The Complete Guide To Mobile App Attribution

A lot of app developers and marketers today use mobile attribution to help them maximize their return on investment (ROI). With mobile attribution, you get crucial data to decide how you are going to change, improve, or sustain your overall marketing strategy.

Today, you are going to learn what mobile attribution is, why it is important for your app strategies, and how to do mobile attribution.

What is mobile app attribution?

Mobile attribution is the process of identifying which marketing activity converts a user. As its name suggests, with app download attribution, you try to “attribute” or “give credit” to the channel that caused your users to do a specific action such as downloading or purchasing a product in your app.

A quick example of app install attribution

To better understand this, let’s have a quick example. A user can have tens of interactions with your app before finally downloading it. 

With a simple tracking tool, you might easily identify that it is your landing page that caused him to download the app. Yet, in reality, that’s not really accurate. 

Your user probably has seen your ads in the past. How about the social media posts you made? Perhaps, your user has read your blog. Maybe, they received your emails. All these could have influenced your user to finally make a decision to download your app.

That’s what mobile attribution is all about. It aims to determine which of your marketing strategies and the impact that they have on your user and cause them to perform your desired action.

Why is mobile attribution important?

Here are the best reasons why mobile attribution is important:

1. Know the source of your users

2. Measure the success of your marketing effort

3. Improve your marketing campaign

How mobile attribution improves advertising campaigns

With the fierce competition in app stores today, you need solid and strong advertising campaigns. Your number one aim is to improve your app’s visibility in app stores so more people discover your app. You can do this by using the right keywords, placing keywords in the right places, improving screenshots, creating app previews, choosing the best app icon, and crafting compelling descriptions.

Mobile attribution can help you gather vital data to help you formulate the best advertising strategies. For example, mobile attribution can identify where your users came from. 

Did they download your app after seeing your ad? Did they use your app after seeing your app listing page? Did they choose your app when browsing through the app store? 

You can answer all these questions through mobile attribution. Basically, mobile attribution helps you know where your users are coming from and how they discovered your app.

Since you will have a better understanding of where your users are coming from and how many of them are coming from a specific network, you can better refocus your marketing efforts to maximize results.

Essential elements for mobile attribution

There are different elements for mobile attribution to be successful. These are the following:

• Touchpoints – touchpoints refer to the action of the user that will lead to in-app actions or app installs. Touchpoints can be impressions and clicks or other external events. There are three primary sources where touchpoint data are collected. These are tracking links, server-to-server (S2S) API, and referrer.
• Conversions – conversions refer to the in-app events, which may include purchases, installs, and add-to carts. To track conversion, app attribution tools provide SDKs, which allow your app to send data to the attribution provider for any event that happens in your app. Aside from SDKs, S2S API can also be employed.

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