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Understanding attribution for smarter sports betting marketing
As the sports betting industry grows in North America, you’re likely facing a common challenge: understanding which channels and campaigns truly drive user acquisition. With users discovering betting apps through social media, affiliate partnerships, and paid advertising, tracking the path to conversion has become increasingly complex.
For app marketers, this multichannel journey can feel like aiming at a moving target. Scaling growth with a paid media strategy that’s robust enough to meet users across all of these touchpoints quickly drives up ad spend. Top players in the industry are paying millions per year on advertising. According to SensorTower, FanDuel is currently spending $225,666,700 per year on ads in the U.S., with DraftKings coming in at $79,859,000 and BetMGM spending $64,412,100. However, success is about making smarter–not spendier–marketing choices.
To illustrate how the landscape is evolving, here’s a breakdown of sportsbook ad spend share in the United States across key sports betting advertising channels from 2023 to 2024. Source: Sensor Tower.
Success across channels requires a measurement solution that maintains visibility across the entirety of the user journey.
Why traditional marketing analytics fall short
Before diving into mobile attribution, let’s address a common scenario: Your marketing team runs campaigns across multiple channels—paid social, search ads, and affiliate partnerships. Each shows positive results, but there’s a problem: the total number of conversions across all channels exceeds your new user count. This is known as “double counting,” and it’s just one of the challenges proper attribution solves.
One major contributor to issues like this is the rise of walled gardens such as Meta, Google, and X (Twitter). These platforms operate within self-contained ecosystems, providing performance metrics that reflect only what happens within their walls.
A walled garden is a platform, like Meta or Google, that keeps all user data and activity within its system, limiting your ability to see how ads perform outside of it.
Because they don’t share user-level data across platforms, marketers are left without visibility into the full customer journey, especially when users engage across multiple channels. This creates gaps in understanding because the contributions of channels outside the walled garden may be underrepresented or missed entirely.
Another challenge lies in an issue we’ve touched on above–the metrics reported by these platforms can be inherently self-serving. Walled gardens make money directly from ad spend, so their attribution models often reflect this interest. By emphasizing their role in driving impressions, clicks, and conversions, these platforms encourage advertisers to invest more heavily. Unfortunately for marketers, this is potentially at the expense of more effective strategies elsewhere.
Peeling back the performance layers with attribution
Insight into how, when, and where users engage is essential for strategic budget allocation. This data, provided by attribution, ensures ad spend goes toward the channels that maximize return and truly drive results. We keep throwing around the term “attribution”, but what does it really mean?
Attribution connects user actions (like installing your app or placing a first bet) back to the marketing efforts that drove them. Think of it as joining the dots between your marketing spend and actual results.
In digital marketing, attribution helps marketers understand how different channels, campaigns, or individual ads work together to guide users along their journey toward conversion. This means capturing key actions like account creation, first bets, and continued engagement as users move across channels. With attribution, it’s clear which marketing actions are most effective at each stage, making it easier to optimize future campaigns.
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So if the attribution data from walled gardens isn’t fully reliable, where should it be coming from? A mobile measurement partner (MMP) like Adjust provides accurate, unbiased attribution to app marketers.
An MMP measures and organizes app marketing data across all advertising channels, providing an overview of a brand’s campaign performance across the user journey.
Sports betting marketers can use an MMP to:
- Collect data from platforms like Google Ads, Facebook, TikTok, etc.
- View all marketing data in a centralized location.
- Combine ad spend and revenue data to see what’s working.
- Map multichannel user journeys and measure the contribution of each touchpoint.
- Turn complex data into clear insights you can act on.
How attribution works for multichannel marketing
There are several types of attribution models. Generally, last-touch attribution is the go-to method for measuring marketing effectiveness. This approach assigns full credit to the final interaction a user has with a campaign, such as the last ad they clicked before installing an app or placing a bet. In many ways, it’s a straightforward model that provides a clear view of which channels are ultimately driving a campaign’s primary key performance indicator (KPI).
Hang tight, because it gets a little more complex once we introduce attribution windows and waterfalls.
Adjust uses an attribution waterfall to make sure the most relevant interaction gets credit. For example, if someone clicks on an ad a day before installing an app and also sees another ad right before installing, the click (which shows more intent) would get the credit. This approach ensures the most meaningful action is recognized.
Attribution windows define the time frame in which an action can be linked to a previous ad engagement. When multiple engagements from different channels occur within the attribution window, it’s crucial to determine whether this is a simple last-touch (non-assisted) install or an assisted install, where multiple touchpoints contributed.
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In an assisted install, multiple channels are credited with helping to move the user toward conversion. For example, a sports bettor might click on a TikTok ad, later click on a Facebook ad, and finally install the app after seeing a Google Ad. In this case, Facebook gets the attribution as it had the more intentional click, while the impression on Google Ads, as well as the TikTok click, are considered assists.
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This data gives marketers a more nuanced view of how different platforms interact to drive conversions. It reveals which channels support each other and how they influence user decisions throughout the funnel. In the example above, this data would indicate to marketers that bidding should prioritize broad reach and engagement to capture attention on TikTok. Then, ads on Facebook can capture a more intentional click at the consideration stage, with a high potential for re-targeting users who show interest. Google Ads, where the final conversion happens, can receive a dedicated budget to focus on high-intent keywords or remarketing to complete the journey.
Connected TV: The assisted install MVP of sports betting
As digital streaming continues to outpace linear TV, connected TV (CTV) is a vital channel for reaching sports fans–especially during live events and moments of peak engagement.
A connected TV (CTV) is any TV set connected to the internet, most commonly used to stream video.
According to SensorTower, sportsbook ad impressions on CTV and OTT platforms in the U.S. rose to 2.7 billion between H2 2023 and H1 2024—a clear sign of its growing dominance. Known for its ability to assist installs, CTV plays a crucial role in the sports betting journey, where the big screen remains a favorite for fans.
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Staying one step ahead: Combining attribution and incrementality
An MMP also helps marketers stay ahead of the competition by combining attribution with more advanced solutions, like incrementality testing.
Incrementality testing measures whether a specific marketing effort drives results in addition to what would happen organically.
Attribution provides a complete view of how each channel contributes to installs and engagement across the user journey. Incrementality takes this further by isolating the unique impact of a specific channel (like CTV) or campaign—ideal for multichannel marketing. Together, these insights allow sports betting marketers to identify what’s driving real growth, optimize their strategies, and confidently invest in the channels delivering the most value.
To unlock the full potential of a multichannel strategy, sports betting brands need to adopt a data-driven approach to their marketing. Reliable attribution is essential for this. It maps out where interactions occur across all marketing channels, showing which touchpoints contribute to your KPIs.
Ready to leverage Adjust’s expertise in sports betting to tackle your unique marketing measurement challenges? Request a demo to see how we can elevate your campaigns.
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