TextNow: Working with Adjust for reliable data, measurement and fraud protection

Founded in 2009, TextNow is a free texting and voice calling app that allows users to text and call without wifi or a traditional data plan. The app enables anyone with a smartphone to access unlimited local calling and texting, and offers subsidized data plans on the U.S. Sprint network. With offices in San Francisco, Waterloo and Portland, TextNow is the largest provider of free phone service in the U.S. and has been downloaded more than 200 million times globally.

Working with a large number of vendors and partners, TextNow required a solution to address user acquisition (UA) discrepancies and consistent data muddiness. The company started working with Adjust to improve data visibility, reduce the number of datasets they were comparing and to report based on a single source of truth. After all,“Data that’s 80% accurate is 0% accurate,” said Tyler Cooper, Head of User Acquisition at TextNow, who asserts that the team is “religious about data.”

The power of precise and reliable attribution data

TextNow deals with millions of data points every day - working with self-attributing networks (SANs) including Google AdWords, which accounts for around 60% of their budget, and other networks and mediation partners such as Liftoff and IronSource.

Adjust is able to accurately count installs and provide them with solid last-touch attribution, settling the discrepancies in reporting. They no longer need to toggle between countless dashboards, comparing data sets in an attempt to accurately attribute installs. Now it’s reliably taken care of - in real-time. For the networks that maintain control of their attribution logic when claiming installs, Adjust is able to apply TextNow’s attribution logic to their marketing campaigns. This results in metrics that accurately reflect the efficacy of the campaigns.

During their four years working with Adjust, TextNow has tested and vetted more than 100 marketing partners. The ‘plug-and-play’ style solution, which applies the same standards and fraud prevention to every ad source is central to this process.

Having a data source they can trust has allowed the team to pull valuable time away from the tedious work of cleaning datasets and contesting installs - a task that also strains ad-partner relationships. They’re now able to spend time on a wider mix of marketing and creative tasks - using Adjust data to, for example, calculate LTV models using in-app event tracking. This means balancing the focus put on UA and retention, and having the time to find the sweet spot between the two.

Teaming up to fight fraud

TextNow also uses the Adjust Fraud Prevention suite as the backbone of its own anti-fraud engine. The prevalence of ad-fraud is growing and fraudulent installs, events and signals don’t just mean wasted money but skewed and unreliable data sets. Adjust’s Fraud Prevention suite uses a comprehensive set of ad fraud prevention tools and filters to combat fraud methods including Click Spam, Click Injection, SDK Spoofing, hyper engagement and device farms. Each individual fraudulent install is then reported to TextNow and the relevant partners.

Roughly 20% of all incoming installs from TextNow’s campaigns are rejected by the Adjust FPS. While networks work hard to find and ban fraudulent publishers, detecting fraud is challenging - particularly on the network side. TextNow is extremely dedicated to clean data, and proudly take their anti-fraud initiatives to the next level. Using third-party tools and in-house analysis, they’re able to identify fraudulent patterns based on the data provided by Adjust. With a partner that automatically prevents the majority of fraud they face, they’ve been able to streamline this operation.