Measurement Platforms Review & Comparison
An independent comparison site for all leading marketing measurement platforms
A Marketing Measurement Platform is the most important platforms for a company advertising their product. A Reliable, Accurate Measurement Platforms help marketers with finding ways to track, measure, and attribute the results coming through Advertising activities and search for incrementality. Whether If you are marketing for your own company, or your client’s, marketers need to see which activities are incremental, and which should be scaled back. Leveraging a measurement platform can provide marketers with important insights into their campaigns, channels, and activities.
Who We Are
We gathered a team of marketing experts from around the world. Each of us has at least 4 years experience in mobile marketing, Growth and UA. We worked for some of the largest companies in the world: Playtika, Plarium, Zynga, King.com, Scopley, NEXON, Lyft, Uber.
If anyone would be considered “Measurement Platform” experts – our group would likely be it.
Review Methodology
We conducted all of the reviews, scoring and comparison over the course of twelve months, working together through the MeasurementPlatforms Slack Channel (Invite Only).
Each of us reviewed each of the twelve platforms across all twelve parameters we chose.
Parameters we chose
- Type: Defining the type of marketing measurement platform, staying away from the companies own marketing BS and going for terminology that anyone who’s part of the community would understand. The categories we used were: Desktop Measurement, Mobile Measurement, Cross Screen Measurement, Cross Medium Measurement, Offline Advertising Measurement
- Measurement Method: What or which methods of measurement are applied by each platform. Categories used are: Last Touch / Last Click, Multi-Touch, Various Touch, Incrementality, Media Mix Modeling
- Top Features: The core strengths and main offering of each platform. i.e. just because Appsflyer “can” do Web Tracking – does not mean this is a core feature their platform has.
- Exciting Features: Any specific feature that we found “wow” or “cool” that we wanted to share.
Graded Parameters
- Support: How helpful was their support ? Since we all worked with these platforms, we all faced actual technical or product support questions. While this point may be subjective (since we did not necessarily face the same issue), this point had the most debate and the most disagreement on.
- Onboarding: One of the most critical part of any measurement platform is the onboarding process. The easiest, the better. Obviously.
- Development Resources Needed: Any marketing person knows this point – Getting time and priority from your tech team (setting up a data pipe, integrating an SDK, adding more features) is a pain. Doing anything to your app that could damage it requires layers of checks, tests, and time.
- Privacy Compliant: legacy solutions relied on cookies or device identifiers. Newer platforms don’t.
- Accuracy: Probably the most controversial comparison point. Each platform claims that they are the most accurate measurement platform, but this is not the case. We had instances where the difference between platforms were +1,000% off the real results. We saw cases where adding a measurement platform could lead to budget waste and wrong decisions.
- Pricing Model: The pricing model tells a lot about the platforms own interest and incentive. Platforms that charge for media costs have a clear incentive that we “spent more” and as a result – always tracked more than any other platform showed us.
- Price: We did calculate the costs and the impact of each marketing measurement platform over results, spend, and ROI, to come up with an absolute 1-5 score based on the impact. And don’t worry – we explain the calculations at length.
- Useful Insights: The best marketing measurement platforms go beyond “reports” and provide digested insights. Insights are expected to provide value by analyzing and explaining what reports would show but what the user (marketer) should conclude from the data.
- Bias: The question we reviewed here was: are there any underlying bias driving the measurement platform to provide insights / reports / tracking as it does ? Unbiased platforms provided technology only and left strategy to the marketer. Biased platforms often provided results that were easily challenged by us, and would likely be challenged by any experienced marketer.
- Secure: Measurement platforms suffer from a lot of fraud. Fraudsters will find ways to abuse these platforms making them show results that have nothing to do with reality. Since marketers depend on these platforms for day to day operation – a hackable “fraudable” platform can lead to terrible outcomes, to the point of making a company go bankrupt!
We had several voting sessions to reach the final scores.
Worth mentioning that we had some disagreements where we chose to show the minority report as part of the review.
We included 12 measurement platforms in our review and comparison:
(You can click each logo to get to the full reviews, but you can also check the summary review below)
 |  |  |
 |  |  |
 |  |  |
 |  |  |
Without further a due – Lets get into the reviews and comparison.
Since we reviewed and compared 12 measurement platforms, we are bringing you with various slices and views over the comparison. Please don’t forget to check out the full reviews for each platform, as well as some comparisons we made comparing platform to platform.
The Comparison You’ll find below is a Qualitative Comparison, including:
- Type,
- Measurement Method
- Top Features
- Exciting Features
FYI: We scrambled the measurement platforms so that we don’t bias the review. Sometimes, tables will be alphabetical, sometimes based on a random order.
Below each comparison table, you’ll also find more details about the lead and runner up for each comparison point.
We put a ton of work into comparing these measurement platforms. We didn’t do this for money, but as a service for the community. But if you would like to invite us for a coffee (or beer) – feel free to hit the donate button so that we can host this site, and continue adding features occasionally.
