Attribution of a new application installation on a mobile device by analyzing network traffic of the device

• US 10,614,482 B2
• Filed: 05/04/2017
• Issued: 04/07/2020
• Est. Priority Date: 05/04/2017
• Status: Active Grant

• Current Assignee: Data AI Incorporated
• Original Assignee: App Annie Inc.
• Inventors: Ungerer, Mark Wilson, Sun, Chang, Wang, Jia, Chen, Yu
• Primary Examiner(s): Sittner, Matthew T
• Application Number:
  US15/587,352
• Publication Number:
  US 20180322525A1
• Time in Patent Office: 1,069 Days
• Field of Search: None
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 16/951 Indexing; Web crawling techniques
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 8/61 Installation
• CPC Class Codes: G06Q 30/0242 Determining effectiveness of advertisements
• CPC Class Codes: G06Q 30/0267 Wireless devices
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 63/0272 Virtual private networks
• CPC Class Codes: H04W 12/033 of the user plane, e.g. user's traffic
• CPC Class Codes: H04W 12/35 Protecting application or service provisioning, e.g. securing SIM application provisioning

Abstract

A system determines attribution of an application install on a mobile device that includes a virtual private network (VPN) application. An application executing on a mobile device may display a third party application advertisement. The VPN application detects a click on the third party application advertisements by monitoring the network requests and records a display time of the advertisement. Further, it detects the download and installation of the third party application by monitoring the network requests and comparing it against a rule from the rules dictionary, and records the installation time of the third party application. If the installation time is within a predetermined threshold time of the display time of the third party application advertisement, an attribution count is updated and is reported to an analytics engine.

Claims

1. A method for attributing an application install on a device, the method comprising:

monitoring network traffic including network requests from one or more publisher applications on a mobile device, wherein the one or more publisher applications display an advertisement for a third-party application;

detecting one or more impressions of the advertisement by determining that the network requests were made by one of the publisher applications to a network address associated with the advertisement;

logging the detected impressions and their associated publisher applications;

detecting an installation of the third-party application on the mobile device, wherein the installation is detected by;

searching a rules dictionary for a rule having a regular expression that identifies a request to access an application store and applying the rule to the monitored network traffic to find a match; and

identifying an installation event for the third-party application, from the matched monitored network traffic, by comparing an installation event identifier of the rule to the matched monitored network traffic;

logging a time of the installation of the third-party application on the mobile device;

determining an attribution of the installation of the third-party application to one or more of the impressions by applying an attribution model to the logged installation and the logged impressions; and

reporting the determined attribution to an analytics engine.

2. The method of claim 1, wherein detecting an advertisement further includes detecting a network request to the mobile application displayed in the advertisement.

3. The method of claim 2, further comprising determining a landing page for the detected network request to the mobile application.

4. The method of claim 1, further comprising storing in a rules dictionary, a rule for identifying a request to access an application store by an application that executes on a mobile device, where each rule further includes an identifier for an event associated with the request to access an application store.

5. The method of claim 4, wherein the event includes at least one of a download, install, upload or a re-download event.

6. The method of claim 1, wherein detecting a third party application installation further comprises:

extracting an icon from the advertisement; and

comparing the icon extracted from the advertisement with an icon of an application installed on the mobile device.

7. A computer program product for attributing an application install on a device, the computer program product comprising a non-transitory computer-readable storage medium containing computer program code for:

monitoring network traffic including network requests from one or more publisher applications on a mobile device, wherein the one or more publisher applications display an advertisement for a third-party application;

detecting one or more impressions of the advertisement by determining that the network requests were made by one of the publisher applications to a network address associated with the advertisement;

logging the detected impressions and their associated publisher applications;

detecting an installation of the third-party application on the mobile device, wherein the installation is detected by;

searching a rules dictionary for a rule having a regular expression that identifies a request to access an application store and applying the rule to the monitored network traffic to find a match; and

identifying an installation event for the third-party application, from the matched monitored network traffic, by comparing an installation event identifier of the rule to the matched monitored network traffic;

logging a time of the installation of the third-party application on the mobile device;

determining an attribution of the installation of the third-party application to one or more of the impressions by applying an attribution model to the logged installation and the logged impressions; and

reporting the determined attribution to an analytics engine.

8. The computer program product 7, wherein detecting an advertisement further includes detecting a network request to the mobile application displayed in the advertisement.

9. The computer program product 8, further comprising determining a landing page for the detected network request to the mobile application.

10. The computer program product 7, further comprising storing in a rules dictionary, a rule for identifying a request to access an application store by an application that executes on a mobile device, where each rule further includes an identifier for an event associated with the request to access an application store.

11. The computer program product 10, wherein the event includes at least one of a download, install, upload or a re-download event.

12. The computer program product 7, wherein detecting a third party application installation further comprises:

extracting an icon from the advertisement; and

comparing the icon extracted from the advertisement with an icon of an application installed on the mobile device.