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Taking a look at ad spend measurement with Adjust’s SpendWorks
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Managing ad spend shouldn’t feel like detective work. But, for many marketers, that’s exactly what it becomes. Piecing together cost data from different networks, reported at different levels of granularity, and on different schedules, leaves you trying to make high-stakes decisions without a complete picture. This is what makes Adjust’s unified ad spend tracking solution an essential part of your measurement stack.
Adjust’s SpendWorks is designed to give marketers a clear, unified, and actionable view of their ad spend, no matter where it comes from, how often it’s updated, or how granular it needs to be. In this blog, we take a close look at SpendWorks to demonstrate how it works and how it supports smarter, faster, and more confident decision making and campaign optimization.
The importance of ad spend tracking
Every marketing team wants the same thing: to invest budget where it performs best and pull back where it doesn’t. In practice, that’s easier said than done.
Ad spend data is often:
- Scattered across multiple platforms and partners
- Delivered in different formats and timeframes
- Missing entirely for certain sources, like influencer or niche network campaigns
When data is incomplete, delayed, or siloed, optimization becomes guesswork. Decisions are either postponed or made too quickly because of the lack of context. Both can negatively impact return on ad spend (ROAS) and overall ROI. An ad spend tracking solution should remove this friction.
What is SpendWorks?
SpendWorks is Adjust’s ad spend solution, built to help marketers collect, validate, and analyze ad spend data across all their marketing activities. Capable of collecting ad spend from a wide range of partners, sources and campaigns, including mobile and web, this allows marketers to account for ad spend more completely, even in complex or fragmented media setups.
Once collected, SpendWorks makes ad spend data usable by aligning it with performance and outcome data at the level of detail marketers need. This enables teams to understand how much they are investing, where that investment is going, and how it contributes to campaign results.
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How SpendWorks works
SpendWorks supports multiple methods for collecting ad spend data, allowing marketers to measure spend accurately across different channels, partners, and campaign types. Depending on how campaigns are run, ad spend can be captured in the following ways:
- Ad spend API integrations: A Pull API with over 40 network integrations and a scheduling tool
- Ad spend on engagement: Data from time of click or impression from any network
- SKAN ad spend: Data from SKAdNetwork (SKAN) campaigns
- Same day ad spend: Ad spend is retrieved 6 times per day to ensure it’s fresh
- Web-to-mobile ad spend: Data from mobile or desktop web campaigns that drive app conversions
- Web-to-web ad spend: Data from desktop or browser campaigns
- Ad spend data import: Upload ad spend and campaign data directly to Adjust (for partners with no integration)
- Ad spend third-party storage exports: Customize reports and how frequently you receive them
Once collected, ad spend data in SpendWorks is mapped, validated, and visualized in a way that allows performance analysis. Teams can explore spend at different levels of granularity, compare it across channels, and align it with outcomes.
Key capabilities include:
- Automated integrations and APIs for scalable data collection
- Support for engagement-based spend metrics such as CPI, CPC, CPM, and CPE
- Exportable reports for deeper analysis or internal sharing
- Seamless alignment with attribution and performance data
Let’s take a closer look at the Pull API, ad spend scheduling, and web-to-mobile.
Ad spend API integrations
Adjust is integrated with more than 40 ad networks, which allows you to retrieve aggregated spend data at the most granular possible level. Once the partner is connected to your Adjust account, you can build customizable reports for views displaying exactly what you want.
The integrations also include a 14 day lookback window, meaning once you get set up, Adjust is able to pull data for the previous 14 days automatically, giving you a basis of historical data to start working with from day one. Because ad spend data is collected and corrected on the network side, there are limits to how much data can be collected in some cases. For Meta and Google, for example, it’s only possible to collect 7 days worth of historical data.
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Scheduling
With SpendWorks’ scheduling tool, marketers can automate ad spend collection so data arrives exactly when it’s needed without manual pulls or checks. Spend can be collected on a defined schedule, including multiple times per day where supported, and aligned to specific time zones for global teams. This ensures reporting is based on complete, up-to-date data while reducing operational overhead.
The Scheduling overview page provides an at-a-glance overview of collection status across partners. You can instantly see when data was last pulled, confirm successful collections, and quickly identify issues that need attention.
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Web-to-mobile
More and more, user journeys are becoming cross-channel, and web-to-app is one of the most common paths to conversion. With this in mind, it’s increasingly important for advertisers to understand when ad spend on mobile or desktop web is resulting in conversions.
Using our Network API integrations or ad spend-on-engagement method, you can retrieve web-to-mobile ad spend data that’s tied to actual conversions. This means that spend from web touchpoints, whether measured at an aggregated or user-level, is reflected alongside traditional mobile campaign data, giving you fuller visibility into how your web efforts contribute to user acquisition and growth and how they contribute to ROAS and overall performance.
The ad spend information that Adjust receives comes from the networks we’re integrated with and this data doesn’t include App ID or store type, a gap we solve with mapping rules. We assign an App ID and Store Type to web campaigns (for the Apple App Store or Google Play Store) and assign the ad spend data for the platform that the campaign is targeting.
This makes it possible to measure and optimize ad spend on web-to-app campaigns.
Bringing clarity to ad spend measurement
By supporting multiple ways to collect, align, and analyze ad spend, SpendWorks gives marketers the flexibility they need to track spend data confidently. Whether campaigns run across mobile, web, integrated networks, or custom partnerships, SpendWorks ensures ad spend data is accounted for, timely, and usable for optimization. The result is greater clarity into marketing investment, stronger decision-making, and more control over how budgets are allocated to drive performance and ROAS.
To learn more about SpendWorks or how Adjust can help grow your app business in general, reach out to your contact person, sign up for free, or request a demo today.
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