Qualitative Comparison
| Platform | Type | Platforms | Core Features | Score |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Kochava | Mobile Measurement Platform | 📱 | Mobile Attribution, Integration with over 4,500 ad networks, Anti-Attribution-Fraud | 85 |
| Appsflyer | Mobile Measurement Platform | 📱 | CPI Attribution, Protect360 (Attribution Fraud), People based attribution, Cost aggregation | 74 |
| MetricWorks | Incrementality Tests (MMM) | 📱 | Incrementality analysis through blackouts, Media Mix Modeling | 60 |
| INCRMNTAL | Incrementality Measurement | 📱💻 📺🎙 | Continuous incrementality measurement with no disruption to marketing activities | 111 |
| Rockerbox | Multi-Touch Attribution | 💻 + 📺 | Cross platform attribution, incrementality experiments (requires turning off campaigns) | 69 |
| Hive9 | Campaign Planning Platform | 💻 | Budget planning, Marketing calendar, Setting marketing goals | 47 |
| Singular | Mobile Measurement Platform | 📱 | Cost consolidation, Mobile attribution, SKAdnetwork handling, Mobile analytics | 94 |
| Countly | Customer Journey Attribution | 📱💻 | On Premises attribution solution, white label, supporting 1st and 3rd party plug ins | 48 |
| Adtriba | Customer Journey Attribution | 💻 | Budget recommendation, customer journey, AI based budget allocator | 81 |
| Adjust | Mobile Measurement Platform | 📱 | Mobile attribution, audience builder, retargeting measurement, Anti-Attribution-Fraud | 82 |
| Measured | Media Mix Modeling | 💻 📺 | Multi-touch attribution, marketing data warehouse | 72 |
| Branch.io | Cross Platform Measurement Platform | 📱💻 | Deep-link management, mobile attribution, customer journey tracking | 81 |
Coolest Features
Almost all twelve measurement platform differed in capabilities and support. Each platform had advantages and disadvantages. But each measurement platform also had a unique “cool” feature.
| Platform | Coolest Feature | Score |
|---|---|---|
| Hive9 | 9 different attribution models supported (desktop only) | 47 |
| Singular | Best in class cost reporting, Attribution fraud is baked in | 94 |
| Adjust | Cohort reports, Audience Segmentation | 82 |
| Kochava | Configurable Attribution, FreeAppAnalytics | 85 |
| Adtriba | Cross platform (web / offline) | 81 |
| Countly | Extendable with Plugins, White label | 48 |
| INCRMNTAL | Incrementality measurement in seconds, Actionable Insights | 111 |
| Branch | Kings of Deep Links | 81 |
| MetricWorks | Marketing automation to facilitate blackout tests | 60 |
| Measured | n/a | 72 |
| Rockerbox | Path to Conversion (desktop only!) | 69 |
| Appsflyer | Pivot Reports, Appsflyer Index | 74 |
Comparison Method / Weights
We reviewed 10 different comparison points for each measurement platform. To come up with an unbiased review, we weighted each point differently, based on the importance of each feature:
| Weighting | Weight | 100% | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|
| Privacy Compliant | 25% | 15.15% | Measurement should only work in aggregate, as per the regulations set by browsers and mobile operating systems. Platforms not adhering to privacy standards place the marketer at risk of getting their app/website banned! |
| Development Needed | 20% | 12.12% | Platforms where integration needed coding / SDK implementation got a lower score than those that could work without development. |
| Accuracy | 20% | 12.12% | You would think this is obvious… |
| Price | 20% | 12.12% | How much the platform cost vs. the spend / revenues generated. |
| Secure | 20% | 12.12% | Unfortunately many platforms are very proned to fraud. We’ve seen weird situations where conversions got tracked when it was obvious they were not real. |
| Useful insights | 15% | 9.09% | As much as we all like reports – platforms that did the extra mile by offering insights were preferred |
| Bias | 15% | 9.09% | We tried understanding if there is a real or potential bias where the platform is incentivized to count more / charge more |
| Support | 10% | 6.06% | How good was the support? |
| Onboarding | 10% | 6.06% | How easy was it to onboard ? |
| Pricing Model | 10% | 6.06% | Does the pricing model make sense ? |
Top Graded, Runner Up, Worth Mentioning
Each point in this review (twelve measurement platforms x 10 comparison points) took hours to complete. The group had to vote on each feature, after multiple discussions over our slack channel, and zoom calls.
Reaching a consensus in the votes was difficult, so we agreed that we will feature this table showing who was graded as top, who was the runner up, and who was worth mentioning. Because “Only a Sith deals in Absolute”
| Comparable | Lead |
| Accuracy | Countly was the only management platform who’s attribution count was the same as our app servers. It is the only measurement platform that is installed on premises – so this was not a big surprise. |
| Onboarding | The most intuitive platform was INCRMNTAL which works like a Kanban board, creating insights for anything we wanted to measure. It took us a couple of minutes to get used to a clean dashboard rather than a flashy reporting platform. |
| Plug & Play Integration | INCRMNTAL integration is a plug and play. We didn’t need any tech resources at all, and could just connect using either MMP, or data warehouses (big query, amazon aws s3 buckets). No need for any dev resources was the biggest plus. |
| Price | The platform costs for Countly were the lowest – BUUUUUUUUT since the platform was installed on our own servers – we needed a full time engineer on it, and additional dev work for every network we worked with. |
| Pricing Model | INCRMNTAL was the only measurement platform that had a pricing model not connected with our spend or revenues. We could pick the package that suited us. |
| Privacy Compliancy | Again at the top – INCRMNTAL doesn’t require device identifiers / cookies or any alternatives. One of us had to sign a DPA agreement with INCRMNTAL as their MMP was unable to not send IDFAs. Rest of us didn’t even need one. |
| Secure | Singular was pretty much impenetrable to Attribution-Fraud. They offer anti-fraud filters as part of the core features (and not as an additional paid feature like Adjust, Appsflyer). |
| Support | Appsflyer had the BEST support. 24/7, slack, phone, email, online, in any language and in any country. Their CSMs were all top notch. No complaints whatsoever. |
| Unbiased | The only platform we all agreed was “unbiased” was INCRMNTAL. A pricing model that was not related to traffic numbers or spend, and insights that improve the more you feedback the platform. |
| Useful insights | INCRMNTAL provided insights, not reports. That was really nice. Instead of looking at random numbers – the incrmntal measurement platform told us what we should understand from the data. |
Runner Ups
In some points, the race was really close. While there was a clear winner combination, we should not ignore the 2nd best in each category of comparison.
