[Partner Spotlight] Perfecting Your MarTech Stack by Adding a Mobile Measurement Partner

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Q1. What value does a mobile measurement partner (MMP) offer?

MMPs are primarily known for being unbiased third-party platform that help clients keep a tab on conversions and attribute them correctly. The main value driver here is that marketers and advertisers can make smart, fast decisions about where they allocate their budgets, which campaigns they should pause, and which they should scale. Without this data, there’s no way to know who to give credit to for an install or session. However, MMPs also allow you to see the role that other channels and campaigns play in the journey of that install. 

Furthermore, with all of your data in one place on an MMP, customers coming from different sources are deduplicated. This ensures you don’t overspend by paying for an install twice. 

Access to this granular, impartial data makes scaling much easier because you can better understand and trust your campaign-spend decisions to drive high revenue or LTV customers to your app and ultimately use budgets more effectively. 

To think about it more simply, in addition to being an essential middleman, MMPs are crucial to pinpointing what’s working and what isn’t and how different channels and campaigns support and influence each other.

Q2. How do you measure the ROI of a mobile measurement partner?

MMPs give you the tools to improve your ROI on marketing campaigns. If your ROAS, app performance, and LTV are improving, and you can scale confidently, use budgets more effectively, and reallocate time previously spent sifting through spreadsheets to more creative and strategic tasks, you’ve got a strong use case that your MMP investment was a good one. 

To measure the ROI of your MMP, you should be able to identify tangible and significant improvements in your campaign structure and management, budget allocation, and, ultimately, revenue. 

To do this successfully, identify the key KPIs you want to improve upon by leveraging your MMP, then set a realistic time frame in which to assess if you’ve seen the improvement you calculated for and if you’re working with your MMP in the right ways to achieve those goals. 

Q3. What kind of data should marketers have access to from their attribution provider?

Using an MMP, marketers are given access to clean, unbiased, and completely objective attribution data from the networks and channels where they are running campaigns.

Here is a scenario:

• An advertiser buys traffic on Ad Network A, which then serves an ad to a customer
• This results in the customer clicking on the ad, where they are then redirected to the App Store
• Upon visiting the App Store, the customer downloads the app
• After the download the MMP reports back to Ad Network A to inform them that the install took place on that network. 

If there were no MMPs as middlemen between the network and the advertiser, the network would be free to claim the install, with no third party to attribute it objectively. Therefore, the data provided to the client via an MMP allows the marketer to discover where their customers are coming from.

It’s essential that your MMP also provides multi-touch attribution, which determines the value of every touch point on the way to conversion, allowing you to factor it into your analysis and budget allocation. 

In short, MMPs collect, organize, and attribute app data to provide clients with metrics on campaign performance. This is enabled via the MMP’s SDK, which collects the attribution data to connect engagements with installs and post-install in-app events.

Q4. What are the most important events to measure after app installation?

App events are how you measure customer engagement post-install and can be used to unlock insights on which campaigns are driving active (or inactive) customers.  Specifically, the insights you can gain from measuring post-install events are essential to campaign optimization and allocation of budget because they show you what consumers do post-install, help you uncover the features they like, and identify pain points and churn points. 

The events an app developer or marketer chooses to measure post-install will differ greatly depending on the app vertical and monetization model. For example, for gaming apps, common events to keep a tab on include tutorial completed, purchase 100 coins, sign-up, etc., whereas for an e-commerce app, important events include registration, login, search product, add-to-basket, etc. 

However, the events essential for all app types are installs, clicks, impressions, sessions, and reattributions. Most platforms allow you to view as many events as you want, but I recommend narrowing it down so that you can remain as agile and actionable as possible. To determine which events your app should be measuring, think about how you monetize and what events indicate profitability other than the in-app purchase, subscription, etc. 

Good event tracking plays a huge role in  your segmentation and personalization efforts. It allows you to determine which segments and cohorts behave in which ways and the different customer experiences they’re looking for. In short, you can uncover who is high LTV and who isn’t. 

