Mobile Attribution Myth Busting: “This Won’t Work with My In-House Analytics”

By Harrison Taylor On Sep 25, 2018

DecisionPoint Systems Introduces the Vision Portal, A Managed Services Gateway for Enterprise Mobility

How does a myth become truth? Repetition, repetition, repetition. And in the mobile marketing realm, we’ve been hearing the same myths for a long time, especially when it comes to mobile attribution.

It’s certainly understandable that myths take hold in our industry. Quite often, in a fast-moving realm like digital marketing, old information that was once held as true is never refreshed or revisited. And, why would it be? The average media buyer is often overworked, overwhelmed, and underpaid.

When tasked with evaluating attribution and measurement, they need to ensure both functions across a slew of different vendors and campaigns. They also need to get campaigns live, wrapped, and reviewed as quickly as possible. Understandably, this can result in sticking with what they know, and not taking their limited time to question and verify their own knowledge. And who can blame them? How can they know that their information is outdated if it seems to be working according to plan?

That said, our industry can’t afford to let mobile attribution myths hold back investment in this critical area anymore. That’s why we’re going about busting the most common myths in mobile attribution in this series of articles. (Check out part 1, which addressed the myth that mobile app to site attribution isn’t possible, here!) In this installment, we take a look at an equally prevalent misconception.

Myth: “This won’t work with my in-house analytics.”

Oftentimes, we hear from clients that they already have their own solutions in place (either proprietary or licensed from a third-party), and they express concern that a partner’s attribution solution can’t work simultaneously — or that a partner’s attribution solution will somehow interfere with their existing one.

Neither of the above is actually true. Sophisticated partners will be able to seamlessly plug into whatever a client is using. Typically, a client has required macros/values that they need partners to pass in specific positions within a campaign measurement URL. Partners can customize the link format and macro placement, making it easy to seamlessly pass data into a clients’ attribution and analytics engines, and then back to the partner solution when a measurement event occurs.

Obviously, in-house analytics tools are significant investments, both in terms of money and time to implement. Marketers shouldn’t let misconceptions around the capabilities of these solutions — or the capabilities of their partners — hold back their investments in critical areas like mobile. Talk to your mobile partners, or mobile partner prospects, and formulate a plan for drawing their insights into your system. You’ll likely be surprised by what’s possible in this regard.

Author’s note: Stay tuned for part 3 of this series, in which we’ll discuss mobile attribution and gaining transparency into where ads appear.