It's 2024 and AppLovin is hijacking navigation swipes to deliver "clicks" for their clients. It's no wonder programmatic still has such an awful reputation when you have large platforms doing idiotic stuff like this to juice their numbers. You can see my upward swipe is registered as a "click" on the ad, but when I'm in the Play Store it's registered as a swipe to the app switcher, as it's supposed to be. To be honest I'm surprised this behaviour is possible but kudos to the devs for creating this incredibly annoying hack.
They have an excuse for that
Jon Norris what it could be : did you also tried a click ? As actually a swipe can also be just interpreted as a clic on the ad and it s then just going to the redirect / destination link. The bad thing is that it should rather be a playable ad instead of a stupid video. Anyway it what we say everyday. CTR is not enough to get the value, and really at the end LTV should be. That why we say « do true playable ads showing truly the game ». Maybe CTR will be a bit less but the ones that install after a real try will really play the game after and not just wondering what is that game they installed.
So the fraud is : Step 1 : don’t show an ad but bill the client (these platforms are typically CPM based) Step 2 : trigger impression and click to MMP EVEN if user doesn’t open the game (it’s a simple MMP URL hit) Step 3 : when the user installs the app organically, MMP will convert the organic to inorganic. Now use that to show performance Step 4 : since the user highjacked is organic, the quality will be very good. Make a bullsnhir story of how you target relevant users and use AI for this! Step 5 : ask client to increase spends We have been flagging these cases for 10years now!! And getting these solved for all clients every day!
I'm pretty sure there's a definition of "click" as "interaction with the ad caused by user's willingly performed action" somewhere in the tos. It's a legally correct definition, the best type of definitions.
This pattern looks dark.
Good news guys, CTR is very good 😆
Glad your calling them out!
That’s very lame and annoying, But quite simple to code. « On leaving app » -> launch store on specific page Once you swipe up to reduce the app (and switch between apps) it’s called and launch it.
Digitally-native marketer growing acquisition for cool companies
1yAnd yes I know looking at adtech on a Saturday is a little depressing but give me a break it's raining.