Adjust

Adjust is a mobile measurement partner (MMP) — a third-party analytics platform that measures and attributes mobile-app marketing. Its central job is attribution: when someone installs an app or takes an action inside it, Adjust determines which ad, channel, or campaign should get the credit, so marketers can see which sources actually drive installs and in-app events rather than guessing. Around that it provides app analytics — real-time reporting on campaigns, channels, and sources in one dashboard — plus tools for fraud prevention and audience work. Because it is a neutral third party rather than one of the ad networks it measures, an MMP like Adjust gives an unbiased view across all of them, which is why app marketers rely on it instead of trusting each network's self-reported numbers. Adjust was founded in 2012 and became an AppLovin company in 2021, joining a larger app-growth and monetization business.

Adjust matters because mobile-app marketing is hard to measure without a dedicated MMP. Installs and in-app events happen on a device, spread across many ad networks, and each network has an incentive to claim credit for conversions it may not have caused. An independent MMP resolves that conflict by attributing conversions consistently and impartially across sources, giving app marketers the accurate picture they need to allocate budget, judge channel performance, and compute the return on app-install campaigns. In the era of tightened mobile privacy — Apple's App Tracking Transparency and its SKAdNetwork framework — measurement got harder and MMPs adapted to attribute within those constraints, which makes their role more specialized, not less. For anyone running paid user acquisition for an app, Adjust is the kind of tool that turns messy install data into decisions.

Adjust's closest comparison is with other mobile measurement partners, and Kochava is a direct one. Both are independent MMPs that attribute app installs and in-app events across networks, offer real-time analytics, and provide fraud protection, and both had to adapt to Apple's privacy changes. They compete on much the same ground, so the differences are matters of emphasis, coverage, pricing, and ecosystem rather than a fundamental capability gap. The most consequential distinction today is ownership and lineage: Adjust is part of AppLovin, an app-growth and monetization company, while Kochava is independent, founded in 2011, and positions itself around omnichannel measurement spanning mobile, connected TV, and offline. A team choosing between them weighs those ties, their channel coverage, and how each fits the rest of its stack, since the core attribution job overlaps heavily.

It also helps to separate an MMP like Adjust from the ad networks and from general product analytics. Ad networks (say, a social platform's ad system) both sell the ads and report their own results, so they are not neutral — the MMP exists precisely to referee across them. Product-analytics tools focus on in-app behavior and engagement for the product team, not on attributing which paid campaign drove an install for the marketing team; the two are complementary. Adjust's specific lane is marketing attribution and measurement for mobile apps: connecting spend to installs and events across sources, impartially. Keeping that boundary clear explains why an app business runs an MMP alongside, not instead of, its ad networks and its product analytics — each answers a different question, and Adjust answers the attribution one.

Adjust — a mobile measurement partner now owned by AppLovin — attributes app installs and in-app events to the campaigns that drove them, giving app marketers impartial cross-network measurement.

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