What is a mobile measurement partner (MMP)?

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. Mobile measurement partners provide marketers with an impartial and accurate overview of mobile attribution by indicating which source should receive credit for driving a conversion.

In short, app marketers utilize mobile measurement partners to understand the ROI of their marketing campaigns and how to further optimize them.

Mobile measurement partners typically offer an SDK (Software Development Kit), which can be integrated into an app for the purpose of linking ad engagements with app installs and in-app events. The SDK 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.

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. If you’re new to mobile attribution, check out our guide: What is mobile ad attribution? An introduction to app tracking.

At a minimum, a mobile measurement company should offer analytics on impressions, clicks, installs, and in-app purchases. We’ve listed below the basic analytics a mobile measurement partner should supply and what information these analytics provide to app marketers.

An MMP reveals:

• How users interact with ads via impressions, clicks, and installs
• How users interact with apps via session lengths, in-app events, and in-app revenue
• Users and campaigns with most value via user lifetime value (LTV), conversion rate, and return on ad spend (ROAS)

As you can see, these analytics are critical to understanding the success of your marketing campaigns. 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.

Most app marketers turn to an MMP out of necessity. In order to scale your app, you need to be certain your numbers are correct, you're not losing budgets to mobile ad fraud, and you’re focusing on the right users. A mobile measurement partner helps you get organized 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 too many spreadsheets and dashboards (not to mention too many discrepancies) to get the answers you need for attribution. A mobile measurement partner’s SDK does the heavy lifting, so you don’t have to manually measure and attribute every conversion for your ad networks.

• 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.

Convinced an MMP is what you need? The next step is to pick the right MMP company for your 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. Any noteworthy MMP should operate on the basis of user privacy first. We suggest looking at how an MMP protects user data, its approach to data residency or where it stores user data, and its privacy certifications.

• 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, find results in just a few clicks, have deep linking capabilities, and streamline your campaign optimizations…to name a few!

• 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 Fraud Prevention Suite.

• 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 our Audience Builder.

Adjust’s intuitive analytics platform is built for app marketers looking to make quick, smart decisions based on accurate data. Clients get real-time analytics on both aggregated and cohort data in our dashboard. For a full look at our attribution methods, click here.

As a mobile measurement partner, we know understanding the entire user lifecycle is essential to optimizing your campaigns. Therefore, Adjust provides full user-level visibility with:

• Uninterrupted user lifecycle tracking
• Uninstall and reinstall tracking
• Unlimited event tracking
• Multi-touch tracking

We’re also one of the safest attribution partners 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.

Speaking of security, we’re known for our Fraud Prevention Suite that fights and stops fraud at its source. This way, you can focus on spending, measuring, and experimenting confidently with any partner. To learn more about how Adjust can help your app grow at scale as your mobile measurement partner, talk to us.