MTNN’s 2024 AppsFlyer Win: 25% ROAS Boost

Back in 2024, Kelechi, the Head of Mobile Marketing at MTNN, had a huge problem. As Nigeria’s biggest mobile operator, they had aggressive growth targets for their apps like MyMTN and the MoMo payment platform, but their measurement setup was a mess of disconnected tools and manual reports. “We were flying blind on attribution,” he’d say in meetings. “Spending millions on campaigns but struggling to pinpoint which channels actually brought in our most valuable customers.” It was a mess. Their mobile CX was tanking because they couldn’t personalize anything effectively, which just led to churn. The user journey was a black box, making it impossible to see where people were dropping off or what got them to engage. How were they supposed to get the insights they needed to fix their mobile customer experience?

The Attribution Abyss: A Pre-Integration Reality

Before bringing in AppsFlyer, the marketing team at MTNN was drowning in data silos. They’d judge campaign performance with whatever analytics the platform gave them, so they never had a complete picture of a customer’s lifecycle. For example, they might see a ton of MyMTN app downloads after a social media push, but they had no way to connect those downloads to people actually doing something useful, like buying a data plan or topping up airtime. This meant the real return on ad spend (ROAS) was a total guess. We’re talking millions of naira in marketing budget just flying out the window. “It wasn’t just about knowing that a campaign worked,” explained Adaobi, a senior analyst on Kelechi’s team, “but how it worked, and for whom. Without that, every new campaign felt like a gamble.”

This wasn’t just a marketing budget problem, either. The customer experience suffered badly. With no real attribution data, any attempt at personalization was basic at best. Think about it: a new user clicks an ad for a specific data bundle and downloads the MyMTN app, only to get a generic welcome screen pushing voice calls. That kind of disconnect causes friction and leads to uninstalls, making the brand look like it doesn’t get digital. It’s a real problem when a 2023 eMarketer report shows 72% of people expect personalized app experiences, a standard MTNN was nowhere near meeting. All that time spent manually pulling data from different ad networks and internal systems was a slow, error-prone process that just made it harder to see what was actually going on.

Choosing the Right Partner: Why AppsFlyer Stood Out

Kelechi’s team went on a long hunt for a mobile measurement partner (MMP) that could give them a single, trustworthy view of their entire mobile app business. They looked at several platforms, but AppsFlyer quickly became the obvious choice. Its solid reputation for attribution, fraud protection, and deep integrations with all the ad networks and analytics tools they were already using were the big deciding factors. “We needed a solution that could handle our scale,” Kelechi said, talking about MTNN’s massive subscriber numbers and growing app portfolio. “AppsFlyer’s ability to process billions of events daily, with sub-second latency, was non-negotiable for us.”

They didn’t just jump in. The implementation, which kicked off in late 2024, was a major project that required a ton of coordination between MTNN’s marketing, product, and engineering departments. Getting the AppsFlyer SDK into MyMTN and MoMo had to be done carefully so it didn’t break anything for existing users. The engineering lead, Chinedu, worked directly with AppsFlyer’s technical account managers to map out all the custom events, the critical user actions like “data bundle purchase” or “bill payment” that they absolutely had to track. Getting that level of detail right is what makes an MMP integration actually work, instead of just being a technical box-ticking exercise. You have to define what’s important to your business and then make sure you’re actually capturing those metrics.

The Integration Process: From Fragmented to Unified

The first step with the AppsFlyer integration was just getting the basic attribution sorted. This meant tracking installs and key in-app events and correctly tying them back to the marketing campaign that drove them. For example, if someone downloaded the MyMTN app after clicking a banner ad on a news site, that install was now properly credited to that specific campaign and publisher. That one step brought immediate clarity. The marketing team could finally see which channels were driving not just installs, but *quality* installs, users who actually went on to register, subscribe, and use the valuable features. In just the first three months, MTNN saw a 15% drop in their customer acquisition cost (CAC) for the MyMTN app, mostly because they could shift budget away from channels that weren’t working and double down on the ones that were.

A huge piece of this was AppsFlyer’s Protect360 fraud suite. In a market like Nigeria, mobile ad fraud can burn through a marketing budget and mess up all your performance data. Before, Kelechi’s team knew they were getting hit with fake installs and clicks, but they had no way to prove it or stop it. With Protect360, they started blocking suspicious activity in real time. This approach protected their budget and kept their campaign data clean and trustworthy. “It was like lifting a fog,” Chinedu said. “Before, we suspected fraud, but proving it and preventing it was another matter. Now, we have concrete data and automated defenses.” This one feature saved MTNN an estimated Naira 50 million in ad spend that would have been wasted on fraud in the first quarter of 2025 alone.

Elevating Mobile CX Through Data-Driven Personalization

With good attribution and clean data, MTNN could finally get serious about improving their mobile customer experience. The unified data from AppsFlyer gave them a complete picture of what users were doing. They could now group users based on where they came from, what they did in the app, and even what kind of phone they had. This deep segmentation allowed for some really effective personalization. For instance, users who installed the MoMo app from an ad about international money transfers would now get an onboarding flow and special offers focused on that specific feature, instead of just seeing generic options for local payments. That kind of contextual targeting really boosted engagement.

The effect on app retention was huge. By seeing which features people used most and where they tended to get stuck, the product team could make smart, data-backed fixes. They noticed, for example, that a lot of new MyMTN users were giving up during the registration process at one specific step. After they used that insight to redesign the screen with simpler fields and clearer instructions, they saw a 7% jump in successful registrations from new users in the first month. They also started using the in-app event data to send out personalized push notifications, like reminders about data bundles that were about to expire or new services that matched a user’s habits. This all contributed to a 10% overall improvement in app retention rates in the six months after the full integration.

Kelechi put it this way: “The beauty of having a unified platform like AppsFlyer is that it breaks down internal silos. Marketing, product, and even customer support teams are now working from the same playbook, all driven by the same accurate data.” That kind of collaboration directly leads to a better experience for customers. Tracing a user’s entire path from seeing an ad to making a high-value purchase gave them a whole new level of insight. It became a feedback loop: good data helps you make smarter decisions, which gives customers a better experience, and that always leads to better business results.

Looking Ahead: Continuous Optimization and Growth

The AppsFlyer integration was a turning point for MTNN’s mobile strategy. By the end of 2025, they had hit their growth targets and also built a solid, data-driven system for getting better all the time. The marketing team now runs A/B tests on ad creative and landing pages with confidence because they trust the attribution data. The product team makes changes to the app based on clear signals from user behavior. Even customer service can see user journey data to give better, more informed support, which also improves the CX.

Now, Kelechi’s team is digging into the more advanced stuff in AppsFlyer, like using predictive analytics to get ahead of churn and building deeper integrations with their CRM. The goal is to get to a point of proactive engagement where they’re anticipating what customers need and delivering hyper-personalized experiences across the whole MTNN digital world. What started as a problem of fragmented data turned into a massive opportunity for growth. It just goes to show that a good mobile measurement partner is a fundamental piece of any successful mobile-first strategy. Being able to measure, analyze, and act on detailed user data completely changed how MTNN handles its mobile customer experience and secured its spot as a digital leader in Nigeria.