| Comparable | Runner Up |
| Accuracy | While INCRMNTAL is not a typical measurement platform (it relies on another platform for the attribution) the results we got were spot-on! |
| Onboarding | Singular’s platform is also easy to understand. There are a few UI features that we loved. Straightforward, and lots of online tutorials. |
| Plug & Play Integration | While Appsflyer does require an SDK (which each of our dev team HATED!) – the Appsflyer SDK was light, easy to integrate, and compliant with most development environments, including Unity Apps. |
| Price | INCRMNTAL has flat pricing. Dead low for the value we got. Monthly or annual pricing. Both are billed monthly, but the yearly contract is 20% cheaper. |
| Pricing Model | Countly also had a unique pricing model that was based on software fees. But there were a lot of unforeseen costs to install, setup, and regular engineering work to work with networks. |
| Privacy Compliancy | MetricWorks also doesn’t need IDFAs , but they did want enormous historical data that did include device IDs and sensitive data about revenues. |
| Secure | INCRMNTAL also helped eliminate some fraud attempts. The platform is focused on finding causality and value and help us bust placements that were fraudulent. It also helped us reduce organic cannibalization. |
| Support | Adjust also had excellent support. They have a ton of documentation and a lot of expert support people who can be really helpful. |
| Unbiased | MetricWorks also seems unbiased – but we did have a concern since it seems that they are connected with an affiliate network. We are not fans of affiliationl |
| Useful insights | Adtriba also provided really useful insights. The platform is able to run marketing automation, and instead of just providing reports – the system changes budgets and optimizes campaigns for us. |
Worth Mentioning
We all had something to say, and we chose to mention the following points about other platforms that didn’t make the cut.
Singular offered fantastic support. It was just about tied between Singular, Adjust and Appsflyer when it came to support. Some of us received technical support from Shabtay Vardi, which is worth mentioning. He was professional, nice to speak with, and even our developers who needed SDK related support enjoyed working with him because he was so solution oriented.
Adjust has a crazy amount of documentation available. While the platform is more complicated to operate, onboarding was relatively painless.
When it came to Cost Aggregation, Singular came in very close with INCRMNTAL. They built connectors to almost every ad network and media platform we work with, and even support things like dropping a report by email (to a dedicated email address). This was a really exciting feature. Plug & Play Integration
Branch did well on the privacy compliancy. They were one of the very few platforms that did not not use fingerprinting in compliance with the OS regulations.
We were actually surprised positively by the level of accuracy offered by Rockerbox. Rockerbox was like a tracking & attribution platform for every media platform, including – offline and influencer marketing. We did of course need to feed it with data , but we were all positively surprised that the data aggregation and accuracy was amongst the highest across all platforms we tracked.
Measured had a decent Pricing Model , while it did include a variable component around spend, it was pretty small and we ended up with a cost of around $7,500 per month (with a spend of $1,000,000 per month) – almost 1% of spend.
AdTriba does not have a free trial, but the price we had to pay was relatively good for the value. While Adtriba is not very efficient in a mobile 1st environment, it did a great job optimizing spend across web channels.
While Kochava is tracking and attribution solution with a pricing model based on clicks – the feeling we all got was that we can trust Kochava having our backs. It seems like do place customers agenda ahead of their own revenues. We faced a few experiences where Kochava advised us to lower spend and volume, which directly impacted our monthly Kochava invoice.
Do You Need a Measurement Platform
Marketing represents a pretty significant portion of most companies revenues and costs. We compared the budget each of us controls vs. the revenues of our companies (ball park!). Some of us control a budget of almost $20,000,000 , where the “smallest” budget in the slack room was about $3,000,000
There was no direct correlation between what percent did marketing represent of our companies revenues. Most of us work for digital first companies, but two of us work for companies that also operate IRL.
Being responsible for the oxygen of the company (new customers!) is a lot of responsibility. Measurement platforms provide the ability to plug all numbers into one and extending it to the various platforms used for product analysis, financial control, and obviously – marketing.
Marketing Data Pipeline
Some measurement platforms offer complete creation of a data pipeline. A Data pipeline is exactly what it sounds – a hub connected to any data source, allowing digestion of data, aggregation and matching, in preparation for other platforms to be able to use this data.
For example, if you Advertise with Facebook – you may want to connect the media costs from Facebook with your own customer base, so that you can understand the impact of advertising on Facebook with your sales results.
