Tracking Marketing Server-Side for Mobile App with Adjust
Before launching mobile marketing campaigns, setting up thorough tracking for your app is essential. Tracking is key to understanding user behavior, assessing your marketing strategies’ effectiveness, and optimizing campaigns to drive engagement and conversions.
Good tracking enables you to make informed decisions about which strategies are most successful in acquiring, engaging, and retaining users. It also helps you manage and refine paid marketing campaigns by identifying which ads attract users who convert or stay engaged with your app. Given the complexity of the subject, I’ve decided to focus on the tracking of Mobile App. I’ve also written an article about marketing tracking for SaaS.
Given the complexities of mobile app tracking — especially with evolving privacy policies and app store guidelines — this article will guide you through essential mobile tracking practices, address privacy challenges, and provide concrete steps for setting up tracking that ensures your data remains both comprehensive and accurate.
An Introduction to Mobile App Tracking
Before launching your paid marketing campaigns, it’s crucial to set up a solid tracking system covering both product and marketing aspects.
Tracking will help you:
- Understand user engagement
- Identify effective conversion funnels
- Optimize paid marketing campaigns with precise data
Good tracking provides the insights needed to make informed decisions and maximize your ROI (especially ROAS). Mobile app tracking has two main aspects: product tracking and marketing tracking.
Product Tracking:
Product tracking involves everything happening within your app and how users engage with it. It includes analyzing the number of users for a specific feature, clicks on a button, paywall interactions, churn, and so on. Essentially, it’s all about your product and its adoption. This isn’t the focus of this edition, but I recommend looking into it before you dive into your marketing tracking!
If you haven’t set up your product tracking yet, I recommend this video to gain perspective and define your product metrics: Consumer Startup Metrics | Startup School.
Marketing Tracking:
Marketing tracking covers tracking your marketing actions (organic or paid) and their impact on acquisition/activation. You’ll use marketing tracking when you start running ads and need visibility on which ads are bringing in users (and revenue).
Marketing tracking tools (also called Mobile Measurement Partners or MMPs) analyze ad campaign performance by accessing your conversion data (downloads/revenue) and correlating it with campaigns across various ad networks (using private ad network APIs).
Beyond just tracking, these tools also help ad networks optimize campaigns based on results to achieve more conversions. Newer platforms like TikTok Ads & Snapchat Ads don’t even have tracking SDKs, relying exclusively on data sent back by MMPs.
Choosing an MMP
Among marketing tracking tools (MMPs), platforms like Adjust, AppsFlyer, Branch, Singular, and Kochava stand out. We recommend Adjust for its good price-performance ratio and reliable tracking. This MMP allows you to analyze your mobile app’s performance and accurately attribute conversions to specific campaigns:
- Install Tracking: Identifies user origin (organic or paid) and analyzes Cost Per Install (CPI) to optimize budgets.
- In-App Event Attribution: Tracks key actions (e.g., sign-ups, purchases) and optimizes channels based on conversion rates.
- Fraud Prevention: Filters out fraudulent installs for more reliable data.
- Cross-Platform Tracking: Offers a complete view of app performance on Android and iOS.
- Cohort Analysis: Tracks user behavior by cohort to understand retention and value over time.
- Marketing Automation: Adjusts budgets automatically based on ROAS with Adjust’s Automate tool, saving time and improving efficiency.
Only a few tools can provide mobile tracking and attribution because linking your in-app data with ad network data requires access to private ad network APIs. Fewer than ten tools currently have this exclusive access, allowing for accurate data correlation and mobile attribution.
The Evolution of Mobile App Tracking
Like web tracking, mobile tracking has evolved significantly in recent years, largely due to new privacy regulations.
Initially, tracking and attribution tools could analyze and associate data through device advertising IDs without special consent. Each device had an easily accessible advertising ID that could be shared with ad networks.
However, with iOS 14 and the introduction of App Tracking Transparency (ATT), user consent is now required to collect this advertising ID.
Apple now restricts access to the advertising ID (IDFA) and introduced SKAdNetwork, an IDFA-independent tracking system that doesn’t require user consent. However, this system has limitations for detailed in-app behavior analysis.
