Non-integrated sources

If you'd like to track users from non-integrated acquisition sources, you can do so using custom sources or attribution partners.

There are hundreds of mobile-focused acquisition sources that can help you acquire new users for your app, and your business' needs may be best-served by diversifying your ad spend across many specialized acquisition partners. Unfortunately, Localytics is not able to integrate with new ad networks upon request.

Custom sources

Localytics maintains generic attribution capabilities for iOS and Android. Using the Attribution Dashboard, you can create your own custom acquisition sources. When you use Custom Sources, Localytics will attribute your app's new users to an acquisition source/campaign, which enables you to measure and analyze the performance of your paid campaigns inLocalytics.

You can create a custom iOS acquisition source through Localytics. This allows us to work with any acquisition source that is capable of capturing the iOS Identifier for Advertising (IDFA) of a user at the time of clickthrough and inserting it in the URL. The process for generating a URL is similar to the other iOS ad networks, but the URL has much less information in it. The IDFA of the user must be appended to the end of the URL using the following format.

http://a.localytics.com/redirect/xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx?idfa=REPLACE_WITH_IDFA

Keep in mind that if you use this approach, Localytics will not postback to the ad network when the user opens the app for the first time. This means that the data will correctly appear in Localytics, but the ad network will only see that a user click on the ad.

Note: Use of Localytics generic attribution functionality requires your acquisition source to specify the IDFA for each ad click. In general, this means that you can measure users acquired from in-app ads but not from mobile web ads (which require "fingerprinting").

Because the Google Play Store can pass UTM parameters (often called "referrer parameters”) after a new app install, you can measure users from both in-app and mobile web ads.

Attribution partners

Use an attribution partner, or ad tracking vendor, who works with your non-integrated acquisition sources. Localytics maintains direct, server-to-server integrations with all of the major ad tracking vendors in the mobile space: adjust, AD-X, AppsFlyer, Kochava, Tapstream, and TUNE. Our six integrated ad tracking partners collectively make up over ninety percent of market share in the third-party attribution space.

A third-party attribution partner will generally enable you to conduct fingerprinting to track mobile web app install ads on iOS and postback to any acquisition partner you choose.