BI / Data Analytics Platforms
Marketing data will get funneled into the company BI platform. There are many platforms companies could choose from.
While in Theory, a BI platform could just connect directly to ad networks and media platforms – you try telling your BI team that they need to maintain integrations with dozens of networks and providers.
The CMO Dashboard
A measurement platform will allow a company to plug all the numbers into one data pipeline creating what is called a CMO Dashboard. This dashboard gives the marketing lead all of the information they need in one screen, allowing to take strategic decisions while understanding the consequences.
Understanding the trade offs between scaling up budget and profitability. Understanding the cost of a lead / sale to plan the company’s growth.
The CFO Dashboard
Financial controlling is also a critical component of every company. Oversight, Forecast, Prediction, Planning. Given that marketing directly influence sales revenues, every CFO needs a clear and accurate view over marketing budgets used.
De-Duplication
If there is just one purpose a marketing measurement platform serves it’s this one. De-duplication is the process of allocating / attributing a result to a point in time, so that there is least overlap in the credit given. In an ideal world, a measurement solution could track a user’s path across every point where they face your ads. We do not live in that ideal world. User privacy is a kept secrete, and the (almost) unlimited access to data we had up to recently is quickly going away with privacy regulations.
In the example above, as Facebook is the only Digital Platform here (requiring advertisers to install their tracking SDK to promote their apps), Facebook would report that they were responsible for generating the customer.
With no measurement platform, the marketer could believe that Facebook and end up allocating all Ad budgets to Facebook.
Detailed Review and Comparison
Check out our snapshot of each measurement platform and overall rating for each platform we reviewed – plus links to our more in-depth analysis. We put a ton of work into each of these – so these reviews dive deep into each marketing measurement platform
Score: 113
Type: Incrementality Measurement Platforms: Cross Platform Core Offering: Continuous Incrementality Measurement with no disruption to marketing activities
The Tagline (from their website): Incrementality measurement built for a post IDFA World Summary: INCRMNTAL was the best marketing measurement platform we tried. There was no debate. It was the only platform that actually gave us on-going insights, pointing us exactly towards optimization ideas that helped improve our ROI. INCRMNTAL didn’t replace the need for attribution, but worked using any of the attribution providers each of us used. We were able to integrate into the platform with no engineering support. The platform runs incrementality measurement in seconds (!!!!). We also appreciated the flat pricing plans, and low price to value point. Most of us used the enterprise package, but some of us used the basic and business packages which gave us the ability to run unlimited tests across all of our apps. Important to mention is that INCRMNTAL was the only platform that wanted nothing to do with sensitive data. Pros & Cons: - Incrementality measurement = measuring the actual contribution Advertising had over user acquisition and sales - Integration was easy and required no tech resources - Pricing model was unbiased. The price was a flat fee based on the package we chose - The platform didn’t need device IDs or alternatives - The results came as insights rather than messy reports that were impossible to interpret
Measurement Platforms Review for INCRMNTAL:
| Support | ★★★★★★★☆☆ | Onboarding | ★★★★★★★★☆ |
| No Dev Needed | ★★★★★★★★★ | Privacy Compliant | ★★★★★★★★★ |
| Accuracy | ★★★★★★★★☆ | Pricing Model | ★★★★★★★★★ |
| Useful Insights | ★★★★★★★★★ | Price | ★★★★★★★★★ |
| Unbiased | ★★★★★★★★★ | Secure | ★★★★★★★★☆ |
Read The Full Review for INCRMNTAL
Score: 80
Type: Mobile Measurement Platform Platforms: Mobile Core Offering: Mobile attribution, audience builder, retargeting measurement, anti-attribution-fraud
The Tagline (from their website): Maximize the impact of your mobile marketing Summary: Adjust was one of the first non udid mobile measurement platform (previously called AdEven). The approach taken by Adjust was using an open-code SDK, allowing developers to integrate the attribution SDK however they wish. Adjust customers suffered a lot from mobile-attribution-fraud as Adjust SDK was not protected , allowing fraudsters to simulate clicks and conversions very easily. Adjust has incredible documentation and their cohort reporting is simply the best. They were also the first attribution company to offer audience segmentation (used for retargeting) – a product that is slowly becoming redundant. Adjust has excellent support and documentation. Adjust was acquired by AppLovin , one of the largest ad networks and mobile game publisher. Beware that using adjust means that you’re handing your data to an ad network and a gaming developer. Pros & Cons: - Best documentation and an extremely simple on-boarding to the platform. - While the open code SDK is a nice idea, each of us needed engineering support to integrate the adjust SDK - Adjust is pretty solid in terms of data privacy – but it seems that their solution is using fingerprinting for attribution! (strictly forbidden and can place an app in jeopardy) - Fairly expensive, and price is based on the number of events tracked. In average, we each paid $21,548 per month (almost 4% of revenues), making the pricing model biased. - Even with all the marketing blabber – Adjust reported conversions that never happened. We found that those were fraudulent conversions. None of us had a discrepancy of less than 5% (where the worst was +30%)
