MMP Migration Guide

Migration Planning

⏱️ Estimated Time: Kickoff call: 30–60 minutes | Planning window: 1–2 business days

Before any technical work begins, your dedicated Client Onboarding Manager meets with you to map out your migration from end to end. Together, you’ll define your go-live target, inventory your apps and platforms, and build a realistic schedule with clear milestones. 

💡 Have a target date? Share it with your Client Onboarding Manager right away. They can work backward to define the milestones you need to hit to make it happen.

Key Actions

• Schedule a kickoff call with your Client Onboarding Manager.
• Come prepared with your desired go-live date and any hard business deadlines.
• Inventory your apps across platforms (e.g., iOS, Android, Web, CTV). DOWNLOAD FREE TEMPLATE
• Identify your integration approach—native SDK or server-to-server (S2S).
• Align internal stakeholders: developers, marketing/UA, and analytics teams.
• Walk away with a confirmed launch plan and milestone schedule.

What Your Kickoff Call Covers

Your onboarding manager guides a structured kickoff to capture the following: 

Resources & Documentation

• Kochava Support Center: Comprehensive docs, integration guides, and troubleshooting
• Downloadable TEMPLATE: Catalog app profiles, platforms, integration types, events, and metadata
• Contact your onboarding team: Onboarding@Kochava.com

Account Setup—Create Account, Members & App Profiles

⏱️ Estimated Time: < 30 minutes (once access is granted)

Your Kochava Client Onboarding Manager takes care of the heavy lifting here. They create your Kochava account and set up member profiles for everyone on your team who needs access. Once you’re in, your job is to create an App Profile for each app and platform you’re migrating. Think of each app profile as the destination that captures all installs, sessions, and events once you go live.

💡 Tip: Create a DEV app profile for initial testing, separate from your production profile. This keeps test data clean and avoids polluting live reporting.

Key Actions

• Confirm account access with your Client Onboarding Manager (they set this up for you).
• Invite all team members who need dashboard access (developers, UA managers, analysts).
• Create an app profile for each app + platform you’re migrating (e.g., iOS, Android, CTV).
• Follow the recommended naming convention: App Name – Business Name – Platform.
• Create a DEV app profile for testing alongside your PROD profiles.

App Naming Convention

Your app names appear everywhere in your Kochava dashboard, from Campaign Manager to Analytics to Reporting. Here’s the recommended format: App Name – Business Name – Platform

ℹ️ Use consistent naming across platforms. Keeping it clear means that every teammate knows exactly which app they’re looking at.

Documentation

• Creating an App Profile: Step-by-step guide to adding your first app in Kochava
• Managing Members & Permissions: How to invite team members and configure access levels

SDK Integration

⏱️ Estimated Time: Varies by integration depth (10 minutes to > 1 hour)

This is where the technical work happens. You or your development team integrate the Kochava software development kit (SDK) into each app you’re migrating. Kochava hosts SDKs for iOS, Android, Unity, React Native, Flutter, CTV, gaming consoles, and more. The level of effort scales with how deeply you want to track: A basic install-only integration can take as little as 10 minutes, while adding event tracking and advanced features (e.g., enhanced deep linking, SKAdNetwork support on iOS) takes a bit more time—but pays off significantly in measurement depth.

💡 Unable to use third-party SDKs? No problem. Kochava also supports server-to-server (S2S) integration for organizations that prefer an SDK-less approach. Talk to your Client Onboarding Manager to confirm which path is right for you and check out this helpful video.

Key Actions

• Decide your integration approach: native SDK, wrapper (Unity, React Native, Flutter), or S2S.
• Share your App GUID(s) with your development team—they’ll need these during integration.
• Define post-install events and consistent naming conventions across platforms.

⚠️ IMPORTANT: Even if you’re retaining an identical event structure to your current MMP, clearly communicate with your app developers which post-install events get implemented and how they’re named. Best practice is to measure events throughout the engagement funnel (e.g., registration, add to cart, purchase) and pass metadata with your events (e.g., product, SKU, price, show ID). If you haven’t done so already, standardizing your event and metadata naming schema across all platforms keeps your analytics clean and comparable when cohorting event data across apps. 

