Why mobile attribution is vital for your UA
The previous episode we touched on what attribution is, now we’re diving into why it’s so important. Lara Doel from Singular walks us through the questions attribution helps us answer about our campaigns, and 5 critical steps you need to follow to be able to answer those questions.
Hi everyone, it’s Lara from Singular.
In our last session we spoke about what Attribution is – Just to recap – in its simplest form, attribution is connecting an effect with a cause – in other words, understanding the why of an effect. Now we’re going to dig a little deeper into why attribution is critical for any marketing team.
After executing marketing campaigns, the number one rule in performance marketing today is collecting data and tracking results, for example, how many visits, clicks, installs, and how much revenue you are getting on every campaign you put out into the world.
But, the data is useless with no way to view it in an organized way that is quick to analyze for smart decision-making that ultimately allows for better performance and growth.
Let’s use the example of a mobile app developer.
If you’re in this position, you need to know when people download your apps. You also want to know why they downloaded your apps, and how they came to install your game or utility or store. The why and the how are crucial for you to understand your users’ motivations and their journeys so that you can better evaluate which activities drive quality users and you would likely want to expand, and, as importantly, what you’re spending money on that is resulting in low outcomes and is not worth the investment.
Traditionally, marketers were really only looking at “where did my install come from?” But advanced marketers analyze deeper into the funnel. They want to understand:
– What is my average CPI or CPA?
– What are my most ROI-positive media sources?
– Where am I acquiring my highest value users?
– What are my best and worst-performing creatives?
– Which bidding strategy worked best?
And in order to achieve this, marketers need to follow five key actions.
The first is to track and measure every in-app action and connect it to your marketing campaigns, in the deepest granularity possible.
What this means is that you need to set up the right infrastructure to make sure every effect can be tied back to the cause.
This includes setting up tracking links, including app store links, deeplinks and deferred deep links, that provide both a seamless user experience and accurate measurement.
The second is to collect and aggregate your data as necessary.
You need to collect all your data, including cost data, from all your marketing campaigns across sources and channels in order to have a full view of your investments.
The third is to automatically combine in-app and attribution data with marketing campaign data to uncover actionable insights to help you drive growth
In order to ensure that the data that you’ve collected, combined and attributed is correct, you need point 4, which is to deterministically and proactively fight mobile ad fraud by preventing, detecting and rejecting fraudulent activity.
Ok, we’re almost there, one more to go.
Once you’ve combined your data and ensured that it is clean, organized and fraud free, you move onto number 5, which is to analyze which ad networks, campaigns, bidding strategies, and creatives drive the best or worst return on investment, ROI, and return on ad spend, or ROAS
Key takeaways
You need Attribution, or as some call it, conversion tracking, to connect the effect of your marketing performance, with the cause to help you analyze and optimize for better performance and faster growth.
There are five key steps:
1) to track and measure all in-app activity
2) to collect and aggregate your granular campaign data
3) to automatically combine our attribution and marketing campaign data
4) to fight mobile ad fraud
5) to analyze your combined, clean data to figure out your ROI and ROAS and optimize your campaigns accordingly