Any marketing campaign for a mobile app essentially aims at finding the most effective, highest-conversion advertising strategy encouraging app purchases and installs at the lowest cost. Advertising channel performance can be assessed directly with post-click attribution. Each app install is matched to a click on a link or banner to help conclude which advertisement performs better.
However, the user does not always take an immediate interest in the product or app after viewing the banner or reading the advertisement. A few hours later, having read the entire news feed, the user thinks back about the product he has taken interest in. Then the user finds the app in the app store and decides to install it.
In such a case, it would be reasonable to attribute this action of the user to that particular advertisement since it caught his attention and made him install the app. Attribution of the user's actions to particular advertisements, even if not clicked immediately, is called post-view, or view-through, attribution.
Post-view attribution, also known as view-through attribution, links app installs to your advertising campaigns, even where the user does not immediately click on the ad or follow the direct link, but finds your app by other means at a later stage. Conventional attribution techniques neither count such users nor identify what particular factor has encouraged an app install, regarding them all as organic. Why is post-view attribution useful (and even necessary) for marketing specialists and media buyers?
MyTracker is able to track both post-click and post-view installs. To enable post-view attribution, an advertising network should support adding impression-tracking pixels. Such a pixel is uploaded when the user views an advertisement and contains information about the user’s device, helping to attribute a subsequent app install to the view. You receive the tracking pixel URL when creating a tracking link in MyTracker.
Post-view attribution looks for a connection between the following two events:
If the two events occur one after another within a relatively short time period, it can be assumed with reasonable certainty that it was an ad impression that encouraged the user to take an action. The time period between the two events is called the attribution window. It can be set up either at the project level or advertising campaign (tracking link) level.
We do not recommend making too large post-view attribution windows. Too large windows may lead to the cannibalisation of organic and non-trackable (TV, word of mouth, featuring, search, etc.) traffic. Attribution windows are most often set to span a few hours to one day to be sure that the user does not have much time to forget the advertisement.
Post-view attribution in MyTracker comes always after post-click attribution. First, MyTracker looks for a relevant click of the user. And only if it is not found, MyTracker checks for an ad view. In other words, clicks falling into the attribution window (including those made before the view) will always have a priority even where the ad view is closer in time to the app install by the user.
Since post-view attribution does not assume any definitive interaction with the user, it is more susceptible to fraud and is less accurate than post-click attribution. For this reason, there are two rules in MyTracker that apply to it:
