What you need from your Mobile Measurement Partner (MMP)

MMPs provide mobile attribution service for app advertising campaigns. As the industry continues to mature, however, leading mobile measurement partners are evolving into cross-platform, full-function, globally useful marketing and advertising measurement platforms that offer instrumented visibility into growth campaigns.

Ultimately, a mobile measurement partner is a growth tool marketers use to collect, organize, understand, and activate all of their marketing data, particularly with regard to mobile apps, but also on the web and other platforms.

For mobile, this means unifying all campaign data across paid and organic, social and search, including impressions and conversions, as well as app data including installs, opens, engagements, and key events. It means assigning marketing credit for installs and sign-ups and purchases, tracking of uninstalls, and more. For most brands, it also means cross-platform marketing measurement, web-based marketing analytics, plus other digital platforms. And for many, it even means integration of out-of-home advertising or email marketing or newsletter links so that marketing technologists can pull all the data from all their campaigns into one place.

How to choose an MMP

Here are ten simple steps to help you through the process:

1. Diagnose the need for an MMP
2. Decide on your mobile measurement needs and goals
3. Build a team of stakeholders including marketing, finance, BI, product, and executives
4. Decide on budget
5. Identify top options
6. Shortlist the ones that look like potential fits
7. Get a demo and feel out how the company responds to inquiries
8. Get detailed specs and data from each of your shortlisted candidates
9. Evaluate your options
10. Make a decision

In 2022, that often means a lot of searching, reading, and watching before actually contacting an account executive AKA sales rep. (You can also check business and SaaS software review sites like G2 Crowd to see what other growth professionals say.)

The best mobile measurement partners are platforms that integrate tightly with your data infrastructure as well as your marketing partners’ data infrastructure. They have teams that quickly respond to the always-fast-changing mobile advertising ecosystem. They have lightweight, capable, and configurable SDKs that ship inside your app or integrate via server-to-server technology, so they have to be completely robust, reliable, trustworthy, and transparent about what they do.

What to look for in a mobile measurement partner

There’s some general functionality that you expect to get (but won’t necessarily) in every MMP, and there’s the specific product capability that you need and must have in your chosen partner.

 In the big picture, your MMP needs to:

• Collect all your cost and revenue data, including from ad monetization
• Measure your performance
• Provide accurate attribution data (table stakes)
• Optimize your ad spend
• Prevent or alert you to potential fraud
• Fit well into your tech stack
• Connect to all the advertising platforms you do business with, or might potentially choose in the future (you don’t want future options limited by your MMP’s capabilities)
• Present insights in a way your team can understand and apply them
• Ship data where you need, when you need it, and in the specific formats that you need it
• Manage new technologies like SKAdNetwork or Privacy Sandbox for Android
• Be 100% transparent about data capture, storage, and use, so that you’re not put at risk as a result of unforeseen and unknown errors or liabilities

 What about reliability? Does the MMP you want to work with share uptime status and history?

 What about customer support? Shockingly, not everyone instantly knows how to apply every tool. Nor do new processes and requirements forced by ecosystem changes come naturally to everyone.

 What about number of partner integrations? As a fast-growing and nimble brand, you want the freedom to advertise anywhere you think you might find pockets of inexpensive high-value users, players, or customers. The last thing you need is to find out that your MMP doesn’t have a deep, official integration with either the industry’s leading platforms, or an integration for the slightly-obscure-but-potentially-critical marketing partner you want to test.

 And ease of migration: most growing and big mobile brands have an MMP. The devil you know often seems better than the devil you don’t, and you know that switching will have costs, complexities, and perhaps a few tears along the way. Does the MMP you’re considering make it easy to switch?

 Unsurprisingly, price also matters. Here the challenge is not so much to get the pricing details from each MMP but to dig deeper and find out how the pricing might change with volume, or what’s not included in the base price that you might really need, or whether you can get pricing that evolves with your needs.

 Interested in a no obligation consultation? Contact Raghavendra (Raghu) Verma at https://www.linkedin.com/in/kvraghuvarma/

Singular is trusted as the next-gen analytics and attribution solution by some of the biggest brands worldwide, who use Singular to fuel their growth.