What is a mobile measurement partner (MMP)?
What is a mobile measurement partner?
A mobile measurement partner (MMP) is a company that acts as a third-party provider to attribute, collect, and organize app data to deliver a unified overview of a brand’s campaign performance.
With an overwhelming volume of campaign data across multiple ad networks, it can be difficult for app marketers to determine which channels, media sources, publishers, or campaigns are leading to conversions and high quality users. MMPs provide marketers with an impartial, unbiased, and accurate overview of mobile attribution, by indicating which source—or sources—should receive credit for driving a conversion (an app install or in-app event).
In short, app marketers utilize MMPs to understand the ROI of their marketing campaigns and how to further optimize them. Beyond mobile measurement and attribution, an industry-leading MMP should also provide deep linking, an analytics solution with easy-to-understand visualizations, next-generation technologies like incrementality, and the ability to attribute beyond mobile—across connected tv (CTV), PC, console, web, and more.
How does an MMP work?
Mobile measurement partners typically work via a software development kit (SDK), which can be integrated into an app for the purpose of linking ad engagements with app installs and in-app events. The SDK—code that collects measurement data—serves to attribute app installs and post-install events to the correct user acquisition source and marketing campaign. This provides granular insights such as which ad delivers which users and which creative won those users over. For installs where a device ID is available, this matching is done at device level, for cases where no device ID is accessible, such as iOS users who have not opted in to tracking via App Tracking Transparency (ATT), this is done via SKAdNetwork (SKAN) aggregated level attribution.
The current industry standard of attribution modeling is multi-touch attribution. MMPs utilize multi-touch attribution to identify every touchpoint that influenced a user’s decision to install and distribute the credit accordingly. For channels like CTV or social, where impressions are often critical to conversion but aren’t necessarily the last touch point in a journey, this is particularly important in measuring their true impact.
For a deep dive into mobile app attribution, the role of MMPs and how they work, as well as how you can get started, get your copy of our all-in-one playbook: The essentials of mobile app attribution.
Which analytics should an MMP offer?
At a minimum, an MMP company should offer analytics on impressions, clicks, installs, in-app purchases (IAP), and revenue metrics. The list below includes the basic analytics an MMP should supply, along with some of the more granular metrics measurable with Adjust. We’ve also included a high level overview of what information these analytics provide to app marketers, or why they are valuable.
Within Adjust’s Datascape, you can view conversion metrics, cohort metrics, SKAN metrics, ad spend data, and more. For the comprehensive list of all Datascape metrics, you can view our Help Center article.
The ability to analyze these metrics is critical to understanding the success of your marketing campaigns, along with which channels and campaigns are providing you with the highest quality users. This is why app marketers use an MMP to make data-informed decisions regarding their campaigns and budgets to ultimately grow their customer lifetime value.
Without unifying this information in one place—and receiving unbiased insight into performance—it very quickly becomes almost impossible to manage a data-driven approach to mobile app marketing.
The metrics above are a quick look at what is available in Datascape, which also allows creation of custom metrics, meaning there is no limit to what you can measure, analyze, and have visualized in your dashboards.
Adjust Growth Copilot adds another analysis layer, along with increased simplicity. Leveraging AI, it enables marketers to query their entire data set for real-time answers to questions, in the form of a chat. Say, for example, you want to know the ROAS for a specific campaign, and whether performance is good, you can ask in plain language, and receive the answer immediately.
The benefits of using an MMP
Most app marketers turn to MMPs out of necessity. In order to scale your app, you need to be certain your numbers are correct, that you're not losing budgets to fraud, and that you’re focusing on the right channels, campaigns, and users. An MMP gets organized and data-driven, with following advantages:
Get a unified overview
An MMP will provide all of your campaign data across multiple channels and networks in one single place. Comparing results is, therefore, much easier.
Save time
Forget going through countless spreadsheets and dashboards (not to mention too many discrepancies) to get the answers you need for attribution and budget allocation. An MMP’s SDK does the heavy lifting, so you don’t have to manually measure and attribute every conversion for your ad networks and channels.
Accurate data
An MMP provides clean data so you know where to spend your budget and how to optimize your app’s performance, ROAS, and LTV.
Scale intelligently
With real-time data at your fingertips, you won’t waste your time and money in the wrong places. With fast and accurate data from an MMP, you’ll be able to invest more in the best-performing platforms and channels for faster, smarter growth.
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What to look for in a mobile measurement partner?
Convinced an MMP is what you need? The next step is to pick the right mobile measurement company for your app business. In addition to deep insights on your campaigns, you’ll want an MMP that offers the following:
Privacy-oriented
With each passing year, concern grows around protecting app users’ privacy and ensuring compliance with the latest regulations, frameworks, laws, and developments. Any serious MMP should operate on the basis of user privacy first, with stringent adherence to requirements. We suggest looking at how an MMP protects user data, its approach to data residency, its privacy certifications, and its solutions for campaign optimization based on aggregated data.
See Adjust’s Protect and Recommend pillars for more on data protection, security, and measurement for the privacy era.
Intuitive and advanced features
If an MMP’s platform is just as difficult as operating multiple spreadsheets, it’s not worth it. The features of the MMP should make your marketing life easier, not more complicated. You should be able to segment your data however you want, get results in real-time, easily generate deep links, streamline campaign optimization, and unify all data in one powerful dashboard.
Fraud prevention
You need an MMP that stops fraud at the source to prevent fraudsters from affecting your analytics and budgets. The MMP should take care of identifying fake traffic and installs as well as click bots. Before signing up with a platform, read their ad fraud protection policies or ensure they have a proactive and preventative fraud solution.
Audience segmentation
Manual segmentation? No, thanks. The partner you choose should allow you to automatically group users and update every audience in real-time. Simply select your criteria and quickly run A/B tests or cross-promotion for your entire app portfolio with a few clicks. At Adjust, we help companies increase user engagement daily with Audiences, part of our Engage pillar.
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Choosing Adjust as your mobile measurement partner
Adjust’s all-in-one, next generation attribution and analytics platform is built for app marketers looking to make quick, smart decisions based on accurate data. Clients get real-time analytics from all campaigns, channels, and sources in one dashboard. See all the technical details on our attribution methods or get started with Measure to learn how we provide the full picture across all devices and channels.
As an MMP, we know understanding the entire user lifecycle is essential to optimizing your campaigns. Therefore, Adjust provides visibility (via device level and aggregated data insights) and advanced capabilities for growth with:
- Unlimited measurement across mobile, web, CTV, pc, and console.
- Unification of all analytics, reporting, and monetary metrics in one place.
- Granular insights to pinpoint the campaigns, creatives, and channels that deliver the best users.
- Privacy-centric measurement for SKAN, the upcoming Privacy Sandbox on Android, and more.
- ROI and ROAS measurement.
- AI-powered incrementality and next-generation, future-proof technologies.
- Frictionless, multi-platform deep linking to boost revenue and engagement.
- Real-time, proactive fraud prevention.
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Working with Adjust is an extremely safe choice in terms of security and data protection, as we don’t utilize a third-party cloud system but have instead built our own servers to store the data we collect. We’re user-privacy first, so you can rest assured that your users’ data is fully protected.
To learn more about how Adjust can help your app grow at scale as your mobile measurement partner, request a demo today.
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