Measurement 2.0: Meet Audience Builder, Real ROI, Hourly Aggregation and On-The-Fly Timezones

Take back control.

The Audience Builder is a brand new component of your Adjust platform, enabling you to define segmentation rules and export audiences as a list of advertising IDs right from within your Adjust dashboard or from our new Segments API.

Using the Audience Builder, you could plan out your retargeting campaigns before you decide on which partners to run with – and set them up in a minute by exporting a slice for each partner. Push notifications, whale analysis, re-engagement, exclusion targeting… With the Audience Builder, you have the tools at your fingertips.

This means that you can get your campaigns up and running with new partners immediately. But it also allows you to control which data is being transmitted to which partners to an unprecedented degree. Many partners don’t want or need to know everything about every single user in your database – so why open the firehose? It’s a good day for data security.

These rules can be based on:

• trackers – which campaign a user is attributed to;
• install date;
• device type;
• OS version;
• users’ country, region, or language;
• previously executed events;
• revenue and LTV;
• time spent in the app;
• last activity time;
• installed app version;
• any campaign data.

You can define multiple rules to use any one or multiple of these metrics. A simple segment might identify all users who were last active in the app over 60 days ago, people who haven’t yet tried out your new app version, or users who spent less than a minute in the app in total. More complex segments can be built up using multiple rules.

Think about looking for users that have engaged a lot with your app but spent very little money – or flipside, users who rapidly reached high LTV but didn’t truly engage with your app otherwise? Both of these audiences are prime for re-engagement and further conversion, and the Audience Builder is designed to help you find them.

Measure the Metric that Matters: Real Return on Investment

Ultimately, marketing is all about driving a positive return on investment (ROI). All of the other metrics we use are merely pathways to get there.

With the introduction of Adjust’s Costs API, we’ve closed the circle on your ROI. Here’s how it works: with every ad interaction, your media partners attach parameters denoting the ad spend that is associated with the click. This could be on a CPM, CPC, or CPI model.

Say that you’re running a CPI campaign. Your ad networks will specify with each click the cost model (cpi) and the price. If a user converts from a tagged click, we add the CPI cost to your campaign totals. The same applies for CPC (except the cost is added as soon as the click is registered) and CPM (where the cost should be added onto impression URLs).

Ahead of the launch, we’ve already integrated 27 partners with the new Costs API.

We’re always working to bring on additional partners. You might have noticed that spend numbers have already gone live for Facebook campaigns! If not – log in to your dashboard right now and check it out.

The Costs API and related functionality is currently being tested in a beta.

Once the costs are entered, you’ll be able to access a set of new metrics from within the dashboard, the KPI Service, callbacks, S3, etc. The king of the new KPIs is your campaign ROI.

Cost KPI

Description

cost

The sum of click_cost + impression_cost + install_cost

paid_installs

The number of installs for which there is cost data

paid_clicks

The number of clicks for which there is cost data

paid_impressions

The number of impressions for which there is cost data

ecpc

Effective cost per click, i.e. cost / paid_clicks

ecpm

Effective cost per mille (thousand impressions),
i.e. cost / paid_impressions * 1000

ecpi

Effective cost per install, i.e. cost / paid_installs

cohort_gross_profit

The gross profit, i.e. cohort_revenue - cost

return_on_investment

The ROI metric derived by cohort_gross_profit / cost

Flip side, Adjust already has a set of functionality to pull in your clean revenue data. On the one hand, Purchase Verification can help you make sure that IAPs are legitimate, and not the result of e.g. piracy. And on the other hand, Adjust can support incoming revenue data in over 160 currencies – converting them to any currency of your choice. It’s the kind of flexibility that comes with Measurement 2.0.

Speaking of flexibility…

On-the-fly Timezones: Measure Any Timezone… Any Time

Running campaigns in local markets across the globe? Talking to partners or local offices in different timezones? We know your pain – since we are ourselves syncing with a dozen offices worldwide.

We had a long think about timezones for analytics. We’re pretty staunch about operating our backend on UTC, so as to maintain the best compatibility with platforms around the world.

But by rebuilding our database to aggregate by the hour instead of by the day, we don’t really need to make that decision any more. From now on, we can allow you to display your daily data by any timezone around the world.

Shortly, we’ll be adding a switch in your statistics dashboard where you can select the timezone to display data in.

A global account setting will be your default, but if you ever need to reference another timezone, you can switch it right from within the dashboard.

Reporting by timezone is being tested and will be rolled out to all users (on any package) shortly.

Hourly Aggregation Tells You the Time of Day

In addition to timezones, the radical shift onto Hourly Aggregation will allow us to present metrics related to the time of day. Do night owls contribute greater ROI than morning people? How do major sports events affect your usage patterns in certain regions? Is there a sweet spot in the afternoon to promote your game?

The new Hourly Aggregation will become the basis of extended drill-down within your dashboard. While the new aggregation scheme is currently being rolled out to all users, we’ll be taking the visualizations out of beta in a few weeks.

Up next, we’re planning to roll out updated graphs for all metrics and allow you to group by the hour, as you might today group by day or week. We have some niftier ideas later on.

## Recertifying Our Commitment to Privacy

In order to pull these changes off, we’ve had to make some changes to how the underlying Adjust database operates. Whereas the entire system previously operated solely on a daily aggregation, the Adjust database will now hold hourly aggregations as well as individual, queryable user records.

Because this affects the type of data that we store, as a precaution, we specially requested our privacy consultants at ePrivacy to re-evaluate our setup prior to implementation. Their evaluation is that there are no substantial changes to our regulatory compliance with the way the platform is now designed.

“Given the sensitive nature of increasing the scope and detail of a dataset like this, Adjust has worked in close conjunction with us along the way of this transition,” says Christoph Bauer from ePrivacy, “Together, we’ve been able to outline a path to enable these improvements, without sacrificing Adjust’s long-running commitment to end-user privacy and data security.”

If you have any further questions, feel free to get in touch with our team.

## How do you get hold of these features?

All of the features above will be woven into Adjust seamlessly. Hourly aggregation is being applied for all of our users, and the Audience Builder is being prepared as we speak.

On-the-fly timezone reporting will be available to everyone. The Audience Builder and Real ROI are features available on the Business Pro package and above.

Hit up our product overview for more detail, and if you have any questions, feel free to reach out to our team!