While it’s not the most popular app, Pinterest continues to rank highly on other indexes that matter to marketers. For example, a new report from mobile ad measurement firm Kochava picks Pinterest as the top media partner in terms of data-signal quality, fraud detection, user retention and correlation of clicks to installs. Other top partners include mobile ads firms like Crossinstall, Pinsight, LifeStreet and Liftoff. Signal clarity refers to the integrity of data input and output -- like impressions, clicks, and post-backs -- reported to attribution providers. “Fraud” represents the percentage of fraudulent traffic, while “quality” speaks to the retention of active users after 30 days. Among consumer-facing brands, Pandora also ranked highly as a media partner. The music streaming app received top marks for its fraud-detection abilities, along with the quality of its traffic. Besting Pinterest, Pandora, and all other potential partners, Microsoft’s Bing search engine actually won out in terms of quality, as Kochava defines it. advertisement advertisement Long-term retention of users is determined by the existence of post-install events 31 to 60 days past the install date. Media partners with a high percentage of long-term retained users are considered to have high quality traffic. Among other strengths, Pinterest topped the list in terms of deterministic attribution, based on an anonymous device ID that sends data about a click or impression. That information is matched to a downstream install or event using the same ID. Since device IDs are only collected from a mobile app, deterministic attribution is used as a proxy for in-app inventory. Kochava performs mobile attribution by tying installs and post-install events to a specific marketing campaign. Accurately matching in-app events to the correct channel relies on two methods of mobile attribution in marketing: deterministic and probabilistic. As for the mobile platform, Pinterest performed equally well on Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android mobile operating system. The pin-based network also beat out all other potential partners across most ad categories, including entertainment, shopping, food and drink, games, sports, music, photo and video, books and reference, education, and tools and utility. Separately, Google Ads won the award for the top self-attributing network, according to Kochava’s ranking process. Within self-attributing environments like Facebook and Google, only the impression and click data used to claim a conversion is sent to third-party measurement providers, rather than the full stream of data. SANs regularly lead any performance ranking, given their market share. Yet the absence of full scope impression and click data makes an apples-to-apples comparison with non-SAN media partners incomplete, according to Kochava. For SANs, quality is determined by long-term retention of users, based on the existence of post-install events 31 to 60 days past the install date. SANs with a high percentage of long-term retained users are considered to have high-quality traffic.
Pinterest has scored highly in a report by mobile content measurement firm Kochava , which saw the site rated the best by marketers for data - signal quality , user retention , correlation of ads to users and fraud detection . Pinterest also led the pack for deterministic attribution , and beat its rivals in a slew of ad categories , from entertainment and food to sports and technology .