Q5. Why should customer retention be driven alongside your customer acquisition efforts?

You should treat customer acquisition and retention as two sides of the same coin. While mobile marketers need to acquire many consumers to drive install growth, retaining them is essential for sustained success. 

Other than for a few specific verticals with early-stage ad-revenue/cross-promotional monetization models, such as hyper-casual games, retaining the customers you’ve spent (increasingly) big dollars on driving to your app is essential if you want to prove the ROI of your campaigns. 

The specific way that UA and retention can be balanced is to create a holistic, full-funnel strategy. By identifying which channels/UA campaigns bring in the highest value customers, you can more confidently invest in retention strategies to keep them in-app for longer and maximize their LTV. You can then design entire UA and retention campaigns that work hand-in-hand for different audience segments, who respond differently to various campaign creatives as they do to different onboarding methods and UX.

According to current industry standards, by Day 1 post-install, you’ll have lost an average of 75% of the consumers who downloaded your app. By day 30, depending on the vertical, this can be as high as 90%. Turning this around by just a few percentage points can prove highly beneficial for your bottom line, which is increasingly important in the current economic climate where consumers are more expensive than ever. 

To successfully monetize the consumers you’re driving to your app, they need to be retained for at least long enough to provide you ample opportunity for your monetization efforts. This is why a good acquisition campaign will already consider every potential new consumer’s entire customer journey. 

With the right tools, you can build campaigns that bring in a high volume of consumers who retain and monetize instead of continually getting big numbers of high-churn consumers just to keep the UA arrow pointing upward. It’s a balancing act that can take some time to perfect. The most important thing to remember is that aligning the two functions, and perhaps teams, should be done holistically via segmentation for the entire marketing funnel to ensure you’re meeting your consumers’ needs and expectations at every stage of the journey.

Q6. What value does integrating a mobile measurement partner with a customer engagement platform provide?

As discussed previously, MMP data is unbiased and granular, allowing you to understand and measure which channels and campaigns are performing and which are not (freeing up time otherwise spent trawling through spreadsheets and data sets). Equipped with this knowledge, marketers are then able to decide which campaigns to pause, which to scale, and ultimately where to invest their budget to get good ROI and high LTV customers. 

This is where integrating an MMP with a customer engagement platform can prove highly valuable. By feeding MMP data into a customer engagement platform, you can build audiences and segments to generate customer insights, implement omnichannel communication and personalization that engage the right customers with the right messaging (a great tool for retention), and ultimately build customer journeys that provide your segments with experiences that convert. 

In short, integrating an MMP with a customer engagement platform allows for more finely tuned, data-driven creation of segments and engagement campaigns.

Q7. What are the top 2 mobile marketing trends brands need to prepare for in 2023?

Among many marketing trends emerging in 2023, I’m keeping the closest eye on media mix modeling (MMM) and centralizing data to maximize efficiency. The combination of the economic downturn and the increased emphasis on consumer data privacy means strategic initiatives around these two concepts make perfect sense.

More and more companies are focusing on forecasting and strategic budget planning, which means that in addition to measuring UA and ad-spend, MMM is a way to determine the impact of marketing tactics in relation to business objectives. So, in addition to the extremely data-driven approach of traditional mobile app measurement, MMM helps you measure non-traditional media channels like connected TV, podcasts, digital out-of-home, and other new channels, all of which can have enormous assisting power on your UA campaigns, and can be effective in helping you reach very niche audiences.

In terms of centralized data and increased efficiency, this is largely the result of marketing being pressured to make more strategic decisions around budgets to ensure performance is fully maximized. To do this, decision-making needs to be fast and accurate. Knowing where to efficiently and effectively place ad spend, which campaigns to pause and scale, and how to continue with allocations can only be done quickly if you’re working from a centralized, reliable data point. 

There are two key benefits to taking this approach, both of which are especially poignant in 2023. Firstly, you have data from all your channels and sources available in one place, which drives up productivity and efficiency. Secondly, it allows you to reduce business expenses by decreasing the number of tools needed to achieve the same outcomes.