What mobile attribution measures
Mobile attribution connects an app install (and the in-app events after it - purchase, subscription, level completion) back to the marketing touch that drove it: an ad click, an organic store search, or a referral. It has to solve this without the cookies web attribution relies on, because apps do not have them.
Why it's structurally different from web attribution
Since Apple's App Tracking Transparency (ATT) framework made IDFA (the iOS device identifier historically used for attribution) opt-in, deterministic device-level attribution is no longer available for most iOS users by default. Apple's answer is SKAdNetwork - a privacy-preserving framework that reports install attribution in aggregate, with delayed and limited data, rather than deterministically per user.
What a mobile measurement partner (MMP) actually does
An MMP sits between ad networks and the app, and handles the parts no single ad network can be trusted to self-report honestly: deduplicating installs claimed by multiple networks, filtering fraudulent installs, normalizing SKAdNetwork postbacks into a single reporting view, and providing deep-linking so a click can route a user to the right in-app content post-install.
AppsFlyer, Adjust, and Branch compared
| Platform | Where it tends to be chosen |
|---|---|
| AppsFlyer | The largest install base among the three by measured brand search volume; broad ad-network integration coverage. |
| Adjust | Common in fraud-prevention-focused evaluations; comparable core feature set to AppsFlyer. |
| Branch | Frequently chosen where deep linking quality (routing a web or email click into a specific in-app screen) is the deciding factor. |
No fake reviews and no ranking here - the honest answer is that comparison-shopping demand between these three is real (people actively search "X vs Y" between them) but demand for hiring a consultant to implement any single one of them measures far lower than for a platform like Klaviyo [fact, measured 2026-09-01]. hypothesis: MMP implementation is treated as an in-house technical task more often than an outsourced one, which is consistent with why we do not run a dedicated MMP implementation practice.
App install attribution methods
- Deferred deep linking - a click before install still routes the user to the right in-app screen after install completes.
- SKAdNetwork - Apple's aggregated, privacy-preserving postback model. See the dedicated SKAdNetwork explainer.
- Probabilistic matching - inferring a match between a click and an install from correlated signals (IP, device type, timing) where no deterministic identifier is available.