What is a Mobile Measurement Partner (MMP)? Incipia Miniseries

Learn about how the iOS 14 SKAdNetwork changes may affect MMPs in this post, and get your checklist for handling iOS 14 here.

Q: What is a Mobile Measurement Partner (MMP), and why do you need one?

A: MMPs such as AppsFlyer or Adjust are attribution tools which record the source/date of each new app user and tag each event that user completes in the app back to the user’s origination source/date. This gives marketers a "source of truth" for calculating the cohorted ROI of marketing campaigns.

While you can see the source of new downloads in Apple’s App Analytics and Google’s Play Console, these are insufficient for two reasons:

1. There is no indication of the medium (i.e. paid, earned, or otherwise) of each individual source, and they do not distinguish within each source (e.g. which campaign / ad group / ad / keyword)
2. There is no source ID (e.g. campaign ID) or user ID to tie latter events back to the date of acquisition, which is necessary for cohorted reporting.

Additionally, while you can use your ad network’s SDK for attribution, multiple networks may serve ads to the same user, which would cause inaccurately inflated numbers across all networks. This is especially common with the move towards impression-based attribution, which increases the number of installs that ad networks can lay claim to.

For instance, we have seen discrepancies in the number of installs reported by a network vs an MMP from 10% to 400%.

Check out our article on how ad attribution works or refer to this AppsFlyer post for more information on the topic.

The Incipia Marketing Miniseries is a collection of 250-500-word posts on topics spanning App Store Optimization, user acquisition, and analytics, written by Incipia CEO, Gabe Kwakyi – speaker, author of over 300 articles on mobile marketing and co-author of the Advanced ASO Book.

Incipia is a growth marketing consultancy, with a specialty in advertising, App Store Optimization, and analytics. For post topics, feedback or business inquiries please contact us, or send an inquiry to projects@incipia.co