Re-engagement attribution

Install attribution asks who brought the user. Re-engagement asks who brought them back.

An install is counted once. Everything a user does afterwards is normally credited to the channel that won that install. That rule breaks down when you pay for ads aimed at existing users: a discount shown to lapsed shoppers, a reminder shown to people who left a cart. If the purchase that follows is credited to the original install channel, the retargeting campaign looks like it did nothing.

Re-engagement attribution fixes this by opening a second attribution record. The retargeting ad becomes the owner of what the user does for a set period after they return.

The three settings that define it

Names differ between tools, and not every tool exposes all three. The ideas are the same everywhere: how fresh the click must be, how absent the user must have been, and how long the credit lasts.

How the match is made

There is no store visit, so the store referrer plays no part. The usual carrier is a deep link. The person taps the ad, the link opens the installed app directly, and the SDK reads the campaign details from the link at that moment. Where the ad platform shares a device identifier or a click ID, the MMP can also match a later open that did not come through the link.

Check whether views count at all. Apple's AdAttributionKit, for example, does not create re-engagement postbacks from view-through ads.^[1]

Why re-engagement numbers are easy to inflate

Existing users open the app without any help. Show an ad to your most active users and many will open the app within a day, as they would have anyway. Each of those opens is a re-engagement on paper. Three guards keep the number honest:

• Exclude recently active users from retargeting audiences, or require an inactivity period.
• Judge the campaign on a paid event, such as a purchase, and not on app opens.
• Hold back a small group that sees no ads and compare how many return.

What to do next

1. Decide what counts as a lapsed user for your app. A daily-use app and a travel app need very different inactivity periods.
2. Give every retargeting ad a deep link, so the open can be matched deterministically.
3. Report installs and re-engagements in separate rows.

Check that your plan measures it at all. Airbridge lists retargeting and re-engagement attribution, for campaigns that target existing active users, in its plan comparison.^[2] For how the returning user's later purchases feed the ad platform, see the entry on the postback. For judging whether those users stay, see retention.