Bringing precision to fraud prevention with Conversion Rules

Fraud prevention is a core requirement for mobile app marketing performance measurement. The way fraud manifests, however, is rarely uniform across apps, partners, or regions. Most fraud solutions rely on fixed filters that cannot account for business-specific requirements or the nuances of real traffic. At Adjust, we designed Conversion Rules to perfectly solve this gap, giving teams fine-grained control over how installs and events are validated before attribution.

Conversion Rules sits within Adjust’s multi-layered Fraud Prevention Suite and act as a customizable logic layer that determines what your app treats as valid traffic. Instead of retroactively auditing activity or relying on a single global standard, you can configure rules based on your own thresholds, compliance needs, and operational realities.

The result is a fraud framework that adapts to each client’s environment, not the other way around.

Fraud filtering alone cannot determine whether traffic is right for a specific business. A technically clean install can still be misaligned, non-compliant, or unusable depending on:

• The version of the app or SDK used
• The app store source
• Regional restrictions
• Device trust criteria
• Required in-app event patterns
• Campaign-level requirements

Without a way to enforce these standards, teams end up paying for traffic that should never enter attribution in the first place. Conversion Rules gives Adjust clients direct control over these scenarios, ensuring that questionable traffic is handled at the point of ingestion rather than downstream in reporting or refunds.

Conversion Rules operate as a configurable decision layer that sits on top of Adjust’s fraud filters. Traffic that passes fraud validation can still be evaluated against business-specific constraints before attribution.

There are three main rule types:

1. Device-level rules

Control which installs are eligible for attribution based on attributes like:

• Store validation for Google Play and Apple App Store (third-party stores and pre-installs coming soon)
• Country
• App version, OS version, SDK version, signature version
• Device trust state (trusted, unverified, untrusted)

These rules allow clients to exclude or categorize devices without disrupting live campaigns. For example, installs from deprecated app versions can be labeled “unverified” for visibility or blocked entirely.

Fraud prevention can identify what is definitively fraudulent, but it cannot determine what is acceptable for every business. Version mismatches, off-target regions, unsupported store sources, or unusual event flows are not always “fraud,” yet they still distort attribution and waste budget. Conversion Rules closes this gap by giving Adjust clients a configurable decision layer that applies their own standards before attribution is assigned.

Instead of relying on fixed global filters, teams can set rules around region, store validation, versioning, device trust, and post-install behavior, all enforced in real time and without engineering work. This makes attribution more precise, protects spend from misaligned traffic, and keeps datasets consistent across markets and app versions. Conversion Rules bring flexibility to a space where this was historically limited, giving clients control over the traffic that enters their measurement, not after the fact, but at the moment it is created.

For more information on the Fraud Prevention Suite and Conversion rules, reach out to your Adjust contact person. To learn how we can grow your app business in general, request a demo today.