LTA + Next-Gen MMM = winning growth strategies across search, TikTok, and beyond

The stage is set for a brave new world at the intersection of gaming, which is evolving at rapid-fire pace, and user acquisition, where new challenges and exciting opportunities in advertising await.

This is where the integration of last-touch attribution (LTA) and next-generation marketing mix modeling (MMM) emerges as a robust duo, empowering advertisers to stay ahead of the curve and drive sustainable growth in an increasingly competitive landscape and privacy-conscious world. This is your chance to boldly go where no one has ventured before, to push the boundaries of what's possible.

IntroducingMaximizing Your ROAS: Cutting-Edge Attribution Strategies in Mobile Gaming, a groundbreaking guide from industry leaders Kochava and TikTok for Business. This strategic resource arrives at a critical juncture, as traditional measurement approaches face disruption from privacy initiatives and evolving user behavior.

Akin to a meticulously designed power-up, the guide arms gaming marketers with the essential insights to thrive in a new era. Gaming studios are increasingly diversifying their media mix to include more upper- and mid-funnel media. Further, increasingly complex player journeys and evolving privacy initiatives are transforming measurement paradigms.

The Breakdown

Optimising your marketing efforts via LTA combined with incrementality insights from next–gen MMM delivers maximum ROAS, hands down. It's a game-changer for marketers looking to optimise their ad spend and drive serious ROI.

The old-school way of measuring digital marketing performance via LTA alone just doesn't cut it anymore. With so many touchpoints in the modern customer journey, you need a sophisticated approach to really understand what's working and what's not across upper-, middle-, and lower-funnel channels.

A Deeper Dive into the Collinearity of Channels

Is your search advertising incremental? Is it generating new demand rather than simply capturing or cannibalising existing demand? Those are great questions that LTA alone cannot answer due to the complex interplay between search and other mid- and upper-funnel marketing channels. In marketing measurement, collinearity refers to the correlation between different marketing channels.

Let’s zoom in on Apple Search Ads (ASA) for a moment. When you run ads across multiple channels, it's essential to determine whether your ASA spend is truly incremental or if it's simply capturing conversions that would have occurred organically or through other channels.

If your ASA ads are not incremental, you’re spending money on ads that aren't contributing to additional conversions, reducing your ROAS. By understanding the relationship (a.k.a. collinearity) of other channels on your ASA performance, you can avoid redundancy in your marketing efforts. For instance, if a TV ad campaign is driving users to search for your app on the App Store, and they end up clicking on your paid ASA Search results ad, you’re paying twice for the same conversion - once for the TV ad and once for the ASA tap.

It’s only through the lens of MMM that you gain high-definition visibility into collinearity to overcome this trap.

Always-On Incremental Measurement (AIM) by Kochava, a next-generation marketing mix modeling platform, uses a metric called the Variance Inflation Factor (VIF) to measure the multicollinearity between different advertising channels. A high VIF score indicates a strong dependency between channels, suggesting that one channel's performance is heavily influenced by another.

For example, if your ASA has a high VIF score with TV ads, it means that TV ads are driving users to search for your app, and ASA is capturing those conversions.

In the graph below, one brand saw its VIF score skyrocket for ASA when it switched bidding tactics, while simultaneously increasing spend on top-of-funnel offline media. While the LTA data for ASA looked highly performative, it was only through AIM that the brand could see the spend was not incremental and make quick adjustments to restore balance.

As a rule of thumb, you want to avoid high VIF scores.

Optimising Lower-Funnel Search With Automation

Once you’ve come to understand collinearity across your different channels, you can more effectively allocate incremental spend on Apple Search Ads and other search advertising platforms. If you’re running upper- or mid-funnel media to drive brand awareness, you can hone your brand campaigns on ASA to account for the influx of search volume being generated by those other efforts—ensuring you don’t cannibalise your investment.

Once you’ve arrived at the optimal spend investment based on MMM insights, you can then leverage real-time LTA data out of ASA, combined with post-install event data from your mobile measurement partner (MMP) to automate campaign management and bidding strategies.

Gaming Powerhouse Scales ASA Success With Automation

One of Kochava’s clients is a popular online gaming platform with over 70 million daily active users - providing users with cutting-edge technologies for game creation and play. The marketing team faced challenges managing the scale of its keywords across brand, non-brand/category, and competitive campaigns. To make the ASA spend more efficient and incremental, the team onboarded Search Ads Maven by Kochava, an ASA campaign management and automation platform.

A strategy was devised for scaling the team’s workflows (e.g., spend redistribution, max keyword bid adjustments, cost per acquisition (CPA) and cost per goal (CPG) monitoring, spend pacing) with guardrails to maintain desired CPA & CPG rates, plus ROAS targets.

The results after a 13-day period?

Case in point: Ultimately, a holistic approach that combines incremental measurement, collinearity analysis, and automation can empower marketers to unlock the full potential of search as an incremental marketing channel, driving sustainable growth and maximising the impact of their search investments alongside other channel activities.

Exploring Next-Generation Marketing Mix Modeling (MMM)

In a recent webinar, over a third of poll respondents shared that they hadn’t adopted an MMM solution yet, but were looking to in 2025. What’s your MMM strategy to future-proof your growth?

If you’re looking to further familiarise yourself with MMM, Kochava hosted an engaging Ask Me Anything (AMA) session focused on the latest advancements in MMM. The session explored data requirements, onboarding procedures, performance benchmarks, common challenges, recommended best practices, and other pertinent topics related to this cutting-edge marketing analytics approach.

This informative session offers invaluable insights that can give you a competitive edge. Tune into the free on-demand recording to stay ahead of the curve and leverage MMM for data-driven marketing strategies that drive real results.

It’s a Wrap

The integration of LTA and MMM presents a powerful combination for gaming advertisers grappling with both ad signal loss and the urgency of driving incremental growth.

Leverage the Kochava + TikTok guide as a comprehensive resource to help you navigate the evolving landscape of mobile gaming attribution. Dual-wielding LTA + MMM enables a balanced approach to user acquisition measurement & optimisation while ensuring privacy compliance.

Unlike LTA, MMM operates without reliance on user-level data or device identifiers, giving you a privacy-durable, future-proof power-up for your measurement.  This ensures that your gaming app can not only survive but achieve remarkable success amid transformative industry changes.

As the gaming industry continues to evolve and advertising challenges persist, the integration of LTA and MMM emerges as a robust solution, empowering advertisers to stay ahead of the curve and drive sustainable growth in an increasingly competitive landscape.