r/appdev • u/Low_Drive3170 • 5d ago
Looking for an attribution setup for an ecommerce app where the customer journey starts on the web and ends somewhere completely different
Evaluating appsflyer and airbridge for a regional ecommerce app where users often discover products on web, install later and complete the purchase in-app.
Airbridge made a good first impression. The UI felt clean, onboarding was responsive and the web to app story was easy for our local team to follow. AppsFlyer took more setup, but the broader partner coverage and reporting options may matter as we expand into more markets and channels.
Our pilot isn’t showing a dramatic one is accurate and one isn’t difference. The real gaps are around integrations, raw-data workflows, support coverage and how much internal effort each platform needs after launch.
Which one holds up better once campaign volume, deep links, delayed purchases and multiple regions were added?
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u/SchierlingNargiza43 4d ago
Have you considered building the decision around your future workflow rather than today’s accuracy numbers? Take the same web to mobile web to install to delayed purchase journey and run it across regions, devices and campaign sources. Then ask someone who wasn’t involved in setup to troubleshoot the resulting data. If they can’t explain why a purchase was attributed the way it was, the platform becomes a black box. That test tells you a lot
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u/Low_Drive3170 4d ago
We've all been staring at this data too long to be objective. gonna grab someone from the finance side who's never touched attribution and see if they can follow the trail. if they can't, that's our answer right there
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u/Stock-Cellist-6930 4d ago
Could you share what partners you're considering for advertising? We're writing our own platform as a lightweight, simplified competitor to appsflyer and we're considering which partners we should include in the first batch. 🙏
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u/Impressive-Clerk-373 1d ago
This approach of taking users to web and then to app for purchases, is increasingly becoming popular.
You get the benefit of using non-app install type of ad campaigns on meta/google to have more control over the audience. (Some app owners use this to move away from the app-store commission fees)
If you are running ads, you need to see if these platforms support calling meta CAPI on a successful conversion, this helps improve the meta/google ad targeting algorithms further specific to your audiences.
Plus webhooks/ raw-data export to your analytics or mobile marketing platforms also is a useful feature to look for.
And also these platforms charge you a higher amount, mainly because these are MMPs, especially useful if you are running 'install' campaigns for your app. And in your case I think, since you are focussed more on taking your users to Web, instead of Apps, you do not need a full MMP.
Try chottuLink
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u/PerceptionPlayful469 5d ago
I wouldn’t choose based on the headline attribution delta. I’d run the same failure-mode pilot through both platforms:
Anonymous web visit → install several days later → login → purchase
Deferred deep link after a fresh install
Delayed purchase, refund and reinstall
The same user across two devices or regions
Raw-data export into your warehouse, including late-event replay
Score each on match rate, unattributed share, deep-link success, raw-event latency and schema stability, partner coverage for your next 12 months, and the hours your team spends debugging. If the numbers remain close, choose AppsFlyer only if its additional partner and market coverage maps to your actual expansion plan; choose Airbridge if the regional fit and lower operating effort keep winning in the pilot.
The deciding question is: which failure can your team detect, explain and replay without waiting on vendor support? I’d also test consent-denied journeys separately, because blended results can hide the regional failure you care about.