Mobile Marketing
Glossary

This comprehensive resource is designed to demystify the complex world of mobile marketing. Whether you’re a seasoned marketer, a curious affiliate, or a strategic network partner, understanding the intricacies of this dynamic industry is essential for success. Here, you’ll find definitions and explanations for a vast array of terms, from fundamentals like CPI, to advanced concepts such as cohort analysis, and attribution models – We’ve covered everything.

A

Accelerated Mobile Pages

Google launched the AMP framework in early 2016 due to the increasing need for creating an optimized and tightly integrated user experience, replacing slow and stuttering mobile experiences users had to deal with.

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Active User

Active users refer to the number of unique users who engage with an app or a website during a predefined period of time and is a metric designed to measure growth, churn, and product stickiness. 

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Ad Exchange

An ad exchange is a digital marketplace that enables advertisers and publishers to buy and sell advertising space, often through real-time auctions. They’re most often used to sell display, video, and mobile ad inventory.

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Ad inventory

Ad inventory is the available ad space that a publisher or advertising network has dedicatedly for sales to the advertisers.

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Ad Mediation

Ad mediation platforms help app publishers manage multiple ad networks on one centralized platform, which streamlines reporting and optimization. Without it, publishers need to manage each ad network through their individual SDKs and platforms. 

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Ad Podding

Ad podding refers to a technique in digital advertising where multiple ads are delivered to a user within a single ad break, creating a “pod” of ads.

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Ad Publisher

An ad publisher is an entity, along with a website or app, that displays a single or multiple ads to its audience. In the mobile marketing industry, ad publishers talk over with folks that show advertisements inside mobile apps or on digital websites.

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Ad Server

An ad server is a software platform that is used to manage the distribution of ad campaigns across channels.

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Advertising network

Mobile ad networks connect app advertisers to publishers (aka websites or apps that host ads) aggregating ad space supply from them and matching it with advertiser demand.

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App Stickiness

App stickiness refers to the ability of an app to keep users engaged and retain them over time. It is a measure of how often users return to an app after installation and how long they stay engaged within the app.

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B

Blacklist

Blacklist is a term that is used in paid advertising which refers to a specific filtering type that is meant to prevent certain websites from displaying your ads.

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Bots

The term ‘bot’ literally translates to a robot. It is an automated software application that can perform tedious and repetitive tasks, over and over, without ever getting tired.

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C

Click Farms

By definition, a click farm is any location that generates internet traffic, in bulk, for a variety of purposes. It can either be operated as a business offering a variety of digital interaction based services; or as an independent enterprise to proliferate clicks for different purposes.

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Click Flooding

Click flood, in simple terms, refers to the practice of generating fake clicks using bots. To achieve click flooding, a fraud publisher generates numerous fake clicks hoping that one of those clicks will be counted as the last click before an app is downloaded by the user.

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Click Hijacking

When a fake click is delivered to an attribution after the installation has begun.

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Click Injection

Click injection is a type of affiliate marketing fraud that spammers employ so that they can generate fake conversions. They do this by artificially inflating the number of clicks on your affiliate ads.

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Click-to-Install Time (CTIT)

Click to Install time (CTIT) is the time between clicking on the online advertising and opening the versatile application interestingly after effectively downloading the application

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Cohort analysis

Cohort analysis refers to the process of taking a large group of users or customers and breaking them down into smaller segments (aka cohorts) with certain, specified characteristics over a set period.

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CPA Fraud

CPA (cost per action) fraud is a type of click fraud aimed at draining advertisers’ marketing budgets by faking actions post-app install.

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D

Daily Active Users

Daily active users (DAU) is a metric that measures the total number of users that log in and engage with your product daily. An “active user” refers to one unique user logging in.

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Deep Linking

Deep links are a type of link that sends users directly to an app instead of a website or a store. They are used to send users straight to specific in-app locations, saving users the time and energy locating a particular page themselves

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Deferred Deep Linking

Deferred deep linking specifically caters to users who have not downloaded the app, yet. When you click a deferred deep link, it first checks if the app has already been installed on your phone. If not, it sends you directly to the app store to download it. Once you complete downloading the app and open it, this is when the link directs you straight to the content you were actually looking for.

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Device farm

Device farms are a form of mobile ad fraud in which scammers manually carry out actions (like clicks, installs, and other types of engagement) to give the appearance of legitimate activity while sapping advertising budgets. 

