What are Mobile App Content Views?
Mobile app content views refer to the number of views of whatever content that you have marked as a standard event, whether it is navigating to a certain page in the app that provides in-app purchases or the completion of a tutorial, and that can be tied back to viewership of your ads. In other words, what level of retention is the audience that you targeted staying at?
Keep in mind, with ad sets and ads sometimes Facebook pulls from their internal data and statistical analysis to model your content views.
What are App Events?
App events, or what can be more broadly referred to as standard events, all go back to the Facebook Pixel or other Facebook Business Tools you and your developer may be relying on. You determine what you consider an app event based on what best suits your content marketing strategy. This is the data that you want to track and be able to manipulate in order to yield the most profit.
You can code or analyze whatever audience action is necessary to understanding the behavior within your app. You can even go ahead and code for custom events (just make sure to also create a pathway for a custom conversion) so you can really tailor this metric to what suits your company or your client the best.
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How is it Tracked?
Depending on what you have logged as an app event with your Facebook Pixel, Conversions API, app SDK, or offline event set, Facebook looks at what time they happened after an individual viewed your ad within the post attribution window that you have set— within 1 day or 7 days of viewing your ad (which is one of the post attribution changes to occur after the iOS 14 update).
How is it affected by iOS14?
With iOS14, comes the total change of many aspects of Facebook that advertisers had grown incredibly accustomed to. Mobile app content view calculation is one of those changes that we have to become used to, in addition to other changes to post attribution calculations.
Now that iOS14 has debuted, content views are tracked and then sent to Facebook from Apple’s SKAdNetwork API, Apple’s way of measuring ad campaigns while also prioritizing privacy and security.
Don’t forget that any third-party API, even Apple’s API, functions differently than Facebook’s internal APIs. This means that the accounting of viewership or other related metrics might vary slightly.