Gavin Deadman
The industry seems to be up in arms over the fact that mobile app tracking is not cookie based.
Luckily where there is a technical issue, there is a simple solution and it’s extremely impressive how new mobile tech start ups have responded with clear and straight forward solutions which work. Has Offers have particularly impressed with their MAT (Mobile App Tracking) product which does what it says on the tin and offers fantastic client service – they do need a European office which is coming though.
Like IP and cookie data, mobile tracking isn’t 100% robust but it certainly does the trick across all devices. Once you’ve chosen your mobile app tracking partner it’s a case of your dev team implementing the SDK and key events across the app passing back variables (especially across registration and sales sections) where applicable.
Next step is to setup a new data feed taking the log level mobile data into your DMP which would have all variables and every mobile device ID you’d ever need to connect the front end data to your back end. Rather than cookie ID, what connects mobile data from click to install as well as from install to your back end data is the device IDs which fortunately for the industry rarely changes (only when you change phones or mess around with the OS).
All mobile tracking tech comes with server to server url conversion tracking in the UI which is fully integrated into hundreds of mobile ad networks already, so you only have to make a couple of clicks and go live with a campaign with the mobile ad supplier for the supplier to view conversion / event data their end to be used for optimisation purposes.
Mobile tracking tech is compatible with all digital channels including paid search enhanced campaigns. As you cannot third party post click track Facebook mobile install ads, you will need to rely on the mobile tracking tech to have an existing integration with Facebook, which would then pull in all of your Facebook campaign data into the mobile tracking tech UI.
Mobile tracking tech are pretty much post click tracking adservers and similar to a traditional adserver you can set CPI / CPX / CPC costs in the UI, set cookie windows and set whether certain event and partner data is de-duped.
Yes, the data team will be saying “not another data feed” but it’s a case of everyone cracking on and getting the job done.
Product Management 
100% where we (MEDIA iQ) are at. If you have your shit together, the Device ID can be used as the same proxy as a cookie / user ID. It really is that simple.
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Data connecting is one thing but tech still needs to be built to deal with the ad network integrations and FB integration which are key.
From the last update I got on the FB integration front, they only allow a few mobile tracking companies to integrate with them which is why a few businesses have had to rule out Cake Marketing as they are still in the queue.
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