Measurement Platforms Review for Adjust:
| Support | ★★★★★★★★★ | Onboarding | ★★★★★★★☆☆ |
| No Dev Needed | ★★★★★☆☆☆☆ | Privacy Compliant | ★★★★★★☆☆☆ |
| Accuracy | ★★★★★☆☆☆☆ | Pricing Model | ★★★★★★☆☆☆ |
| Useful Insights | ★★★★★★☆☆☆ | Price | ★★★★★★★☆☆ |
| Unbiased | ★★★★★★☆☆☆ | Secure | ★★★☆☆☆☆☆☆ |
Read The Full Review for Adjust
Score: 45
Type: Campaign Planning Platform Platforms: Web (Desktop) Core Offering: Budget planning, Marketing calendar, setting marketing goals
The Tagline (from their website): Cloud-based marketing performance management software Summary: Hive9 is a marketing planning tool, allowing Advertisers and agencies to plan their marketing activities. As part of the platform, Hive9 offers nine attribution models, all suitable only for web advertisers: Last Touch, First Touch, MTA, U and W shaped, Custom attribution. The idea behind the platform was to offer advertisers with an integrated solution from tracking to attribution to goal settings and media planning. Some would refer to Hive9 as a “Meta DSP”. Hive9 didn’t excel in any of the review parameters. It doesn’t mean that it’s not a good platform, but it seems that the focus of Hive9 is towards web advertisers. Hive9 does have the potential of being a decent CFO / CMO dashboard (standalone), but their pricing does not justify using the platform only for the dashboard features. Pros & Cons: - Plenty of dashboards to pick from - Starting price of $25,000 – yikes!!!! - Exclusive for desktop channels – suitable for old school marketers - An interesting attempt to mix marketing attribution and media planning into one platform - Required heavy data & BI resources to integrate - Our CFOs liked the dashboards. Marketing Did Not. Suitable only for marketers that work with quarterly / monthly planned budget.
Measurement Platforms Review for Hive9:
| Support | ★★★★★☆☆☆☆ | Onboarding | ★★★☆☆☆☆☆☆ |
| No Dev Needed | ★★★☆☆☆☆☆☆ | Privacy Compliant | ★☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆ |
| Accuracy | ★★★★☆☆☆☆☆ | Pricing Model | ★★★★☆☆☆☆☆ |
| Useful Insights | ★★★★★☆☆☆☆ | Price | ★★★★☆☆☆☆☆ |
| Unbiased | ★★★★★☆☆☆☆ | Secure | ★★☆☆☆☆☆☆☆ |
Read The Full Review for Hive9
Score: 93
Type: Mobile Measurement Platform Platforms: Mobile Core Offering: Cost consolidation, mobile attribution, SKadNetwork handling, mobile analytics
The Tagline (from their website): Zero time chasing data. More time driving growth. Summary: Singular is a leading mobile analytics and attribution provider. The core product Singular started with was cost aggregation – and by far, their system is the best for cost reporting. As an analytics provider, the Singular platform has superb dashboard, very intuitive to visualize data. Unlike other solutions, Singular has their anti-attribution-fraud baked into their attribution product (not as a premium product). We found that their attribution method was the most resilient to attribution fraud. Onboarding was easy to understand. Singular offers very good support. Most of us spoke with Shabtay Vardi during onboarding (some tech issues, some SDK issues) and he was a pro. Connecting ad networks to Singular for cost reporting is simple. Singular is a very honest no-bullshit company. They stand behind what they say, and say what they mean. They do their best in matters of privacy and were one of the few mobile measurement platforms that did not use fingerprinting to attribute conversions in OS versions that ban the use of FP. Pros & Cons: - Best cost aggregation and visualization - Onboarding was fairly intuitive - While some development was needed to fit the SDK into our apps, it was relatively painless - Some of us experienced some major discrepancies between Singular and our own reports. Update: Apparently the discrepancies were due to fraudulent activity. - Pricing model is based on number of conversions tracked + SaaS fees. The average costs each of us paid was $18,200 per month - There was some bias in the business and pricing model, but the support we got was very honest and transparent. We felt cared for, regardless of incentives.
Measurement Platforms Review for Singular:
| Support | ★★★★★★★★☆ | Onboarding | ★★★★★★★★★ |
| No Dev Needed | ★★★★★★★☆☆ | Privacy Compliant | ★★★★★★★☆☆ |
| Accuracy | ★★★★★★☆☆☆ | Pricing Model | ★★★★★★★☆☆ |
| Useful Insights | ★★★★★★★☆☆ | Price | ★★★★★★☆☆☆ |
| Unbiased | ★★★★★★★☆☆ | Secure | ★★★★★★★☆☆ |
Read The Full Review for Singular
Score: 87
Type: Campaign Planning Platform Platforms: Mobile Core Offering: Mobile Attribution, integration with over 4,500 ad networks, anti-attribution-fraud
The Tagline (from their website): Don’t put your iOS app business in jeopardy. Kochava is the safe choice for privacy-compliant attribution on iOS14.5 Summary: Kochava is an independent mobile attribution company based out of Idaho. Kochava offers various solutions and services around tracking and attribution: Free App Analytics – a free product (in return to using your data), premium analytics, fraud audit, ”the foundry” - premium services by an expert team, XCHANGE – a blockchain for advertising). Kochava has always been the black sheep in the attribution provider game. They have strong opinions and are very direct and honest about which ad networks are good and which are bad. On the other hand, Kochava is a premium solution, and is very expensive. If you are based in the US – their support is pretty good, but if you are anywhere else, the waiting time for any support tickets can be frustrating. Pros: - Kochava was the first MMP to offer configurable attribution (the ability to setup different attribution rules for different ad networks) - The pricing is based on Impressions and Clicks. The average costs for each of us was just over $43,000. Kochava was by far the most expensive measurement platform we tested. - While Kochava offers anti-fraud as part of their solution – we all experienced large discrepancies.
