Adobe and AppsFlyer: Bridging mobile and the omnichannel experience

By Ben Roodman

Over the last year, we have been working closely with our partners at Adobe, building new exciting integrations and innovations together.

We sat down with one the smartest voices in this space, Matt Asay, VP, Mobile at Adobe to talk mobile measurement in an omnichannel world:

AppsFlyer: Thanks for joining us. To get started, can you tell us a bit about Adobe’s point of view on mobile in an omnichannel world, and why you selected AppsFlyer as your sole business-level attribution partner?

Matt: Here at Adobe, we like to say that mobile is more than just another marketing channel. Mobile is a leading channel for new customer acquisition, the most effective driver of purchase activity and the primary channel for customer loyalty and conversion. Businesses making serious mobile investments need to both properly measure this growth, and connect it back to their overall business. The AppsFlyer and Adobe partnership helps to answer this need, delivering advanced mobile attribution and connecting this mobile growth data back to the Adobe Experience Cloud. This customer-centric approach delivers an accurate, mobile-first seamless and fully optimized cross-channel experience.

Adobe’s unique business-level partnership with AppsFlyer allows our customers to seamlessly connect their mobile marketing investments with the rest of their customer journey, helping them better measure, understand and improve their cross-channel customer experience and bottom-line ROI.

AppsFlyer: What are the benefits of Adobe’s Business-Level Partnership with AppsFlyer, and what does this offer marketers?

Matt: Enterprise businesses and marketers in specific, do not have the time or interest in manually setting up, maintaining and troubleshooting their platforms. AppsFlyer is Adobe’s only business-level attribution partner, providing mutual clients with dedicated, enterprise-grade support and best-in-class integrations. We have done the hard work, so you don’t have to.

To take this a step further, our product and development teams work closely together, aligning on product roadmaps and new feature development. This is more than an integration, it is a true business partnership.

AppsFlyer: What role does mobile attribution play for enterprise marketers? How is this changing as marketers shift towards a mobile-first omnichannel mindset?

Matt: Increasingly, we are seeing that marketers really need to leverage every available datapoint to improve their buyer journey. In a mobile-first world, AppsFlyer’s best-in-class attribution is integral to strategic, omnichannel marketing strategies. For example, AppsFlyer’s comprehensive media cost integrations with leading networks provide more than just cost-per-install benchmarks. When marketers sync their attribution signals back into Adobe’s Marketing Cloud, they gain valuable insight into the omnichannel ROI of their media spend.

AppsFlyer: How do you see mobile attribution data signals driving enterprise business?

Matt: Firstly, allow me to give credit where it is due. The depth and quality of AppsFlyer’s integrations with networks around the world provide a powerful campaign setup, management, attribution and measurement platform. The data sync back to networks is key to both user acquisition and retargeting. Adobe takes this data to the next step.

Once setup in AppsFlyer, marketers further sync this attribution data with the Adobe Experience Cloud (including Adobe App Analytics), providing robust profiling, segmentation, and targeting across the Adobe ecosystem. Marketers use these signals to segment users who came from specific ad campaigns for targeted, automated email follow-up, or target users who came from Facebook Ads with messages about their upcoming Facebook campaigns. This isn’t just about connecting the dots, it’s about unifying the customer journey across channels.

The impact is powerful.

AppsFlyer: How does Adobe look at the growing issue of mobile fraud? How does this impact the value of mobile attribution signals when they are synced over to the Adobe Cloud?

Matt: Mobile fraud requires two unique capabilities: scaled data and technology. While many providers have chosen to focus on technology, today’s criminals have found ways to outwit these solutions. In order to properly combat mobile fraud, these solutions must be able to deploy machine-learning solutions across a massive, fresh database. Only this new class of fraud solutions can properly protect and immunize against the most advanced and costly types of mobile fraud.

AppsFlyer’s unique scale powers Protect360, putting their anti-fraud solutions in a class all their own. This unique level of protection provides marketers with the assurances they need to seriously invest in mobile growth.

Furthermore, the impact of this fraud protection extends far beyond the mobile channel. While mobile fraud is more most often discussed in the context of mobile user acquisition, the damage does not end there. As this fraudulent data travels upstream into the marketing cloud, marketers risk polluting their broader datastream, misattributing their ROI and building inaccurate customer journey models, audiences and segments as a result.

AppsFlyer: Let’s explore that sync further. A few weeks ago AppsFlyer rolled out Audiences, offering a new way to sync user segments over to Adobe Audience Manager. From Adobe’s perspective, where have you seen the strongest value for marketers?

Matt: AppsFlyer’s Audiences platform delivers strong integration with Adobe Audience Manager. This feature allows marketers to define audiences in AppsFlyer using AppsFlyer’s unique data signals, such as uninstalls, continuously updating the defined audiences in Adobe Audience Manager.

For example, in AppsFlyer’s Audiences platform, a marketer can create an audience comprised of users who completed a purchase over $90 in the last 30 days, and uninstalled in the last week. With just a click, they can then sync this audience over to Adobe Audience Manager for follow-up engagement, and exclude this audience segment from future targeting to protect user privacy and data.

This unique integration is fully pre-configured, so the marketer doesn’t even need to setup or troubleshoot field mappings. Moving forward, this audience will continuously update, maintaining an accurate Adobe Audience for re-engagement.

This is a very strong feature, and part of our continuing efforts to align our product roadmaps and built stronger solutions together.