Unifying Web 2 and Web 3 attribution
Spindl is partnering with AppsFlyer
Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it.
Norman MacLean, A River Runs Through It (1976)
Two years ago, when I was still employed at one of the large Web 2 attribution platforms, I was staring at the real-time dashboard of the company’s data ingestion. About 300,000 times per second, or 25 billion times a day, someone somewhere sent another event happening on their mobile devices—think clicks or app installs—into the company’s vast data machinery. This was the entire world of mobile computing, from Facebook to consumer apps like Netflix, agreeing on what had happened in the online world and settling billions of dollars of ads spend.
What if everyone just used a common database and wrote into that, I thought, instead of having to slosh all this duplicative state around?
This thought partly led to Spindl’s founding: understanding the promise of the shared public ledger of a blockchain as common marketing database. For the past year we’ve been building a Web 3-native version of the attribution and analytics technology that’s now standard in the mature mobile world. Much of Spindl’s magic is allowing users to seamlessly move between Web 2 events like clicks and Web 3 actions like NFT mints, but there’s still lots of important functionality missing.
Partly that’s due to mobile marketing being hard: Following users from walled-garden platforms like Facebook to the app store to an app install to actually using the app is a convoluted engineering problem. The company we’re partnering with, AppsFlyer, has been a leader in mobile measurement and attribution since 2011 and has raised $300 million in venture capital funding to solve it. With 60,000+ integrated apps and 20 global offices, AppsFlyer is the pre-eminent attribution platform, practically synonymous with marketing measurement.
This two-way integration enables developers and marketers to seamlessly send and receive data between AppsFlyer and Spindl. They’ll be empowered to see their mobile in-app data alongside their on-chain Web3 metrics.
This partnership will be particularly important in gaming, where game studios are taking a hybrid approach to the blockchain: some game actions and purchases happen onchain, but some (or even most) user actions happen offchain like any other game. That presents a big problem: every Web 3 gaming dashboard has missing data around onchain revenue and user actions, presenting a very partial picture. Worse still: the more onchain a game is, the more wrong basic metrics like lifetime value are.
To date, Web 3 has broadly avoided the mobile measurement problem as much of crypto runs on desktop, but that won’t last forever. Web 3 games like BoomLand and Mighty Action Heroes are launching full mobile experiences, and that means mobile user acquisition via the usual suspects of Google, AppLovin and all the rest. Much as gaming studios have hybridized their user experience across the regular Internet and the blockchain, the attribution of the future will also be a hybrid.
With this AppsFlyer/Spindl data integration, game developers will be able to easily figure out where their mobile app installs are coming from (AppsFlyer), and how well those users are monetizing and sticking around onchain (Spindl).
This two-way integration enables developers and marketers to seamlessly send and receive data between AppsFlyer and Spindl, and into their existing data pipelines. They’ll be empowered to see their mobile in-app data alongside their on-chain Web3 metrics. This is all done while putting privacy at the forefront — prioritizing the safety of, and minimizing the movement of, customer data.
For the first time, the vast river of mobile usage and native blockchain data will be joined in an orderly and usable way, app installs merging seamlessly with every NFT sale and much else besides. This is a sign of maturity for Web 3, both needing the sort of sophisticated measurement that mobile growth requires, and being a market worth focusing on by established mobile players like AppsFlyer.
We’re live right now.
Any Appsflyer customer can start integrating with Spindl by finding us in the AppsFlyer Partner Marketplace pictured above. In the setup screen, pick the AppsFlyer events you want Spindl to join to your onchain data, and we’ll do the rest.
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