(See event examples and download our FREE TEMPLATE for app profile and event definitions.)

• Have your developer compile a test build and confirm that data is flowing into your DEV app profile.

Integration Depth

Resources & Documentation

• Kochava SDK Library: SDKs for every platform (e.g., iOS, Android, CTV, web)
• iOS SDK Integration Guide: Step-by-step iOS app integration
• Android SDK Integration Guide: Step-by-step Android app integration
• OTT & CTV SDK Integration Guide: Step-by-step OTT & CTV app integration
• Server-to-Server (S2S) Integration: For SDK-less implementation
• Event Tracking: Recommended events by app vertical
• Free Template: Define app names, events, and metadata

Integration Validation

⏱️ Estimated Time: < 20 minutes

Before anything goes live, confirm that the Kochava SDK is working as expected. Your developer will use a DEV app profile that’s separate from your production profile, so all test traffic is isolated and won’t pollute your live data. You’re looking for two things: installs registering correctly and your key post-install events firing as defined.

💡 This is the moment to catch issues. A few minutes of validation here prevents data gaps and misattribution once you’re live.

Key Actions

• Confirm that your developer is pointing the test build at your DEV app profile (not PROD).
• Trigger a test install on a QA device and verify that it appears in the Kochava dashboard.
• Fire each post-install event and confirm that they arrive with the correct names and parameters.
• Check that event naming matches your agreed conventions across platforms.

Documentation

• Testing Your Integration: How to use Kochava’s test tools and validate installs/events

Campaign & Partner Setup

⏱️ Estimated Time: 5–10 minutes per media partner

With your SDK validated and data flowing, it’s time to connect your existing media partners and set up the tracking infrastructure that powers attribution. 

This step covers your paid media integrations (e.g., Google, Meta, TikTok) and your owned media (e.g., email, SMS, QR codes, web banners).

Part 1: Paid Media—Integrate Your Media Mix

Kochava integrates with thousands of media partners. For each partner, you create a tracker, configure postbacks, and (for certain partners) test attribution before going live.

Key Actions for Each Media Partner

• Create an Install Tracker and/or Reengagement Tracker in Campaign Manager.
• Set up the Partner Configuration and enable postbacks.
• If applicable, configure partners for SKAdNetwork campaigns. 
• Test attribution (available for non-SAN partners).
• Enter cost credentials if you want cost data aggregated across partners.

Key Partner Setup Guides

These top partners have dedicated configuration guides—click to go directly to the support doc.

💡 Tip: SANs (self-attributing networks) such as Google, Meta, Apple Ads, TikTok, and Snap don’t support attribution testing. Ask your Client Onboarding Manager about monitoring campaign attribution with these partners after you’re live.

Documentation

• Create an Install Tracker: How to set up a standard install tracking campaign in Kochava
• Create a Reengagement Tracker: Set up reengagement tracking for returning users
• Partner Configuration & Postbacks: Configure your media partners and enable postback delivery
• SKAdNetwork Integration: Configure iOS media partners that support SKAN & AAK
• Test a Campaign (non-SAN): Verify that attribution is working before campaigns go live
• Cost Data Aggregation: Enter partner credentials to pull spend data into Kochava

Part 2: Owned Media—Don’t Forget Non-Paid Channels

Paid campaigns aren’t the only traffic worth measuring. 

Kochava SmartLinks™ let you track performance across all your owned channels (e.g., email, SMS, in-store signage, web banners), giving you attribution data on touchpoints you may have left unmeasured.

Common Owned Media Use Cases for SmartLinks

Key Actions for Owned Media

• Identify owned media channels you want to measure.
• Create SmartLinks for each channel in Kochava Campaign Manager.
• Replace existing untracked links or QR codes with SmartLink versions.

See Kochava SmartLinks Overview to create and manage tracking links for owned and non-paid channels.