Measurement Platforms Review for Kochava:
| Support | ★★★★★★★☆☆ | Onboarding | ★★★★★★★☆☆ |
| No Dev Needed | ★★★★★★★☆☆ | Privacy Compliant | ★★★★★★★☆☆ |
| Accuracy | ★★★★★★★☆☆ | Pricing Model | ★★★★☆☆☆☆☆ |
| Useful Insights | ★★★★★★☆☆☆ | Price | ★★★★★☆☆☆☆ |
| Unbiased | ★★★★★★★★☆ | Secure | ★★★★★★☆☆☆ |
Read The Full Review for Kochava
Score: 81
Type: Customer Journey Attribution Platforms: Web / Desktop + Offline Core Offering: Budget recommendation, customer journey, AI based budget allocator
The Tagline (from their website): Evaluate marketing holistically, optimize budget allocation and increase revenue with the help of AI. Summary: Adtriba is a German based AI software unifying marketing measurement and running budget allocation decisions on the fly. The platform can digest excel and CSV data, making it a pretty good platform for marketers who operate most of their budget between offline and web. When using the platform for automation of budget allocation, the platform was able to make changes to search campaigns on Google and other web DSPs like MediaMath, The Trade Desk and DV360. Pros & Cons: - Pretty good in data unification and aggregation - AI based budget allocation decisions - Only suitable if you’re a web or offline advertiser - Pricing is reasonable, but contains a variable component (% of media costs) - The product is not self service, and required some meetings and calls to get started The product is not very intuitive
Measurement Platforms Review for Adtriba:
| Support | ★★★★★★☆☆☆ | Onboarding | ★★★★★★☆☆☆ |
| No Dev Needed | ★★★★★★★☆☆ | Privacy Compliant | ★★★★☆☆☆☆☆ |
| Accuracy | ★★★★★★☆☆☆ | Pricing Model | ★★★★★★★☆☆ |
| Useful Insights | ★★★★★★★★☆ | Price | ★★★★★★★☆☆ |
| Unbiased | ★★★★★★☆☆☆ | Secure | ★★★★★☆☆☆☆ |
Read The Full Review for Adtriba
Score: 49
Type: Customer Journey Attribution Platforms: Mobile, Web (Desktop) Core Offering: On Premises attribution solution, white label, supporting 1st and 3rd party plug ins
The Tagline (from their website): Product analytics and innovation Summary: Countly is an on premises software which means you need to install it on your own servers. What’s very cool about it is that it allows any advertiser to construct their own attribution model, including developing on-top customized plug ins. As an on-premises solution, countly is a pretty cheap solution – but you’ll need a full team of developers to set things up and integrate your data, as well as at least one full time developer to maintain the platform. Every additional network you’ll want to work with will force you to more development work. The mobile app solution requires an SDK , collecting user level data. The solution is not promising for a post IDFA world. We’re actually not sure why bother with on-premises attribution solutions. Attribution is a commodity these days. It was a huge stretch to get going with countly, when there were such prominent solutions available. Pros & Cons: - On-premises solution is a unique offering - Requires heavy tech resources to setup and use - Support was pretty awful. There was no documentation available, and we had to go through many (!!!) calls to get things going. Countly doesn’t handle SKadNetwork postbacks. You’ll need to use another solution for iOS
Measurement Platforms Review for Countly:
| Support | ★★★★☆☆☆☆☆ | Onboarding | ★★☆☆☆☆☆☆☆ |
| No Dev Needed | ★★☆☆☆☆☆☆☆ | Privacy Compliant | ★★★★★★☆☆☆ |
| Accuracy | ★★★★☆☆☆☆☆ | Pricing Model | ★★★★★★★★☆ |
| Useful Insights | ★★☆☆☆☆☆☆☆ | Price | ★★★★★★★☆☆ |
| Unbiased | ★★★★★★★★☆ | Secure | ★☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆ |
Read The Full Review for Countly
Score: 80
Type: Cross Platform Measurement Platforms: Mobile, Web (Desktop) Core Offering: Deep-link management, mobile attribution, customer journey tracking
The Tagline (from their website): Digital brands grow on Branch. Summary: Branch is one of the largest mobile attribution platforms, starting as a deep-link technology – Branch pivoted towards attribution after the acquisition of TUNE (MobileAppTracking). The measurement technology relies on deep-links, creating unique links for every event. Unfortunately, this approach is not compliant with privacy centric regulations (enforced by Apple, pending by Google), but – we were glad to see that Branch is not testing the patience of Apple – and have stopped all fingerprinting for OS versions above iOS14. Branch has excellent support and the onboarding is fairly simple once integrating the branch SDK. Pricing was obviously biased, as it was based on the number of conversions tracked. Branch was not very accurate when we compared it to our own server counts. The anti-attribution fraud features are relatively limited. Pros & Cons: - BEST in Deep Links – no doubt. - Very expensive – amongst the most expensive solutions out there (the average price we ended up with was just under $20,000) - Branch had pretty good customer service , but anything needing some technical support took quite some time to get resolved - The best feature Branch used to have to offer was customer journey tracking (using deeplinks) but this feature is no longer relevant as both cookies and device IDs (mobile) are either deprecated or getting deprecated.
