Announcing Xpend, AppsFlyer’s cost aggregation solution

Today marks an important milestone for AppsFlyer with the announcement of our next-generation cost aggregation product, Xpend.

Over the past few years, we’ve worked with thousands of customers and partners measuring tens of billions of dollars in ad spend through our legacy cost aggregation product. Everything we learned was used to create Xpend.

With Xpend, you can calculate your true ROI with a holistic cost aggregation solution, built on attribution data you can trust.

If you are a performance marketer, you are familiar with the pain of fragmented cost data and are well aware of the market’s need for a cost standardization solution. You’ve done the tedious work of manually generating weekly spend reports for hundreds of channels, pulled together endless spreadsheets, combining data from different sources, filling in missing gaps, and correcting wrong data. And, you’ve likely come to terms with how inefficient and error-prone this all is.

Despite putting in the effort, the data you get is often not at the level of granularity you need to make smart decisions. Simply put, the data can’t be relied upon to allow marketing teams to act fast on their spending goals, or accurately optimize their campaign budget in any way.

Since ROI and ROAS are such important KPIs for performance marketers, it’s hard to imagine not having a solution that can accurately provide cost data at scale or be counted on to attribute that data properly.

That’s why we’ve built on years of experience working with performance marketers to create a product that can truly meet all of their cost aggregation needs, Xpend.

Xpend is replacing a previous solution that processed ad spend data manually via an ingestion file or through the attribution link.

As marketers struggle to keep up with their scale and data complexity, the Xpend team recognized that a more innovative approach is necessary to achieve real optimization success.

Furthermore, with industry changes looming above, using cost data tied to attribution links alone may pose its own set of challenges. This is why aggregating cost data directly through integrations with network APIs is a critical solution for tomorrow’s marketers.

As we have written before, having partial ROI data is almost the same as having no ROI data (as it came to be looked at as a zero-sum game).

Data comes from hundreds of channels, ad networks, and custom sources; each with thousands of campaigns and keywords, endless creatives and ads. When you add different currencies, source-specific dimensions, and various placements to the mix and you’ve got yourself what some marketers might call “their worst nightmare.

With the launch of Xpend, we set out to provide solutions to these challenges based on years of dealing with data at scale.

Beyond scale, we understand the need for a reliable platform that is built to support complex schema and data mapping. Rather than having to work with multiple vendors, Xpend lets you access all of your data from one in-house solution. This means you don’t have to rely on ‘hacks’ resorted to by other providers to extract the data in a delayed and untrustworthy process that can conflict with data security and privacy compliance standards.

Measuring ROI at a granular level is no longer a fantasy but rather can be provided for you at the click of a button with the same attribution platform you know and trust.

After all, why does attribution need to be separate from your cost data? It doesn’t, and that’s why Xpend is the only right solution.

“We’re proud to partner with AppsFlyer to offer apps a full view of cost and revenue, a key capability in performance marketing. Our enhanced cost integration aligns perfectly with our innovative products at Snapchat, providing reliable and actionable measurement to advertisers. Enabling accurate ROI calculations is a critical step towards increased efficiency and growth loop acceleration in a mobile app’s lifecycle.” – Sheila Bhardwaj Measurement Partnerships, Snap

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Cost ETL (extract, transform, load)

Since each channel or source may differ in its campaign and reporting schema, querying and analyzing data directly becomes challenging, which is what Xpend solves for.

CostETL will provide streamlined access to all this normalized cost data directly into an S3 bucket. This makes the process of ingesting data into your own BI system a breeze, with a customized data scheme and regular data updates.

60+ API integrations, now including Twitter, Tencent Social Ads, and more

In the past few months alone, AppsFlyer Xpend has reached 60+ API integration supporting all the major networks.

We are excited to announce that Twitter and Tencent Social Ads are now fully integrated via reporting APIs into Xpend, as well.

With the industry beginning to shift towards a more aggregate way of measuring marketing efforts, the importance of having an accurate, complete, actionable, and secure cost aggregation solution has become paramount.

In parallel to our innovative solutions for attribution in the aggregate era, we are also ensuring that your entire marketing stack is all-systems-go for the challenges that lie ahead.

It’s time to consolidate vendors, empower yourself with sophisticated solutions, and focus on your bottom-line.