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E

eCPM

eCPM is a way of measuring how much money an app makes for every 1000 times an ad shows up on the app. The higher the eCPM, the more money the app is making.

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Emulated Device

Emulated devices, often known as device emulators, are non-mobile devices that run mobile operating systems. Most developers use device emulators on their laptops to test their products on various devices or operating systems without having to buy and set up all of them.

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I

In-app bidding

In programmatic advertising, in-app bidding is a sales method that allows mobile publishers to offer their ad inventory in an auction where all advertisers can participate simultaneously in a fair competition for ad space.

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In-app events

In-app events are actions users take after installing an app (e.g. a purchase, level achievements, tutorial completion, etc.)

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K

K-factor

The K-factor is a mobile marketing metric that evaluates your app’s virality by considering how many new users the typical existing user introduces to it.

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L

Lifetime Value (LTV)

Lifetime value, or LTV, is an estimate of the average revenue a customer will generate over the time that they use a given product or service. In other words, Lifetime Value is also the net profit expected from a customer throughout his lifetime with a business.

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Limit Ad Tracking (LAT)

Limit ad tracking (LAT) is a feature on iOS devices that allows users to opt out of personalized advertising.

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M

Mobile ad fraud

What is Mobile Ad fraud? Mobile ad fraud is a representation of various methods used by fraudsters to exploit attribution systems used to measure ROI

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Mobile attribution

Mobile attribution is a method for determining which campaigns, media partners, and channels delivered specific app installs.

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Mobile fraud detection

Mobile fraud detection involves a variety of techniques and technologies used in identifying actions (impressions, clicks, installs, etc.) that aren’t actually real.

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Mobile Geofencing

Mobile Geofencing is a location-based marketing technique that uses a user’s GPS, Wi-Fi, and cellular data to target them with personalized notifications, offers, emails, etc. based on their location.

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Mobile Malware

Mobile malware refers to a type of harmful software designed to gain access to mobile devices via ads or apps aimed at stealing sensitive data, misusing device functions, holding a device ransom, and even generating fake traffic.

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N

Non-organic install (NOI)

A non-organic install (NOI) refers to an app download that happened as the result of marketing activity (e.g. a paid or owned media campaign).

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O

Offerwall

Offerwalls are in-app advertisements that give developers a way to reward user engagement and generate income from both paid and free users, giving businesses the chance to increase app revenue and enhance user engagement and retention.

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Organic install

The term “organic installs” refers to app downloads that take place without any direct marketing efforts to attract users through paid or owned media campaigns.

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OTT (Over-the-top) Platforms

OTT is a content distribution channel that uses existing internet connections instead of other methods like cable boxes or radio waves.

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P

Phone Farm

Phone farms (also called device farms and click farms) are maintained for the purposes of mobile ad fraud and are illegal in much of the world.

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Postback

In mobile app marketing, a postback contains data that is sent from attribution providers to media sources.

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Predicted lifetime value (pLTV)

The predicted or potential value of a customer, which combines past learnings with current measurements, in order to allow marketers to build and optimize campaigns around their audience’s predicted consumer trends.

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Privacy Cloud Application (PCA)

A Privacy Cloud Application (PCA) enables brands and their partners to share and analyze data using a secure platform. The purpose of a PCA is to support ecosystem collaboration despite limited access to user-level data, and enhance end-users experience while preserving their privacy in full.

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Privacy Preserving Technologies

Privacy-preserving technologies (PPTs) offer comprehensive data protection capabilities that minimize personal data use and maximize data security while enabling marketers to gain campaign insights, analyze audience data, and optimize their reach.

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R

Reattribution Window

A reattribution window refers to a set period of time set during which a user re-installs an app.

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S

SDK spoofing

SDK spoofing (otherwise known as SDK hacking) is a type of bot-based fraud, often executed by malware hidden on an app. 

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Session

A session is a single instance of active engagement by a user in an app or on a website.

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SKAdNetwork

StoreKit Ad Network, or SKAdNetwork, is a privacy-centric API operated by Apple. It helps ad networks and advertisers measure their ad activity (such as impressions, clicks, and app installs) on an aggregated level.

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U

User Acquisition (UA)

User acquisition is the method of driving new users or customers to be acquired for a mobile app business through marketing activity.

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