View-Through Attribution: Shifting Gears in Performance Marketing

A successful performance marketing campaign comprises different elements, from building the right user insights and creatives to evaluating the appropriate network partners and ad spend. And to get all the elements of a campaign right, performance marketers rely on mobile measurement and attribution reports as the single source of truth. If missing a small piece of data could result in a poor campaign, cranking the right levers can drastically improve campaign performance. View-Through Attribution (VTA) is one such lever that can buoy campaign outlook from merely achieving targets to delivering beyond expectations. Attributing for both clicks and views indicates the true reach and influence of a campaign on mobile users.

Impact of VTA across campaign stages

1. Precision targeting for quality users

A deep understanding of user behavior that signals high lifetime value (LTV) is the holy grail for mobile marketers. And yet, performance marketers fail to account for the behavioral and engagement patterns of 85% of users who are non-clickers, which includes high-LTV users. With VTA, performance marketers can capture the behavior of high-LTV users outside of clickers i.e. among non-clickers as well. Thus, building holistic user insights for precise targeting.

First recorded in a study by comScore, non-clickers are defined as users who do not click on display ads in a month. Many non-clickers deliberately refrain from clicking an ad despite being interested in the product being displayed. For example, instead of clicking on an ad to download a gaming app, non-clickers will download it directly from the app store. By optimizing the campaign for clickers alone, marketers are studying and analyzing only a tiny cohort of high-LTV users, and therefore risk not acquiring high-value users who may be non-clickers

2. Investing in the right networks

Performance marketers can increase their chances of success by investing in networks that maximize returns. VTA-enabled networks optimize for both clicks and views, effectively lowering the acquisition cost per loyal user (CPLU), and thereby delivering the best return on investment (RoI). At a time when the cost of acquiring high-LTV users is rising at 101 percent year- over -year, investing in the right network is of paramount importance for performance marketers.

3. Enhancing campaign performance

By partnering with networks that optimize based on VTA, performance marketers can achieve app install uplifts as high as 120%. With feedback on both click-based and view-based installs, campaign optimizations across the network expand reach efficiently and at scale to all clicker and non-clicker high-LTV users. In addition, previously unavailable premium inventory can be accessed, thus improving the share of high LTV users being targeted. Marketers can significantly boost performance by making accurate and complete information on user behavior and total ad installs available to partner networks through VTA. By partnering with leading mobile measurement and attribution players such as TUNE, Kochava, Appsflyer and Adjust, performance marketers can leverage VTA with the flip of a switch.

Mobile marketers today need to overachieve and deliver outstanding results to influence marketing budgets. By brushing aside all non-click based installs as organic installs, marketers are discrediting their own efforts on the mobile medium. With VTA, marketers can better influence the allocation of digital marketing budgets across mobile and partner networks by accounting for the true Return on Ad Spend (RoAS). This in turn enables performance marketers to smartly invest in expanding their user base while constantly improving the contribution of high-LTV users. VTA is a vital leaf in the performance marketing playbook that cannot be missed.