What is mobile attribution?

Every marketing pro wants to know if and how their campaigns are driving in-app results. Enter mobile attribution tools, technology that can directly link an app install to an ad, campaign, or other marketing effort.

When every marketing dollar counts, data matters. Mobile app attribution can help businesses determine which marketing channels are effective — and which aren’t. This can help them decide where to spend their marketing budgets to deliver the biggest return on advertising spend (ROAS).

When businesses understand attribution in mobile marketing, they can also leverage these insights to improve user acquisition, user retention, and the user experience for their apps, which can also help build engagement and loyalty.

What mobile attribution model is best?

There are many mobile attribution techniques, and each works in a different way to track and analyze user behavior.

Multi-touch attribution aims to capture all the interactions a user has had on the journey to conversion. As the name suggests, multi-touch attribution gathers data from many different touchpoints, such as advertising, social media, emails, in-store promotions, and QR codes. Multi-touch attribution provides a great depth of information for businesses. However, analyzing that data for meaningful, actionable insights may be more challenging for marketers.

In reality, achieving a unified MTA solution is outdated and consumes more resources than are justified.

“You really have to stitch together more than one methodology to get to what the true performance of a given marketing campaign is.”  — Anthony Scarpaci, VP of Growth at Acorns

Considering the many costs and variables involved in building unified MTA solutions as well as the fact that MTA also takes a lot of resources andis increasingly fragmented due to privacy constraints, it might not be the most practical framework to implement for every brand.

Another kind of mobile attribution is last-touch attribution, which is sometimes called last-click attribution. Not surprisingly, this captures information from the last touchpoint a user had before completing an action. While this model is easy to use and understand, it can give an incomplete picture of the path that led a user to a product.

There’s also a model called first-touch attribution, which gathers data from the first point of contact a user had. Alternatively, view-through attribution connects conversions back to an individual impression. Other models may focus on the timing of a transaction in relation to an ad, which is referred to as a mobile attribution window — the point in the customer journey when a user converted.

Each mobile attribution model provides information that businesses can use to streamline their marketing and achieve better results.

Best practices for mobile attribution

First, set the stage for success by establishing clear goals and key performance indicators for your ad campaigns. This will help you select the right mobile attribution model for your needs. For many, the best one is the multi-touch attribution, which will provide a broad — and deep — view of user behavior so you can target your marketing efforts to your most successful channels.

It’s also important to validate the data you’re using for your mobile attribution tool. As the saying goes, garbage in, garbage out. Start with quality data so you get accurate results. Then, invest the time and energy necessary to thoroughly analyze your data and gain the most benefit from this valuable information.

Also, don’t let high tech replace traditional marketing efforts like A/B testing. The two can and should work hand in hand to improve the effectiveness of your campaigns.