What is a tracker?

In mobile measurement, a tracker is a campaign tracking link. A mobile advertiser must insert a tracker into a campaign to allow them to measure performance. This includes reporting on how many clicks and impressions a campaign generates, showing how efficiently users convert.

Trackers also provide information on the users who convert, allowing marketers to dive deeper into their data and analyze activity throughout the mobile marketing funnel.

Trackers are an essential component to mobile measurement because they provide advertisers and marketers with the granular data necessary to assess advertising performance. An ad campaign without a tracker will provide no campaign-specific data (or partial data if the campaign publisher has a dashboard) to the advertiser. Without this essential data, mobile advertising would simply be an act of faith.

With a tracker inserted, advertisers are able to analyze how campaigns perform, understanding whether they deliver value and then using that information to inform their marketing strategy.

In particular, trackers provide value for advertisers further downstream. When trackers are used in conjunction with a concerted attribution and analytics effort, they help advertisers identify the most valuable users, feeding that information back into their targeting efforts.

This is important when companies scale up their user acquisition, ensuring that they are only increasing their ad spend with networks that will improve ROAS.

A properly constructed tracking structure allows advertisers to easily compare performance across networks and partners. This helps advertisers spend their budgets more efficiently on a significant scale, ensuring they can strategically expand their mobile marketing campaigns.

Adjust uses trackers in two ways. Firstly, trackers are used to provide a link to your app; secondly, they are used to segment users who interact with the link so they can be analyzed effectively.

Before implementing trackers, it helps to know the corresponding terminology and their definitions, including:

• Tracker URL: This is your link (including the domain, tracker token and query string).

• Parameters: These are additional components that can be added to your tracker URL to modify its behaviour. To learn more about dynamic callback parameters, take a look here.

• Query string: This is the set of parameters you have added to your tracker URL.

• Tracker token: This is the code seen after the domain and before the query string.

Adjust’s trackers automatically redirect to the App Store, but advertisers can freely modify trackers to redirect to other locations and create multi-platform tracking links for other stores. Furthermore, Adjust has a number of attribution partners who advertisers do not need to create trackers with. Integration with the likes of Facebook, Twitter, Google Universal App Campaigns and Snapchat also helps advertisers to easily track their campaigns.

To learn more about using trackers with Adjust, take a look at our official documentation. More information about receiving partner parameters (available on session, install, reattribution, and event callbacks) can also be found here.