Your app data and your ad data have never met

Short answer: your app measures itself with one tool and your ads measure themselves with another, and the two have never been introduced. Nothing is broken. They were simply built as separate systems, and nobody joined them, so app revenue and web revenue are compared as if they were different businesses.

Why the two never met

Apps are measured by a mobile measurement partner. Installs, opens, in-app purchases, all attributed inside that tool with its own identifiers and its own windows.

The website is measured by pixels and server events, with a different set of identifiers and different windows.

Both are correct about their own half. Neither has ever seen the other, so the obvious question, what did I sell in total and what did the advertising cost, has no home. It gets answered in a spreadsheet once a quarter, badly.

What that costs

• Budget goes to whichever half you can see. Usually the website, because that is where the reporting is easier. The app quietly subsidises decisions it had no vote in.
• The same customer is counted twice. Someone who browses on the web and buys in the app appears in both systems as two people, and every per-customer number you calculate is wrong in the same direction.
• Nobody trusts either number. Two systems that disagree and cannot be reconciled produce the same result as no measurement: decisions made on instinct.

Where MIQAS comes in, and what it is not

Being direct about the boundary first: MIQAS has no mobile SDK. We do not ask you to add anything to your app, ship a release, or wait on your mobile team. If a vendor tells you their attribution needs an SDK in your app, that is a real cost and a real release cycle, and it is worth knowing before you agree to it.

What MIQAS does is take the purchases your measurement partner already records and bring them in as an order source, alongside the orders from your store. Adjust, AppsFlyer and MoEngage all already know what your app sold; that data simply needs somewhere to sit next to everything else.

Once it does, app revenue joins web revenue in one total, and your spend gets measured against all of it rather than the part that happened in a browser.

What to do this week

• Write down last month’s app revenue and web revenue side by side. Most teams have never seen the two numbers next to each other.
• Add your total ad spend and divide. That single figure is closer to the truth than either half was.
• Check whether any campaign is being judged on web conversions alone while sending meaningful traffic to the app. That is the one most likely to be cut for no reason.

The app and the website are one business. They are only two numbers because of how the tools were built.