Measurement Platforms Review for Branch:
| Support | ★★★★★★★★☆ | Onboarding | ★★★★★★★★★ |
| No Dev Needed | ★★★★★★★☆☆ | Privacy Compliant | ★★★★★★☆☆☆ |
| Accuracy | ★★★★★☆☆☆☆ | Pricing Model | ★★★★★☆☆☆☆ |
| Useful Insights | ★★★★★★☆☆☆ | Price | ★★★★★☆☆☆☆ |
| Unbiased | ★★★★★☆☆☆☆ | Secure | ★★★★★☆☆☆☆ |
Read The Full Review for Branch
Score: 65
Type: Incrementality Tests (MMM) Platforms: Mobile Core Offering: Incrementality analysis through blackouts, Media Mix Model
The Tagline (from their website): How will you find your way in the post-IDFA storm? Summary: MetricWorks is a subsidiary of an affiliate platform called target circle. The company claims to offer incrementality testing, ltv prediction, and marketing automation. What we’ve seen is that the company offer an analysis of incrementality based on econometrics data, requiring at least three months of data or a full year of data. MetricWorks method of measurement incrementality was asking us to stop all advertising activities in a country in order to get a report that suggested which of the channels was incremental and which was not (?) The claim was that metricworks has full marketing automation to facilitate the blackout tests – but we have never seen any dashboard in action. Only reports. Pricing was a complete shock. The average price we paid averaged at $48,100 – the most expensive solution we tested. We were offered a 50% discount in retrospect if we would stay on as a customer. Pros & Cons: - Pricing model is based on media costs, and is very expensive for the value received - There is no platform. The analytics is done by a team and insights are provided as a report - MetricWorks wanted an insane amount of historical data - Integration and onboarding took over 6 weeks - The solution requires stopping marketing activities on major marketing channels (we were asked to stop campaigns on Google, Facebook, AppLovin, Snap…)
Measurement Platforms Review for MetricWorks:
| Support | ★★★★☆☆☆☆☆ | Onboarding | ★★★☆☆☆☆☆☆ |
| No Dev Needed | ★★★★★☆☆☆☆ | Privacy Compliant | ★★★★★★★☆☆ |
| Accuracy | ★★★★☆☆☆☆☆ | Pricing Model | ★★☆☆☆☆☆☆☆ |
| Useful Insights | ★★★★☆☆☆☆☆ | Price | ★☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆ |
| Unbiased | ★★★★★★★★☆ | Secure | ★★★★★★☆☆☆ |
Read The Full Review for MetricWorks
Score: 71
Type: Media Mix Modeling Platforms: Web (Desktop), Offline Core Offering: Multi-touch attribution, marketing data warehouse
The Tagline (from their website): Incrementality measurement for smarter cross-channel marketing decisions Summary: Measured is a web advertising measurement solution offering advertisers with a multi-touch attribution model and using this to try and measure incrementality. Measured had its success in 2018, but once the browsers started deprecating cookies in browsers (following the same move that happened by Safari and Firefox), the approach of measured.com became irrelevant. Today, measured only serves customers as a data consolidation allowing customers to upload data from various affiliate platforms (pepperjam, ShareASale, affiliate future, affiliea, affiliate future, affiliate by conversant, net affiliation), ad networks (criteo, steelhouse, adroll), and other advertising platforms (roku, the trade desk). Measured pricing was fairly straightforward. In average, we spent $7,500 per month with Measured (about 1% of our revenues). The costs were high for the value we received. Pros & Cons: - Measured processes data from web advertising platforms (typically affiliate networks) helping customers to make budget allocation decisions - The incrementality “feature” is a set of recommendations for experiments (for example: pause all campaigns on affiliate future for a month to identify if the same affiliate ids operate in another affiliate platforms) - The suggestion for incrementality testing is to run an audience split test. This is not possible anymore. Seems like the platform has not been updated in a while.
