Marketing is becoming mobile-first: Sanjay Trishal, AppsFlyer

With India’s population at 1.3 billion, around billion of them use mobile phone which makes this platform having the largest potential to reach out to audiences. The ad spends on mobile is growing at a CAGR of around 43 per cent, and the explosion of mobile advertising can't be denied. This makes it sometimes difficult for advertisers to understand the audiences they want to reach out, effective ad placement, etc.

To make this tedious process simpler, AppsFlyer a leading mobile attribution and marketing analytics platform, measuring billions of dollars in mobile ad spend annually, provides data and insights to marketers and advertisers to make smarter decisions in planning effective campaigns. AppsFlyer is considered an Attribution Authority, which works independent of the advertising industry, but assigns credit to the appropriate media partner (be it a publisher or ad network) for user actions like app installs or events like in-app purchases, using various technologies.In comparison to other analytics solutions -- the attribution data that AppsFlyer provides is used for billing and charging, in addition to the routine measurement and optimization. This effectively means that both advertisers and media partners depend on our data to settle more than $4 billion in media payments annually. Currently, over 10,000 app marketers, agencies and brands use our proprietary solutions to measure and optimize their marketing performance.

Sanjay Trisal, Country Manager, India at AppsFlyer, talks more about the marketing attribution space, measurement parameters and mobile advertising strategies. Excerpts: 

Adgully (AG): What benefits does the AppsFlyer platform offer?
Sanjay Trisal (ST): Advertisers and marketers need an unbiased, third-party platform for measuring and optimising their mobile marketing and advertising activities, and AppsFlyer provides that solution. While many networks offer their own attribution services, these usually have limited accuracy and can present transparency issues. With billions of advertising dollars changing hands, both advertisers and ad networks need a reliable attribution data source for billing. Because of the inherent conflict of interest between advertisers and publishers/ ad networks, there is need for an independent, credible, reliable platform to measure advertising campaigns that is trusted by both parties. This is where we come in.

AppsFlyer provides marketers with unparalleled insight into not only their media performance, but the bottomline impact of their efforts. For example, many mobile marketers measure their campaign effectiveness using media metrics such as conversion rates. While media metrics are important to marketers, the ultimate metrics a marketer should be looking for are cost, lifetime value (LTV) and return on investment (ROI).

Among other features, AppsFlyer is the only attribution provider in the world to offer real-time ROI for Facebook ad campaigns. For those building successful and sustainable businesses, automated, real-time ROI reporting is a game changer for mobile app marketers.

Additionally, app marketers are increasingly looking to television campaigns as an important outlet for broadening their reach and positioning their brands. AppsFlyer's TV campaign attribution solutions allow mobile app marketers to track which installs and app-generated revenues came from which television ad campaigns. This not only helps marketers optimize their broadcast media buys, but allows them to benchmark their broadcast media alongside all their digital and direct media channels.

AG: How is the marketing attribution space evolving? What should marketing managers focus on?
ST: Marketing is becoming mobile-first. Beyond the far greater usage, mobile serves as the main connector to the offline world with location-driven advertising and mobile payments. As the space continues evolving, more and more companies will adopt performance based marketing models in which advertisers pay only for valuable user actions such as purchases or bookings.

As this trend materialises, mobile attribution experts can develop robust measurement, and catch up with desktop by developing other advanced fractional attribution methods including time decay, even, linear and custom models.

AG: Do you believe that the measurement parameters need to change?
ST: On the mobile marketers end, the focus should be on measuring activity that generates actual value besides creating awareness. This should effectively translate from a cost per install (CPI) pricing model to a cost per action (CPA) model by measuring in-app engagement, retention, revenue, in-app purchases and of course [true] ROI using cost data, and multi-touch attribution. Then, they should focus, as much as possible, on connecting the dots to better understand audience behaviour and the consumer journey.

AG: Who are AppsFlyers’ partners and what are the attribution volumes being handled?
ST: At present, we are official partners to Facebook Mobile Measurement, Google, and Twitter. We have over 1,500 integrated media partners. AppsFlyer provides mobile advertisers with unbiased attribution, smart deeplinking, mobile campaign analytics, in-app user engagement tracking, lifetime value analysis, ROI and retargeting attribution for over 800 million installs each month.

In India, leading brands offering varying services use our platform. These include PayTM, Quikr, BigBasket, GoIbibo and of course, all three major mobile service providers – Airtel, Vodafone and, recently, Idea.

Internationally, brands such as Macy’s, HBO, Alibaba, Jet.com, Trivago, Samsung, Under Armour and other prominent companies and agencies use AppsFlyer to track, measure and optimise their mobile campaigns. By attributing the right installs to the right campaigns and by understanding the true value of each install (based on in-app activity), marketers can boost their performance and their ROI.