The Mobile Ads DarkHorse: The App Handoff (Part 2) Attribution & Analysis
In PART 1 I talked about the mobile ad to app handoff, the cases you would need mobile landing pages, and how to think about testing ad install vs. ad to page to install.
In this post I’m covering how to properly setup for tracking both methods to an app install so you can analyze the engagement & revenue, by time period, of each user cohort.
Ensuring Proper Tracking and Measurement
First things first, you’re going to need to choose the mobile attribution provider you fancy most. There’s a number of MMPs out there: Kochava, Adjust, Appsflyer, etc but everyone is slightly different *or limiting*.
Appsflyer and Adjust are both pretty recommendable. Adjust has great attribution link creation, but gets a little tricky when customizing tracking parameters for various user flow purposes. Also, worth a bit of praise: the integrity of a key integration with Mixpanel (noted at the end), which Appsflyer and Branch both have good documentation for.
Once you choose your MMP or land on a solution you and your dev team can agree on, you’ll need to implement the SDK (Appsflyer also integrates via Segment for an additional bonus).
Setting up Ad Campaigns
For each ad network, the setup for 2 different methods we’re testing will be slightly different. Your campaigns will need to either be web campaigns or mobile install campaigns.
For the Ad > Mobile Landing Page option, you’ll choose to optimize for an action on your website
For Direct to mobile app, you’ll choose the campaign for optimize for Mobile App Install
Adwords
For the Ad > Mobile Landing Page option, you’ll create web campaigns (starting with either Standard or All Features)
For direct to mobile app, you’ll choose a Mobile app installs campaign
Twitter — same procedure as Facebook for the most part
Once you’ve modified the settings for your campaign, then established your adsets or adgroups structure, you’ll move on to creating your ads. With any particular ad you’ll fill in the copy, drop in your creative, decide on placement, and finally you’ll need to ensure tracking for every ad. This part is big…
For install campaigns, your setup is fairly on the simple side:
For Adwords — you’ll setup your Ad URL in the “Final URL” slot or you can use the dynamic tracking URL at the campaign or adgroup level. The important part is to make sure to add all the attribution parameters to your link from your MMP. For example, you’ll write in
http://app.appsflyer.com/id2t48t20t727?pid=googleadwords&...and so on
More about setting Appsflyer parameters for your Adwords Ads here
For Facebook — you’ll have setup your Facebook App ID and tied that your campaign. There’s no further URL configuration needed as each MMP has an integration with Facebook (postback) that receives the campaigns, adset, ad data.
The more advanced part — the ad to mobile landing page setup:
For Adwords — make sure to setup ads in the dynamic URL tracker at the adgroup level or higher. Set your dynamic URL with the dynamic landing page insertion in the first bracket: {lpurl}?. Then follow with UTM parameters AND parameters from your MMP (you’ll need these params for the next step: the JS logic on your landing page) . In this example I’m displaying Appsflyer parameters:
For Facebook — this time you’re setting up a web URL. You’ll need to include the landing page URL along with UTM parameters and MMP parameters. You can write the parameters at the end of the URL in the URL field or you can add each one as part of their URL tags feature.
The URL field example would look like:
As a side note — Twitter Ads would work very similar to Facebook with regards to the URL setup for each method.
After you’ve finished setting up your respective campaigns you’ll want to track each of your tracking links for every campaign, adset/adgroup, and ad variation in a spreadsheet. You should separate your ad networks and, for adwords, make sure to separate each tracking URL (web & mobile).
Now that you’ve got you’re URLs setup, you need to send users either straight to the App or to mobile landing pages. I’m not going to cover how you should be creating your landing pages, but will mention that there will be 3 different ways you can prompt your mobile app install on the page:
- With install button at the top or bottom of the page, which you render as the top focal CTA on the mobile page
- With an interstitial that appears over the mobile page
- Using a Smart Banner, which can be a handy feature. The folks at Branch.io have easy Smart Banners you can use as part of their services.
Whichever way you prompt to Install the App, the most important part is being able to track installs on the landing page from the respective ad.
Quick note — Install App ads are simple enough, you’ll read the campaign type, media source, adset/adgroup, and whatever else you want to classify (depending on the MMP and what custom parameters they allow) in the MMP analytics dashboard.
Graphic on how ID matching works for mobile apps:
For iOS devices, the click to install correlation (through the App Store black hole) is done by utilizing your device’s IDFA. You can read more on that here. For Appsflyer, they preach a more sophisticated attribution technology called NativeTrack. For Android, most attribution is done with fingerprint and ID attribution. Attribution being much easier with Google since you don’t lose user id through the App Store.
Back to tracking attribution after users hit the mobile landing page…
Once the user hits the landing page with those attribution tracking parameters noted above, you’ll want to make sure you’ve written certain logic on your landing pages:
The JS you write depends on whether or not you’re cookie-ing users with custom “MMP specific” referral parameters to set as properties of a user.
- If you don’t, you can write something like below to send every parameter in the incoming URL query along with the “Install Button” on the mobile page, as usersr click through to download your app.
- If you do, you’ll need to speak with your developers about writing code that cookies users with the custom params on the tracking link they initially hit a page with. Then sets those params as properties for that anonymous user, so their behavior stays consistent whenever the user revisits your mobile page (within your set attribution window: 30–90days). Similar to the JS used with Mixpanel, which auto creates super properties for incoming UTM parameters, and sends UTM properties along to another page with the revisiting, anonymously identified user.
BONUS CONCLUSION
One important consideration you’ll want to make is how you’ll be analyzing user behavior over time from these different app acquisition methods.
Doing user level analysis is not that easy when you bring mobile attribution into the equation. You could export CSV reports from your chosen MMP and hack together spreadsheets with data from different places. Or you can use the MMP API and add a new column or whole table(s) to your database to pull out specific reports.
One way to simplify this process is to use the SDK -to- SDK integration with Appsflyer/Adjust and Mixpanel (forwarding the attribution object to Mixpanel) where you can consolidate your acquisition info in one place, segment by platform, pull together retention analysis, and much more.
Read more about the integration here: https://mixpanel.com/blog/2014/09/24/measuring-the-value-of-mobile-ad-campaigns. And, as mentioned at the top of the article, Branch has a handy Mixpanel integration if you choose to utilize their SDK, as well.
Alright, now you’re set to track mobile attribution for either path to install and can further setup to analyze app usage behavior for each cohort of users, install method.
Feel free to ping me on Twitter or Linkedin, should you have any further questions or know anyone that needs help in this area.
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