Replacing Mobile Services features with Appsflyer

[JanJav]

Hello,

in our company, we are currently dealing with the issue of the sunset of the Adobe Mobile Services which shall also mark the end of all our acquisition and marketing mobile links created via the interface. I have read the brief pdf document regarding the sunset where the Appsflyer Adobe partner is mentioned as a replacement. We would like to keep all our links in place - we are using almost exclusively the Universal Links and App Links. The problem is that we are very much lacking details about this transition - most importantly how does the integration with Adobe work.

We would like to continue to use the Universal Links and App Links both for our acquisition campaigns and promotions using different marketing channels (internal campaigns, e-mails, paid search, .. you name it) whilst having the ability to report on the metrics and the campaigns in Adobe for the most part. 

Does this simply involve installing the SDK and an extension? Is the configuration in Adobe still based on the Processing Rules?

Any information would be much appreciated,

Jan

[VaniBhemarasetty · Accepted solution]

@JanJav You can use V5 SDK still and do acquisition tracking in mobile apps

Here is the documentation on the same

https://experienceleague.adobe.com/docs/mobile-services/android/acquisition-android/acquisition.html...

[JanJav]

Hi, thank you very much for your reply. That seems pretty clear for Android and Google Play Store. But does it also work for iOS and App Store?

The documentation here https://experienceleague.adobe.com/docs/mobile-services/ios/acquisition-ios/acquisition.html?lang=en specifically mentions the acquisition links created in Mobile Services.

Can this perhaps be solved with what is specified here https://experienceleague.adobe.com/docs/mobile-services/ios/acquisition-ios/c-acquisition-methods.ht... ?  However, it seems that this requires an appId identificator generated by the Mobile Services if I am not mistaken. 

[Jennifer_Dungan]

Processing Rules is still available... it's actually funny.. when we started our apps using SDK V5, we were told we couldn't use Mobile Services and had to use Processing Rules... only now, with all the people trying to transition I find out that almost 3 years later it was still around and being used

I've never used AppsFlyer, so I wish you the best of luck... I do know that we are tracking Universal Links, Push Notifications and Campaigns in our Mobile Apps... but we aren't using any fancy tools.

[JanJav]

Hi, thanks for our reply! I realized one can use the Universal Links tracking even without Mobile Services as the SDK can consume the query parameters appended to the link the same way as it would with normal deep links. However, what links created in Mobile Services offered was the automatic routing to the App Store if the user did not have the app. I guess that without Mobile Services this logic has to be somewhat custom implemented by us as this is not a functionality that the Universal Links feature contains implicitly.

[kyle_rosenlof]

Hi Jennifer, are you still able to pull in links and campaign details without third-party tools after the deprecation of Mobile services at the end of 2022? I find it bizarre that Adobe doesn't seem to offer any out-of-the-box way to track campaigns or deeplinks in mobile apps. If you are still doing this, would you mind sharing some details of what is in place to make that possible? Thanks! 

[Jennifer_Dungan]

We are collecting campaign data.. we are collecting our UTM values from Universal Links, and Google Play Store referrals.... We don't yet have a solution for Apple Store attribution... we don't even have that solved in the Apple Store analytics.... 

If you are just interested in Google Play Store referrals, there is a video on Mobile App Campaigns from Google Store from the EMEA User Group: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jCd1uDAVEmE

We are doing more customization in our solution... basically, I have our developers capture the campaign values (all our various UTMs), and the referrer value that Google Play Store forwards from installs (I have them parse the values since I have some custom eVars capturing data along with the normal s.campaign and Marketing Channel rules).. then I have them set all the values as Context Variables that I can then process and pass as needed to all our campaign tracking areas....

So I have a context variable for UTM Source, and another for UTM Medium, etc... I also have them pass the full url with the parameters so that my Marketing Channel rules that look for specific query strings will process this data the same way as our website....

In processing rules, on the "Page View" rule, I set Page URL, my custom eVar for UTM Source, my custom eVar for UTM Medium, etc and then I create a concatenated string of values (based of the individual UTM context variables) and pass that to my Campaign 

(I actually have these currently split into multiple so that I can check at each UTM and make sure I format my string accordingly...  I don't use "n/a" placeholders when some of my optional utm aren't set.. so my rules are a little more complex.. but your desired format may be easier to do in a single rule)