On Google’s side, the Privacy Sandbox for Android aims to balance privacy and ad tracking. Currently in beta, this project is developed in collaboration with key industry players, with a full rollout expected by 2025.
Tracking tools (MMPs) like Adjust require user consent but allow for detailed post-install conversion tracking. Meanwhile, SKAdNetwork offers attribution without needing consent, providing an overview but with limited post-install information. These two approaches complement each other, making both essential for a complete attribution strategy.
Setting Up Tracking with Adjust
As mentioned earlier, I collaborated with Damien from Adjust for this edition. My goal, as always, is to make this edition as actionable as possible. I asked Damien to help me set up mobile tracking for one of our apps, Cray Cray, so I could walk you through a step-by-step tutorial on setting up marketing tracking with Adjust.
Step-by-Step Tutorial:
The first step is simple: create your account on Adjust.
Next, set up your app profile and retrieve the associated token.
To begin collecting in-app data, add the Adjust SDK. This will allow you to track sessions by identifying both new and existing users.
You can choose to collect data (such as conversion events) directly through the SDK or in server-side mode (from your backend to Adjust), which avoids the need to publish an SDK update each time a change is made.
Adjust considers the first time an application is opened as an installation. This can sometimes create a slight discrepancy with the number of installations reported by Apple.
Next, add custom events in Adjust, each with its own token, allowing you to link external data flows to these events.
For example, for a revenue event, connect data from your revenue management tool (such as RevenueCat) via the token. RevenueCat’s backend will then send the information to Adjust with the correct user identifiers (like the advertising ID and Adjust ID), and Adjust will handle the correlation needed for attribution.
📍 Here is the video tutorial for this step:
Verification of the configuration
We will now check that the tracking and attribution parameters are correctly configured to ensure the accuracy of the collected data and maximize the impact of our advertising campaigns.
Creating a Test Tracking Link
- Log into your Adjust account.
- Go to the Custom Links section.
- Create a dedicated test tracking link, integrating necessary attribution parameters.
Tracking link test
- Click on the tracking link you’ve created.
- Check the correct redirection to the store (App Store or Google Play).
- Download the app, open it and accept ATT (App Tracking Transparency).
ATT acceptance is essential for IDFA (ID for Advertisers) to be collected.
Testing in the Testing Console
- Once the application is open, access Adjust’s Testing Console.
- In the Testing Console, follow the installation assignment to check that it is correctly registered and assigned.
You’ll need the test device’s Advertising ID to perform this verification.
To obtain the Advertising ID (IDFA for iOS or Google Advertising ID for Android) for your device, download the Adjust Insights app (Apple / Android), open it to retrieve the device’s IDFA/GAID, and use this ID to verify correct attribution in the testing console.
Check the status and attribution of the installation through your test link (TEST) to confirm that the installation has been recorded and attributed correctly.
If you need to repeat the test, uninstall the app from the device before each test. In Adjust’s Testing Console, click “Forget Device” to remove your device’s data from Adjust’s database.
Testing on Ad Networks
To verify ad network tracking, ensure the tracking link and attribution settings are configured in the “Partners” section of Adjust.
Here’s an example of testing with TikTok Ads:
Don’t forget to add your App ID (Apple & Android), available in the Event Manager in TikTok Ads Manager. It is recommended to track only data originating from the ad network (Only data attributed to TikTok for Business).
Don’t forget to add the generated tracking links (Link URLs) to your TikTok campaigns. To do this, access your TikTok Ads Manager account, create or edit a campaign, then go to the ad group level. In the third-party tracking section, enter the Adjust click tracking URL (Click URL) and, if available, the impression tracking URL.
Finalize the setup and launch your campaign for optimal tracking.
Since Apple now requires user consent, optimizing the ATT prompt has become essential. This prompt only appears once, and if denied, the user can’t change their decision. Timing and presentation are key to gaining user consent. I’ll cover this in more detail in a future edition to help you maximize your consent rate.
🎁 2 Months Free Mobile App Tracking
The Adjust team has kindly put forward a special offer for readers of my article: Get 2 months free after passing the free plan (activate by 2025). Worth over €1,000 (no commitment). If you’re interested, send me a message on Twitter :)
👋 Thanks for getting to the end of the article, I hope it helps!
If you’d like to go further, feel free to contact me on Twitter.
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