Assists

Assists are important for piecing together the full user story behind attribution. They offer visibility into the ad engagements that assisted your attributed installs. This means you can understand the full-funnel impact of your marketing channels. Identify the touchpoints that played a role assisting conversions to optimize your marketing strategies with better-informed decision-making.

Learn more about how Adjust can help you with assists reporting using the Assists dashboard.

How it works

As per the typical attribution flow, Adjust may consider many different data points to attribute the source of an install. As long as an engagement occurs within the attribution window, it is eligible for consideration.

Some installs may have many competing engagements, meaning that seeing only the attributed install reported does not demonstrate the full story. That's why Adjust breaks your install data down into assisted and non-assisted categories.

With assist data, you have information about not just the engagement attributed to the install, but the engagements that make up the entire user journey. This gives you a fuller picture of what may influence and affect user behavior.

Assisted install

An assisted install means that the app install had multiple different ad engagements that competed for the attribution. The assisting engagements can be a click or impression, but must fall within the attribution window specified for that link.

Non-assisted install

A non-assisted install means there were no touchpoints in the attribution window prior to the attributed engagement. Since organic users do not have any engagement with the link, they are not considered as assisting the install.

Assists and self-attributing networks

With self-attributing networks, Adjust uses API calls rather than links to send information to the network. Adjust sends SANs every app session our SDK reports. If the network recognizes the activity, they claim the attribution (called self-attribution) by sharing the details from the last ad engagement on their side. Adjust then uses the engagement data we have from all networks (including non-SANs) to attribute the install to the last known engagement source.

Since this attribution flow with SANs works differently to other channels, Adjust has different levels of visibility into the various areas of assist data.

Full visibility into other channels assisting SANs

With the Assists dashboard, you can see the full extent to which SANs are being assisted by other networks. This lets you understand the comparative performance of other networks in producing engagements which resulted in a conversion on a SAN platform.

No visibility into SANs self-assisting

Adjust cannot report the extent to which SANs assist themselves. Since we only receive attribution claims from SANs, we don't know what happens on their platform prior to this. As a result, Adjust cannot report on other engagements that may have assisted the attribution.

Limited visibility into SANs assisting other channels

Adjust does not always accept attribution claims from SANs. When another network provides a stronger engagement, we attribute them instead. In these cases where we reject the self-attributed network's attribution claim, we report this as assist data.

Key terms