The Hidden Threat in App Promotion: Fraudulent Attribution

The mobile app market is a battlefield. Developers and marketers pour enormous resources into acquiring new users, with global app install ad spend projected to reach a staggering $118 billion by 2022. At the heart of this investment lies a critical process: attribution. Mobile app attribution is the science of connecting a user’s app installation to the specific marketing campaign, ad network, or even the exact creative that drove it. Accurate attribution is the bedrock of a successful user acquisition strategy, allowing marketers to understand their return on investment (ROI), optimize their ad spend, and scale their most effective campaigns.

What is mediation

Mediation is a strategy used by publishers (website and app owners) to maximize their ad revenue. They do this by integrating multiple ad networks into their platforms. A mediation platform serves as a central hub to manage these ad networks. In modern digital advertisement industry, such solution is mostly provided by SSP/mobile SDKs. As there are huge amount of advertising network out there ,it’s costly to integrate with most of them. As a mobile app owner, it’s seems impossible to integrate even with a small group of them. In such case, mediation emerged. Traditionally, every ad network offer the budget only to the apps. To maximize the income, some app owners with great development resources implemented their own ad network to diversify their budget source or they integrate multiple SDKs and applies a set of logic layers in app to choose the best bid. However, such not only increases the maintenance cost but also downgrades the user experience which is the nightmare of app owners. Networks started to support mediation since the issue turned out in the market. It was firstly implemented as server side function to distribute traffic to multiple bidders. To avoid performance issue and improve the unit price by narrowing the auction group of bidders, which was known as header bidding. Header bidding was known as a special solution for the client on PC webs. Nowadays, it’s been evolving. We can call it mediation or in-app auction.

What is Retail Media Network

From the beginning of online advertising network, it’s already been more than 10 years. There’s seems no exciting product emerging within last few years in the industry. However, there’s a niche industry within online advertisement industry rising quietly. In recent years, more and more retailers realize that besise the produt sales, they can initialize another revenue stream by monetizing their own traffic. In such case, the retail media network came out as a niche in the online advertisement industry. As it’s called, the retail media network is to sell placements on the ecommerce website to the product sellers. This is exactly the same as Amazon, JD.com, Alibaba , etc. are doing to sell their website traffic inventory to the onboarding sellers or brands. We call those giant ecommerce platforms the top tier players in the market. They’ve already built holistic solution platform to monetize their website traffic inventories. Such solution is quantified with a key indicator which is called takerate. This is the expense that sellers need to spend on the platform based on its sales on it. However, most lower-tiered ecommerce players are not monetizing their traffic inventory thoroughly

Breaking news in the digital marketing industry

Recently, when I was reading news from an RSS reader, I found shocking news of the digital marketing industry. Media Math, which was one of the leading DSP in the world , has announced its bankruptcy. By recalling all the major events in this industry in my memory, I realized that this is the first well-known digital marketing player falling down of all the time. It rang the bell for all the players in the industry. The era of DSP has already gone.

What is OOH

OOH is the breviation of out-of-home advertising, also called outdoor advertising, outdoor media, and out-of-home media, is advertising experienced outside of the home. This includes billboards, wallscapes, and ,screens, posters seen while “on the go”. It also includes place-based media seen in places such as convenience stores, medical centers, salons, and other brick-and-mortar venues.

OOH advertising in the marketing industry

The marketing campaigns are following marketing funnel. For OOH , it’s sitting at the top funnel mostly to drive awareness. Originally, the marketers will research the demographic of selected regions and choose the most fitable region to buy OOH media. It’s widely used by brand awareness marketing, new product release, etc. .

What is header biddig

What was it like before header bidding

Header bidding sounds like a term of ancient online advertisement industry. It truely is. This word was originated from PC era within early 2010s. Header bidding is a trick of publisher placement auction. In short word, it’s a revolutionary businenss model based on cocurrent technology. Before header bidding emerging, publishers had to decide one of the inventory monetization channel before deploy their website. After the decision, publishers had to rely on one of the Adnetwork they chose. Moreover if the buyers/publishers wanted to skip the Adnetwork to save cost , it’s not possible or it will cost too much to switch. In the monetization aspects, publishers were not able to voice on the auction. All the programmatic auctions are controlled by Adnetworks, like Doubleclick Adx, Appnexus, Rightmedia exhange, etc.

What is Generative AI ?

The concept of Generative AI is hot from beginning of 2023. The technical industry becomes excited than ever before. The technical giants all around the world have started arm race on the generative AI products. Generative AI refers to the AI model that can be used to generate content based on what it has learned. It has begun to save work load dramatically in the daily r routine. Chat-GPT, Midjourney, Mircosoft designer, etc. All of them have been starting to replace the roles of repetitive work. Nowadays, generative AI models are used to compose product descriptions, write articles, design product posters, generate marketing assets, etc. More and more cases are coming out. As a veteran of online advertisement, I’m cautiously optimistic on how generative AI can change the world of online advertisement.

What does data mean for marketing

Along with the development of digital marketing, audience data becomes more critical for the campaigns. Nevertheless, how much can data help in the marketing campaigns ? No one can measure that so far like what was happening more than a century ago. Data plays a very sophisticated role in the online marketing for now, not only for marketers but also for the media providers/publishers as well.Obviously, data is not magic spell. Learning from many campaings, I found many failures were caused by mis-configured data. Moreover , marketers should not take audience targeting data as the only factor of successful campaigns. Meanwhile, publishers , in some cases may try to convince marketers to rely more on audience data that they can maximize outcome of limited amount of inventory.

What does Meta live with

Meta which was previously called Facebook, is a traditional social media company. Facebook is obviously their product once shocking the world. It brought brandnew social communication approach to the public. However, as all the other internet companies, it had headache on how to monetize what they have. By checking Meta’s earning report of 2021 and 2022, Advertisement took 99% of it’s income. It seems internet industry can’t find a monetization solution better than advertisement. Online advertisement is eventually a model of demand and supply. Apparently, Meta is on the supply side. Meta advertisement inventory can be devided into two categories, which are O&O inventory and 3rd party traffic. Meta now is monetizing Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp. These apps are owned and operated by Meta. The other set is the traffic on the Facebook Audience Network. According to experience of other similar Ad platforms. O&O traffic and 3rd party traffic are taking different position within an online advertising company. Mostly, O&O traffic plays the role of profit generator, while 3rd party traffic plays the role of scale expander.Two types of traffic are working like gears matching and running the whole machine. Without O&O traffic, companies don’t have capability to build Ad networks from scratch. Withouth extenral 3rd party traffic, O&O traffic will be priced higher and higher and it will result in performance downgrade and advertiser leaving.