Measurement Platforms Review for Measured:
| Support | ★★★★★☆☆☆☆ | Onboarding | ★★★★☆☆☆☆☆ |
| No Dev Needed | ★★★★★☆☆☆☆ | Privacy Compliant | ★★★☆☆☆☆☆☆ |
| Accuracy | ★★★★★☆☆☆☆ | Pricing Model | ★★★★★★★☆☆ |
| Useful Insights | ★★★★★★☆☆☆ | Price | ★★★★★☆☆☆☆ |
| Unbiased | ★★★★★★★☆☆ | Secure | ★★★★★★★☆☆ |
Read The Full Review for Measured
SCORE: 72
Type: Mobile Measurement Platform Platforms: Mobile Core Offering: CPI attribution, protect360 (attribution fraud), people based attribution, cost aggregation
The Tagline (from their website): Attribution data you can trust Summary: Appsflyer is the largest mobile attribution company with over 1,000 employees and the most amount of developers as their customers. Appsflyer provides tracking and attribution using device IDs and fingerprinting. Recently, Appsflyer also declared that it will assist developers in handling SKAdnetwork postbacks (at least until iOS15 - when developers will have direct access to the Skadnetwork postbacks). Appsflyer is known to publish a yearly ”index” ranking ad networks based on volume and quality. Appsflyer index is known as a very skewed report, as over the years, the ad networks that “starred” at the top were networks who are now known as some of the most fraud infested ad networks. With over 1,000 employees – Appsflyer has best in class support. Their SDKs are very stable and out of all measurement platforms – the appsflyer SDK needed the least iterations with our tech teams. Appsflyer launched an “incrementality” feature recently – but forgot to mention that this feature uses IDFAs and audiences. Appsflyer is pretty expensive. We paid in average $24,100 per month – this is without adding premium features like SKAdnetwork and “protect360” (a tool that helps limit the fraud that goes through appsflyer’s own system) Pros & Cons: - Pretty expensive platform, and can get even more expensive with “premium features” (anti-attribution fraud, handling skadnetwork, audience builder) - Support is great. Friendly and very professional. - Appsflyer is a legacy platform – as large as they are – their solutions does not meet the new restrictions and regulations in the market. - The pivot table reports appsflyer has are really useful. Just like excel!
Measurement Platforms Review for Appsflyer:
| Support | ★★★★★★★★★ | Onboarding | ★★★★★★★★★ |
| No Dev Needed | ★★★★★★★★☆ | Privacy Compliant | ★★★★★☆☆☆☆ |
| Accuracy | ★★★★★☆☆☆☆ | Pricing Model | ★★★★★☆☆☆☆ |
| Useful Insights | ★★★★☆☆☆☆☆ | Price | ★★★☆☆☆☆☆☆ |
| Unbiased | ★★★☆☆☆☆☆☆ | Secure | ★★★★☆☆☆☆☆ |
Read The Full Review for Appsflyer
Score: 68
Type: Multi-Touch-Attribution Platforms: Web (Desktop), Offline Core Offering: Cross platform attribution, incrementality experiments (requires turning off campaigns)
The Tagline (from their website): The Single Source of Truth for Digital Brands Summary: Rockerbox is a marketing measurement platform allowing the consolidation of data across multiple platforms. These are very much web platforms (i.e. adroll, bing, criteo, outbrain). Campaign tracking requires the use of UTM codes. Onboarding takes between 2-4 weeks as per documentation, but our experience was closer to 3 months to get onboarded. The attribution part of the platform is not tailored to any advertiser investing in app promotion / advertising. But with that , as a media mix modeling platform, Rockerbox uses historical data (in aggregation) suggesting the right combination of channels and mediums. Rockerbox includes an incrementality section, suggesting a series of experiments (turning off campaigns in across TV or specific channels like Facebook and Google) to measure the impact. Rockerbox also uses the baked in “lift” measurement packages offered by some platforms. Note: Facebook deprecated Lift tests as of 2021 Pros & Cons: - The dashboard looks really nice and can act as a CMO dashboard - Data can be onboarded from various channels. Rockerbox works very well as a data visualization tool. - Path to Conversion is the most valuable feature Rockerbox offers – but this only works on browsers supporting 3rd party cookies. - Rockerbox does not support attribution for iPhone and iPad apps
Measurement Platforms Review for Rockerbox:
| Support | ★★★★★★★★☆ | Onboarding | ★★★★★★☆☆☆ |
| No Dev Needed | ★★★★★☆☆☆☆ | Privacy Compliant | ★★★★☆☆☆☆☆ |
| Accuracy | ★★★★★★☆☆☆ | Pricing Model | ★★★★☆☆☆☆☆ |
| Useful Insights | ★★★★☆☆☆☆☆ | Price | ★★☆☆☆☆☆☆☆ |
| Unbiased | ★★★★★☆☆☆☆ | Secure | ★★★★★☆☆☆☆ |
Read The Full Review for Rockerbox
We spent several months and over 5 man years reviewing the platforms. We hope that you appreciate the amount of work we’ve done.
While this was a “side business” for us, if you would like to buy us a beer, you can.
We are also accepting applications to our slack channel. The minimum requirements for applicants are:
- Over 4 years experience as a UA manager at a leading advertiser
- Responsible for a marketing budget of over $4M
- A proven understanding of measurement, tracking, attribution
- Fluent in English
- Master in Economics, Statistics, Computer Science – preferred
- Official approval and waiver from the company you are employed by
Applications can be submitted here: [email protected]
Comment Section:
1. Mark Pope June 14, 2021 Thanks boys and girls! It was great working together!!! 2. Erica Nevoroja June 20, 2021 WOW! Thank you so much! This is the most detailed comparison I’ve seen J 3. Jame Gunn June 21, 2021 I completely disagree with the review for Adtriba. We use this platform in my agency and it is very good. 4. Oded Frummer June 21, 2021 it’s time that someone said it – Appsflyer sucks. It’s an over inflated company that ruined the lives of many people. They started rejecting 90% of the conversions my network was generating and no matter how much we tried talking with them - they made no changes. We lost business and had to fire over 20 employees because of their system. 5. Sameer Gupta June 21, 2021 InMobi also offers attribution 6. Tony Write June 22, 2021 The best combination is Singular for Attribution and Incrmntal for incrementality. Best of both worlds and they work flawlessly together.
Add a Comment