Analytics, Reporting & Data Access

⏱️ Estimated Time: Depends on optional extract, transform, load (ETL) configurations

Kochava gives you multiple ways to access and use your data—from built-in analytics, reports, and SQL prompt dashboards to a full reporting API and real-time data delivery. For most teams, the Kochava platform alone is all you’ll need. Support is also available for organizations that want to pipe data into an internal data lake, BI tool, or data warehouse.

📊 In-Platform Analytics & Reporting

The Kochava dashboard is ready to use the moment you go live. No engineering needed.

• Explore Analytics—campaign performance, cohort analysis, funnel reporting, and more.
• Pull one-time or scheduled reports via the Reporting dashboard.
• Use Kochava Query—run SQL queries directly against your raw event data, right in the platform.
• Use StationOne by Kochava—an integrative AI hub that lets you chat with your data.

Documentation

• Analytics Dashboards: Explore dashboards, cohorts, and performance views
• Reports Dashboards: Download one-time and/or schedule recurring reports
• Query Dashboard: In-platform SQL query tool for raw data access

🔁 Advanced Data Access & ETL (Optional—requires engineering resources)

If your team needs to move Kochava data into your own systems, these options give you full programmatic access to your data.

• Reporting API: Pull aggregated or raw reports on a recurring schedule into your internal systems or data lake.
• Real-time postbacks: Configure postbacks to fire conversion events in real time to your own endpoint or data pipeline.

⚠️ Note: Advanced ETL and API integrations typically require support from your data engineering team. Your Client Onboarding Manager can help scope what’s needed.

Documentation

• Reporting API: Pull data programmatically into your own tools and systems
• Custom, Real-Time Postbacks: Stream conversion data to your internal endpoints in real time

AI-Powered Assistant for Your Kochava Data

Ask your Client Onboarding Manager how you can log in to Kochava via StationOne and engage the AI assistant. Prompt the assistant with questions like Show me install trends across all my apps this week or Which events are missing metadata? and build agents that run these checks automatically on your schedule. Talk to your Client Onboarding Manager about setting up your first StationOne workflow.

Controlled Go-Live 🎉

⏱️ Estimated Time: 1–3 days (including app store review wait time)

This is the final stretch. 

You’ll submit your updated app (with the Kochava SDK) to the relevant app stores, flip the switch on your campaigns, and confirm that installs and events are flowing and attributing correctly in Kochava. 

Before you submit, you’ll also do an import of historical device IDs so Kochava recognizes your existing users from day one. 

Plan for some waiting time: App store reviews can take 24–48 hours (sometimes longer), so factor this buffer into your go-live date.

Before You Submit: Final Pre-Launch Checklist

• Migrate SDK config to PROD app profile(s): Coordinate with your app developers to update the Kochava App GUID in your production app build to point to your production app profile (not the DEV profile used during testing).
• Run historical traffic import: From your current MMP and/or internal database, export a list of your active user device IDs and import them into Kochava. This ensures that existing users are not logged as new users at launch. See related documentation and allow up to 24 hours for processing.
• Pause active paid campaigns: Temporarily pause paid user acquisition campaigns while your app update is in app store review. This protects against duplicate attribution from your old MMP.
• Confirm that all partner configurations are active: Verify that every media partner and SAN integration is set up and ready to attribute from the moment the new build goes live.
• Confirm that your Kochava tracking links are in place: Ensure that all prior MMP tracking links are replaced with Kochava links across your active campaigns.

Submitting to App Stores & Platforms

Submit your production-ready app build(s) relevant platform app stores:

⚠️ Build in buffer time. App store reviews can be delayed, especially around holidays or major iOS releases. If you have a hard go-live date, submit early.

At Launch: Confirm That Data Is Flowing

Once each of your app updates is approved and live, do the following:

• Monitor your Kochava dashboard: Confirm that installs and events are appearing in your app profile(s). 
• Reenable your campaigns: Turn paid campaigns back on and verify that attribution is logging.
• Activate SAN integrations (e.g., Google Ads, Meta, Apple Ads): Activate self-attributing network configurations if not already live.
• Notify your Client Onboarding Manager: They’ll perform a post-launch check-in to confirm that everything is flowing as planned.