Appsflyer, Adjust, Branch are all some of the leading players in the mobile attribution space. Each offers its own unique solution to tracking mobile attribution for things like campaign attribution for first installs, deep-linking, and on-going ad attribution to conversions.

All these players implement common patterns for the two major app stores including Google Play and Apple. Tracking attribution for Google play is significantly more straightforward as compared to that for Apple. This is because of the manner in which Google and Apple treat referrer information when the app is first installed. While Apple strips this information completely, Google does provide a callback API that can be used to fetch the original referrer.

In this educational guide for a mobile attribution startup, we covered the following broad topics

1. Introduction to mobile attribution including tracking ad clicks and first installs
2. Contrasting the implementation for an SDK when working with Google Play vs. Apple
3. Best practices in data capture for effective fingerprinting in Apple. This followed a deep-dive discussion on nuances of how Apple treats referrer information from app install campaigns
4. Providing examples of the kind of data elements that a vendor should capture to improve the accuracy of fingerprinting classifications

The audience for this marketing collateral was the client’s prospects and the purpose was to differentiate the offering from other products by providing a deeper perspective on the data points that the startup collected in order to make attribution more effective.