Mobile Attribution: Make Sure Your PPC Campaigns Deliver
Which marketing effort caused someone to press the download link? You will never know. You must solve the mobile attribution problem and track where your users are coming from. This is the only way you will know which promotions are working and which ones aren’t so that you can tweak the successful channels and ditch the ones that aren’t working.
And, with mobile ad spend growing rapidly, it’s becoming even more crucial for you as a marketer to accurately pinpoint which channels are actually converting for you.
The Mobile Tracking Problem
No data, no business. You must be able to attribute each app download to one or another of your marketing channels. But, you can only do that if you have tracking data.
When someone downloads your app after seeing a video ad in another app they are using, you have no way of knowing which ad has persuaded that person to press the download button.
You could just run one ad at a time, but you want your business to grow quickly. For rapid growth you need to:
- Have multiple marketing channels from day one
- Identify the 20% of your marketing that delivers 80% of your downloads
- Stop the worst 20% of your ads as soon as you identify them
- Use split testing to improve your best-performing ads
- Use deep-linking to take customers directly to action pages to increase conversions
What Is Mobile Attribution?
You need to attribute each app download to one partner, marketing campaign or channel. Only then will you be able to judge how effective each effort has been. Only then will you be able to reward the partner whose work has brought the sale. You also need to avoid paying two partners for the same sale. Mobile attribution platforms allow you to do both. They use probability matrices to help overcome the problem of identifying a single user who uses multiple devices and only allow each app download to be attributed once, so you never pay two partners commission for the same download.
The Problem With IP Addresses
IP addresses are shared by thousands of users on a mobile network and the address of any user changes as he or she moves from one network tower to another. Even on a home network, each user does not have a unique IP address.
Mobile advertising fraud is on the rise in 2019. It could empty your marketing budget with false downloads in a few hours as you pay for automated downloads to imaginary buildings full of non-existent mobile devices.
Getting All The Data
Google, Facebook, and Twitter are famous for their reluctance to share the different data points along your customer journeys; yet, you need that data to help understand your customer and to make the buying process easier.
Deep Linking
Making it easier for customers to buy is central to mobile marketing. Nobody wants to go through unnecessary steps to download an app or make a purchase. This is where mobile deep linking comes in.
You would never send new customers to your home page, rather, sending them directly to a sales page. Similarly, mobile deep linking lets you send visitors directly to a product page within your app instead of the front page. A mobile attribution platform makes deep linking simple.
You can use deferred deep linking if the individual has not installed your app. The user will be taken to their app store to download and install your app, once installed the app will automatically open at your sales page.
Long Story Short
Mobile marketing grows in importance every month, yet tracking mobile sales is notoriously difficult. Mobile attribution software is an essential tool for any mobile marketer because it uses algorithms and probabilities to assign each and every app sale to one or another marketing channel or partner.
Any tool that removes steps on your customers’ journeys will increase conversions. Using your mobile attribution provider’s deep linking facility is a no-brainer way to improve your bottom line by sending them directly to product or sales pages.
