App Marketers’ Wildest Dreams Are Coming True: APS New York 2019

This month our very own Tommy Yannopoulos took to the stage at App Promotion Summit in New York to talk about the most exciting innovations in mobile marketing measurement. Here are 5 of the top takeaways from his presentation.

[04:00] “Attribution - while incredibly effective at making our lives a lot easier and centralizing our reporting - provides only a simplified version of reality. This is especially true in the case of last click attribution and last touch. In the case of last touch attribution, if I serve an ad to someone and they download my app and make a purchase in my app, all of the credit for that activity goes to whoever served that ad. The problem with that is that it doesn’t take into account anything that may have happened with that user before.”

[06:10] “ If you tell a vendor, ‘I’m going to judge your campaign based on a seven day click window and a 24 hour view window’, then the problem is that vendor is incentivized to drive a ton of clicks at a really low cost. And, like we saw before with CPC pricing being the measurement that we used in 2002, that doesn’t lead to business outcomes - that leads to someone driving as many clicks as they possibly can without real intent of driving revenue for you.”

[07:13] “In general, attribution models do lead to an overall misalignment of incentives and they make it really hard for us to understand what is the true value of a particular source that we might be testing at a given time.”

[07:27] “We would argue that setting better incentives means measuring what grows your actual business. It means Incremental Revenue. Incremental Revenue means you can say these ads cause more sales. Incrementality means you have the ability to prove that sales were caused by the particular ads you might be serving.”

[07:47] “This is where we’ve all been trying to get to over the last 20 years - to prove that a particular source is responsible for a particular amount of revenue. This is what Incrementality does for you.”

[08:10] “Attribution looks to say, ‘These activities are happening within an app. Who gets credit for these activities? There’s a purchase that happened and someone served an ad to them - well then that purchase value goes to that particular vendor’ That’s not quite right though. Incrementality looks to answer the question, ‘Was there an increase in sales caused by the additional marketing channels?’ It doesn’t look to take credit for the things that already exist and would have happened. It looks to say ‘On top of all this, is there actual value in this particular vendor?’ “

Ongoing uplift testing [13:01] - “Incrementality needs to be measured in an ongoing way.”

Free of cost [13:20] - “In order to measure it in an ongoing capacity, it also needs to be free of cost. Most advertisers aren’t interested in incurring 20% cost for PSA ads.”

Significant results in a reasonable timeframe [13:33] - “For small apps, this can be really challenging. If you have a really small app and a really low volume of converting events, how do you gain statistical significance? What your vendor should be able to do is provide different levels of control groups that you can test against. So it shouldn’t have to just be a 10% control group. Maybe it makes more sense for a 30-40% control group. Having that ability to dynamically shift the size of the control based on the size of your app is really important.”

Verifiable [14:10]- “It’s one thing for a vendor to say, ‘Hey, this was incremental and we’re kicking ass for you guys.’ It’s another thing for them to say, ‘We’re kicking ass and also, here’s all the data for you to verify that.’”

Remerge is proud to offer Incremental App Retargeting that meets all of the above criteria. Contact hello@remerge.io to make all your mobile marketing measurement dreams come true.😉