Mobile ad platform AppLovin loves acquiring companies. On Wednesday, AppLovin entered into a definitive agreement to buy MoPub from Twitter for $1.05 billion in cash. The move makes a lot of sense. Recently-public company AppLovin has been on a mobile ad tech buying spree, with more than a half-dozen acquisitions under its belt in the […]
Gaming apps are getting better at beating install fraud. Just 3.8% of paid installs are fraudulent among gaming apps, according to research published by AppsFlyer on Tuesday, compared with 32% of non-organic installs for apps in other categories. Finance apps have the highest app install fraud rate at 48%, for example, followed by travel apps […]
Fake installs on Android are costing mobile app marketers beaucoup bucks and messing with their data sets. On Wednesday, mobile marketing analytics company Singular released a tool that deterministically validates whether an Android install is real or bogus before the install gets attributed. There are other tools on the market that aim to do the […]
This is the first in a series of deep dives from AdExchanger on mobile fraud and mobile data quality, including guides to fraud tactics and threat vectors and practical solutions from advertisers in the growth and user acquisition trenches. Read the second story (“Mobile Data Has A Quality Control Problem“) and the third (“Anatomy Of […]
Google is opening up an API to stop fraudsters from stealing credit for app installs, and mobile measurement and attribution platform Tune is an early adopter. The API, which was fully integrated into Tune’s platform Monday, enables Google to share data with partners about the exact time an app install is initiated in the Play […]
Mobile app install ads are still a multibillion-dollar business for Facebook. But is Facebook taking too much credit? It’s hard to say, because Facebook is what’s known as a self-attributing network, i.e., a walled garden. A self-attributing network is just what it sounds like: a platform that, usually because of its scale, has the power […]
While mobile app advertising is in dire need of standards, that prospect is easier said than done. Confusion and wrongheadedness in the industry is rife, even among user acquisition specialists. “Ask a room full of UA managers to explain how mobile tracking works and I think most won’t be able to explain the whole process,” […]
Prospecting is one of the biggest challenges facing British carrier O2, especially in apps. “Pretty much every app acts as its own ecosystem – they’re cookieless environments, so actually being able to track someone using traditional methods is nigh impossible,” said Dan Michelson, innovation and capability lead at the Telefónica-owned telecom. O2 is concerned with two […]
IronSource is counting its cash. The Israeli ad distribution and app monetization company, which announced an $85 million round in September, said Wednesday that it’s brought in an additional $20 million from a group of unnamed investors led by Access Industries. These two funding events represent the first time ironSource, which works with Yahoo, Google, […]
Monetizing apps in the iOS environment means playing by Apple’s rules, and occasionally adapting to changes in how those rules are enforced. Sometimes those changes can impact the way ads are served and tracked, as happened back in February when Apple (briefly) put a barbed wire fence around the use its Identifier For Advertising for […]
