The Lowdown on Mobile Measurement Partners (MMP)

The best way to improve any marketing team’s efficiency is to have a deeper understanding of all marketing spend. Many companies already have one or more analytics tools to help their teams measure key performance indicators (KPIs) and other vital metrics, but this is only part of the equation.

Marketing managers are faced with many challenges every day, from planning for growth, ensuring that new campaigns go off without a hitch, and constantly measuring the impact of their efforts. These goals are often at odds with each other: growth requires more spending, but raising budgets without first knowing which channels are most effective means spending money on channels that don’t deliver results. Just as important as it is for marketing managers to understand their current marketing channels, it’s equally important for them to keep up-to-date on new ones in order to stay ahead of the competition.

The best way for marketers to focus on what really matters is by being able to answer questions like: Are we making the right investments? Which channels should be our priority? Which channel partners are driving the most success? How can I optimize my digital marketing strategy?

MMPs, or Mobile Measurement Partners, can provide instant answers to these questions by enabling marketers to understand every aspect of their marketing spending. Leading MMPs such as Singular manage all this via an SDK for your apps, code for your websites, links for digital and offline marketing, and server-to-server solutions to provide you with complete flexibility.

Your MMP can help you harness the power of technology to take your business to new heights or cause it to lose ground to competitors who have adopted new technological trends.

What do MMPs do?

While certainly not a comprehensive list, these are the basics of what you should be getting from an MMP:

• Organize campaign data.
• Measure marketing results.
• Verify ad partner performance.
• Optimize in-progress campaigns.
• Protect advertisers from ad fraud.
• Provide a single view of global performance.
• Enrich marketing and conversion data for value-added insights.
• Stream data into BI systems quickly, efficiently, and immediately.
• Calculate the lifetime value (LTV) of users, players, or customers.
• Create audiences for episode and live or dynamic marketing campaigns.
• Capture and aggregate spend data across hundreds or thousands of partners.
• Combine spend and conversion data to calculate overall and campaign-level return on ad spend.
• Provide multi-platform deep linking, deferred deep linking, and tracking/measuring link capabilities.
• Simplify integration, compliance, and optimization for emerging mobile attribution models such as SKAdNetwork and Privacy Sandbox for Android.
• Navigate complexities in partner management by standardizing data definitions and terminologies and normalizing both spend and conversion data.
• Collect data from major platforms such as Facebook/Meta, Apple Search Ads, Google, Snap, Twitter, Tiktok, and others that only offer access to a small number of select partners.
• Ensure legal compliance with all applicable privacy legislation and platform requirements.

So how do you choose an MMP?

Choosing a mobile measurement partner is not much different from choosing any other big software platform. To make a sound decision, you have to carefully diagnose the need, determine your goals, assemble a team of stakeholders who care about the decision, and then move forward with the purchase process.

When considering mobile measurement partners, it’s important to understand how different companies and product offerings measure up to your unique needs. The first step is to diagnose your overall mobile marketing needs—not only what you have now, but what you think you’ll need in the future—and figure out how an MMP can help you meet those goals.

After making a list of what you want to accomplish, who your target markets are, and why mobile matters to your business, it’s time to build a team of people who can weigh in on the decision. In addition to marketers, product managers, and executives who could benefit from data and insights into how their mobile strategies are performing, consider anyone else who has a stake in the process.

If you’re looking at an MMP that integrates with or supplements your current BI software or campaign management platform, you’ll need input from IT. If the company will be contributing its own analytics or reports to your existing tools, find out which reporting tools they’re using and whether there are any compatibility issues between them. The more people involved in the decision-making process, the better. They’ll all have different questions about mobile measurement capabilities that can help you decide who is best for your particular situation.

In 2022, it may take you a lot of searching, reading, and watching before contacting an account executive (sales rep) but it’s still worthwhile tuning in with colleagues and contacts for their opinions and experiences. You can also check business and SaaS software review sites like G2 Crowd to see how growth experts rate different software packages.

Yet MMPs are more than just a piece of software.

The best mobile measurement partners are platforms that integrate tightly with your data infrastructure.  They have teams of marketing experts who are always on the cutting edge of mobile advertising.  Their SDKs are lightweight, configurable, and easy to implement so that you can focus on your app’s core features. They are built with integrity, reliability, and trustworthiness in mind.

In choosing an MMP, you make a decision that will affect your organization’s future for years to come and grow as you grow. This means you need to have total trust in the development team, customer service staff and management, and the company’s ability to respond to any concerns or challenges that arise in the future.

What Should I Look For in a Mobile Measurement Partner?

You have to be clear about the general functionality you expect from an MMP, and you need to do your homework and find a partner who can deliver on specific product capabilities required by your organization.

MMPs must:

• Optimize ad spend.
• Measure performance.
• Fit well into your tech stack.
• Prevent or alert potential fraud.
• Provide accurate attribution data (table stakes).
• Collect cost and revenue data, including from ad monetization.
• Present insights in a way teams can understand and apply them.
• Ship data when and where, and in the precise formats, you require.
• Manage new technologies like iOS’ SKAdNetwork or Privacy Sandbox for Android.
• Connect to all your existing advertising platforms and ones you may work with in the future.
• Have full transparency about data capture, storage, and use to avoid unforeseen and unknown errors or liabilities.

But of course, it gets much more detailed than that. There are some often-overlooked soft skills:

Reliability: Does the MMP you want to work with share uptime status and history? Can you be confident that your mobile measurement partner will be able to scale to meet peak demand, or could it crack under pressure?

Customer support: Shockingly, not everyone instantly knows how to apply every tool. Nor do new processes and requirements forced by ecosystem changes like SKAdNetwork come naturally to everyone. Customer support that is fast, effective, and — particularly important — local and in your language matters.

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 deep, official integration with the industry’s leading platforms or integration for the slightly-obscure-but-potentially-critical marketing partner you want to test. So, check the number of partner integrations and ensure it matches your expectations.

Ease of migration: 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? Do they do everything possible to make it simple? Will they walk with you and hold your hand during the process?

Some of these are challenging to quantify with the existing clients of the MMP you’re investigating to learn these details from them. 

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

Lastly, how innovative is the partner you’re potentially bringing on board? Do they keep up with industry trends? Do they have the latest technology? Do they solve the newest problems? Are they always on the alert for changing conditions that require changing approaches to the core problems of attribution and marketing measurement?

Picking The Right Mobile Measurement Partner

If you’re interested in a comprehensive list of questions to help you to better make your decision, book an obligation-free meeting with a Singular consultant to help walk you through the process.

Singular’s next-gen attribution and analytics powers marketers to grow faster by uncovering accurate, granular, and timely performance insights. Worldclass teams from brands like WB Games, Twitter, Lyft, Rovio, Airbnb, Activision, Homa Games, Truebill, EA, LinkedIn, and more use Singular to make smarter user acquisition decisions and analyze the impact of every ad dollar with full-funnel marketing analytics, best-in-class ad fraud prevention, and automatic loading directly into your BI tools.

Ready to take your marketing to the next level?

By: John Koetsier