Two Years Of Measuring Marketing For Mobile With Appsflyer
May 29, 2018

Two Years Of Measuring Marketing For Mobile With Appsflyer

Srikanth Bangalore | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with AppsFlyer

AppsFlyer is being used by the whole organization. We have a central AppsFlyer integration that supports all the apps. 59 apps so far! We use AppsFlyer to achieve measurement for marketing campaigns for these mobile apps.
  • AppsFlyer dashboard reflects metrics in real time. If you click on a link on your mobile device and then install/engage, then, the result shows up in the AppsFlyer dashboard within the minute. This fast metric is really useful for testing.
  • AppsFlyer has a product called data vault that gives you both organic and non-organic traffic attribution details - for every single call made. It is great for doing more analysis.
  • AppsFlyer customer service is phenomenal - I have phone access to at least two people in Appsflyer - one an account manager, and another, an engineer.
  • AppsFlyer has great integration with other mobile networks (SSPs). I was evaluating using DoubleClick for Mobile vs AppsFlyer. At the time of evaluation, AppsFlyer was miles ahead and integrated with every ad network that we were interested in. Moreover, Facebook has the most audience that we are interested in - AppsFlyer was better suited for that than DoubleClick.
  • The AppsFlyer UI for generating individual campaign trackers is terrible. I gave them feedback and they tell me that they are working on fixing it soon (in 6 months?).
  • AppsFlyer documentation for server to server integration for both install and engagement campaigns is (still!) very confusing.
  • We have spent more than $50 million on mobile campaigns, all tracked through AppsFlyer. If we assume measurement adds at least 10% value, then, we can quantify ROI at at-least $5 million.
  • We have 59 apps on AppsFlyer.
  • We have integrated with 101 ad networks through AppsFlyer (i.e. created trackers to run ads on these networks).
We actually did an integration with Kochava. Our integration was Server To Server. It did not work out - we never got the right attribution. It was also a challenge to verify a real end-to-end campaign with a mobile network. To be fair, this was done 3-4 years ago, and Kochava might have improved in the meantime.

I evaluated DoubleClick as a way for measuring mobile attribution but gave up when I realized that most of our audience is on Facebook. DoubleClick does not integrate with Facebook, but AppsFlyer does.


If you are doing marketing for apps and doing real-time bidding/price adjustments, then, AppsFlyer's integration will help you double the value (than if you did no integration - basically ran a cost-per-click campaign). If you wanted to do funnel analysis of how your users navigate your product, then use something else - like Flurry Analytics.

Using AppsFlyer

10 - We have a central system - so the number of people depending on AppsFlyer is close to 100. But only 10 people deal with AppsFlyer directly - they are the operations manager, media buying team, and integration engineers.
5 - 
We have server to server integration with AppsFlyer - and we have 59 apps that are integrated with AppsFlyer. To support this, we have 5 people.
2 persons to work with individual apps for onboarding them.
1 person for importing the reports from AppsFlyer into an internal dashboard
2 persons to integrate with AppsFlyer server to server.
  • Mobile marketing measurement
  • Buying decision in real time
  • Server to server integration (as opposed to SDK), because we are paranoid about 3rd party SDKs
  • If you buy audience on Facebook.
AppsFlyer works well with our use cases already, and is working on addressing the gaps (of trackers UI)