What Facebook’s deprecation of the AMM program means for marketing teams (and what they should do!)

By now you may have heard that Facebook recently announced that the Advanced Mobile Measurement (AMM) program will be deprecated on October 29, 2021. This means their ad network will no longer allow Mobile Measurement Partners (MMPs) to provide user-level attribution data to mobile marketers for Facebook traffic. While this may have come as a surprise, it is believed that many other networks will follow suit with a similar move sooner than later.

MMPs are third-party companies that Facebook has certified to build specialized integrations . These integrations include unique access to user-level data on Facebook, in order to provide mobile ad attribution on behalf of advertisers. AMM is an optional agreement that individual advertisers can make with Facebook, giving them direct access (typically via data exports) to user-level data via their MMP. 

Facebook’s view-through data was removed from AMM in 2020, and the latest change will remove click-through data from AMM.

These changes will not affect Voyantis’ Signal Optimization solution. The only change would be the manner in which campaign performance and engagement is measured over time. 

So now what?

With this change, which only affects mobile advertisers, Facebook will only allow MMPs to provide aggregate results over events that are sent to them. Examples of such events include revenue events, signups, or even pLTV events such as the optimized signals from Voyantis.

This is all a part of Facebook’s effort to offer a new experience to meet the needs of advertisers and partners. Naturally, confusion tends to arise with such changes for all parties. It is undeniable that these changes will impact advertisers, growth marketers, and user acquisition managers alike, as they will no longer be privy to the device-level AMM data from Facebook. It is worth noting that Facebook does not expect app campaign performance or results to change, because their delivery system will still be able to optimize for click through and view-through conversions. 

The only change is access to granular conversion data. Growth teams can still understand the impact of Facebook conversions, as they will still be reported in aggregate on Facebook reporting surfaces. Aggregated Data will be provided by the MMPs in their dashboards, and in a server-side API.

These changes, on the one hand, render much of the MMPs value proposition of providing a user-level attribution API useless. On the other hand, this will mean that the MMPs will become the only de-facto marketing analytics service any mobile marketer can use. The marketer’s own BI can still be used for product analytics and understanding user journeys, they will just not be able to aggregate by marketing campaigns and channels. This is a major shift for mobile marketers, though it doesn’t affect us at Voyantis a great deal.

How growth teams should prepare before Oct 29th

These changes won’t cause much frustration for most marketing teams. The teams behind larger companies (that were exporting raw, log-level data for in-house modeling) will have their work cut out for them, as this ability will diminish once AMM is out of the picture. And let’s not forget—this type of user-level data from Facebook was already limited on iOS devices because of changes in Apple's App Tracking Transparency.

There’s no doubt that the way measurements are conducted for apps will change. Apps will no longer be able to pull raw data from MMPs, leaving them in the position to relay and measure their performance using aggregate data. 

Considering the fact that you will only be able to use aggregate data pulled from MMPs, we recommend you start doing this now.

Additionally, if you currently measure performance using a multitouch, or data driven attribution model, we recommend you set up a “simple” attribution model within your BI (such as last click/first click) which you can easily compare with your current BI model, as apps have a limited time frame to assess the impact of switching to a simpler attribution model that will be implemented by the MMPs.

On that note, now would be a good time to talk to your MMP about the attribution models they will be able to provide (considering the changes). E.g. Will they provide you with cohort aggregate revenue data for several models (first click, last click, 40-20-40, etc.)

Stay tuned for a more detailed explanation of adjustments, following additional information from Facebook on what to expect when AMM is deprecated.