What Is an MMP and How Can it Help My Marketing Strategy?

We can’t explain the economy during the pandemic without talking about digitalization. What was expected to happen in the coming years arrived in only months and the mobile app industry played a key role in helping people to quickly adapt to the new normal. 

After two years, some behaviors are here to stay. Consumers, in general, continued to turn to their mobile devices to stay connected and entertained, and people who never had contact with a smartphone were now influenced by their use. According to Statista, there are 84.4 million smartphone users in Mexico, a number estimated to grow to 95.2 million in 2025.

Is 2022 likely to continue to be a year of further shifts in consumption patterns and acceleration of the mobile transformation? All the signs say yes. While we are trying to balance an eventual return to regular activities with an already modified digital lifestyle, companies must be prepared to satisfy consumer needs. And considering the number of users, mobile strategies are more attractive than ever.

Apps: Opportunities for Marketing

Apps have become a success factor for marketing strategies. Adjust’s Mobile App Trends reports have highlighted sustained growth in recent years in all verticals. Just in 2020, installations grew a historic 50 percent compared to the previous year.

From health and fitness to dating apps, people have gotten used to using apps in their daily lives. Some verticals, such as e-commerce, have reported extraordinary numbers: Sessions saw 27 percent growth in Latin America in 2021 and 12 percent growth globally, according to the E-Commerce App Report 2021.

While we continue to see numbers of installations, sessions and time in the apps going up, marketing strategists are finding new ways to improve advertising in the world of possibilities between all these apps. For that purpose, it is important to know and understand the options that some marketing tools offer for our brands.

What Is ‘Attribution?’

Let’s start by explaining what attribution means in the mobile industry. It is “the science of matching two data points, such as attributing ad spend to user engagement or installs based on certain variables.”

Attribution allows marketing specialists to discover where their users are coming from. For example, some installs might come from video ads in an app, others from social media. In a sentence, attribution identifies whether a user installs an app after seeing an ad and then keeps track of how a user behaves after installing the app.

What Is an MMP?

Companies known as MMPs, or “mobile-measurement partners,” “attribution providers” or just “measurement tools,” provide attribution services to advertisers who do any kind of paid marketing for their apps. Their main job is to attribute a mobile app install (as well as post-install events) to the source they come from.

Someone might question why a third party should be involved. After all, shouldn’t this system just exist between the advertiser and the ad publisher? But there’s a good reason behind it.

How Attribution Works With an MMP

Apps, known in this case as the advertisers, buy traffic on Ad Network A, which then serves an ad to a user’s device. The user clicks on the ad, having become interested in the offer, and is sent to the App Store, where the user can (and does) download the app. All of the information, from the network who sent the ad, to the creative, is saved by an MMP, which then reports back to Ad Network A that the click and install have happened.

If Ad Network A and the advertiser didn’t have anyone between them to attribute the install, then the network would effectively control the ad — in effect, it would be like allowing students to grade their own homework. Attribution providers are not only reliable data warehouses but trusted partners in the ad system that maintain the status quo.

Other Characteristics of MMPs

MMPs are primarily known for their ability to help clients track conversions and attribute them correctly but they often provide other services that help marketers improve their marketing strategies and outcomes.

MMPs also usually have a suite of products that augment the marketing stack, such as the ability to segment and build custom audiences for retargeting campaigns, track cohorts and their in-app engagements, receive custom callbacks filled with granular app user data, utilize and track deep links and use combined datasets to optimize ad spend.

The mobile era is here and companies should be planning to jump in now if they are not there yet. Tools like MMPs are designed to help marketing experts reach their goals while taking advantage of a trend that is used by the world’s most recognized brands.