is needed to segment and retarget users in real time based on their in-app behavior. If the MMP is only able to send events generated after a user clicks on a retargeted ad (versus before), real-time segmentation is not possible.
Do you support last-click attribution for re-engagement?
Last-click attribution is key for measuring retargeting performance, as often these downstream users have previously been targeted in an install campaign. A last-click attribution model will provide 100% credit to the campaign that drove the last click prior to conversion (for example, a purchase).
Is it possible to configure attribution windows for each vendor?
It is important that your MMP offers flexible attribution windows (the time period between ad click and conversion) to align with your unique business goals. In general, advertisers have longer windows for re-engagement versus install campaigns depending upon the complexity of the path to conversion. Common attribution windows for retargeting campaigns include 4 days, 7 days, 14 days, or 28 days.
Do you show re-engagement campaigns in your UI?
Performance marketers rely on MMP dashboards to view campaign activity across all vendors. For re-engagement campaigns, the marketer should be able to determine attribution based on what they see in the MMP dashboard without having to access that data elsewhere.
Do you make historic data available for export? If so, does that include organic and paid installs as well as downstream events, such as purchases? Are there any lookback restrictions?
Marketers aiming to quickly scale a campaign out of the gate can export historic install and downstream event data for segmentation. Historic data on downstream events is particularly important for targeting lapsed users and bringing them back into the app to convert.
Keep in mind that it’s not required to work with an MMP in order to get started with TapCommerce -- there are other implementation methods available to you, such as our SDK. However, if you do have a mobile measurement solution already in place, it’s easy to kick-off a retargeting campaign since we partner with a number of popular providers.
