MNTN, the New York-listed connected television advertising platform, said on September 28, 2026 that it had deepened its integration with AppsFlyer so that app installs, purchases and sign-ups recorded by the measurement company now flow back into MNTN's reporting and campaign optimisation. The two-way connection had been live since the end of June, according to MNTN's own help centre, and the setup documentation shows the two platforms applying very different rules when deciding whether a television advertisement earned a download.

In Short

MNTN sells ads that run on streaming TV, and AppsFlyer is a company that tracks which ads lead people to download and use phone apps. The two now pass data in both directions, so MNTN can see purchases and sign-ups inside an app and use them to decide where its TV ads run next. That matters mostly to companies with an iOS or Android app that want to test television with the same tools they use for mobile ads. The catch is that the two systems count differently: by default MNTN keeps linking an app action to a TV ad for a month, while AppsFlyer stops looking after three days, so the two dashboards will rarely show the same number.

What the two companies described

The announcement, distributed through Business Wire from New York, set out three capabilities under the heading of CTV to mobile attribution. According to MNTN, full-funnel measurement connects television exposure to app installs, purchases, sign-ups and other in-app events. Performance optimisation feeds those in-app conversion signals back into MNTN so that campaigns are steered toward business outcomes. Unified visibility places MNTN Performance TV exposures inside AppsFlyer and AppsFlyer's in-app results inside MNTN.

The data path runs both ways. Television impressions travel into AppsFlyer, while in-app events travel back to MNTN, where they can also be used to optimise delivery - a sequence the company described as connecting exposure, measurement and optimisation in one loop. The stated requirements are an AppsFlyer account and an iOS or Android app. Gaming, retail, restaurants, fintech and subscription apps were named as target categories.

For mobile app marketers, the company said, the integration "closes one of TV's biggest measurement gaps" by tying an advertisement seen on the largest screen in a home to what the viewer does next on the smallest. The stated ambition was to let those advertisers "treat Connected TV like any other performance channel."

The only named spokesperson was from AppsFlyer rather than MNTN. "TV has historically been a difficult channel for mobile marketers to connect to real business outcomes - you know the screen is big, loud and influential so you run the campaign hoping it shows up somewhere in your app metrics," said Alex Yip, Director of Product Strategy for AppsFlyer.

What the release did not contain is as telling as what it did. There was no pricing, no performance figure and no count of how many MNTN customers run app campaigns. MNTN said only that it continues to bring new categories of advertisers to television, "including a growing number of mobile marketers."

A feature that shipped in June

The changelog dates it to June 30

The release describes a new integration; MNTN's product changelog tells a different story. According to MNTN's help centre, an entry titled AppsFlyer Integration v2 carries a release date of June 30, 2026 and introduced the same two-way flow promoted on September 28, with AppsFlyer installs and in-app events appearing in MNTN reporting, filterable by conversion source and conversion type. The setup article carries an update stamp of August 5, 2026.

A technical paper MNTN published on August 24, 2026 went further, describing AppsFlyer as a partner that already returned installs and purchases into both MNTN's reporting and its optimiser. Read together, the documents suggest the September announcement presents a capability available for roughly three months, rather than a product change made on the day.

The June release sat inside a cluster of integration work. The changelog lists a HubSpot attribution update on June 15, and Upwave and MNTN deepened their connected television partnership on June 18. Yet when MNTN reported second-quarter results on August 4, the measurement partnerships it highlighted were HubSpot, Northbeam and Upwave, with no mention of AppsFlyer in that list.

The outbound half dates to 2023

The one-way connection is older still. MNTN's Next Gen TV update in November 2023 listed integrations with AppsFlyer, Adjust and Kochava for measuring app installs, according to the company's Business Wire release at the time. That arrangement pushed television impressions toward the attribution provider, and MNTN's setup guide still offers it as a one-way option. What changed in 2026 is the return path: post-install events arriving inside MNTN's own systems.

How the data moves

From the television to AppsFlyer

Setup begins in MNTN, where an advertiser generates an API access key dedicated to the AppsFlyer connection. Inside AppsFlyer, the advertiser builds a template in OneLink, AppsFlyer's deep-linking product, with cross-platform attribution switched on - and each app can belong to only one such template. MNTN is added from AppsFlyer's partner marketplace, the key is pasted in, and AppsFlyer generates an impression attribution link that is copied back into MNTN's impression tracking settings, according to the help centre. Agencies connecting for a client must first be placed on an authorised list by MNTN.

For every impression, MNTN sends AppsFlyer campaign IDs and names, creative IDs, impression IDs and an IP address, according to the documentation. That last field is the thread linking a television set to a phone. AppsFlyer, as the advertiser's mobile measurement partner, uses it to decide whether an install on a handset followed an impression served to a screen on the same network.

From AppsFlyer back to MNTN

Installs are forwarded automatically. Any other event - a purchase, a trial start, a registration - has to be configured as an in-app event postback, with the postback window set to lifetime and values and revenue included. Each event is mapped to a name that then appears as its own conversion type in MNTN reporting.

The returning payload is broad. According to the help centre, AppsFlyer can send MNTN app identifiers and names, the AppsFlyer advertiser ID, device IDs, event names, timestamps and values, geographic data, operating system details, order amounts, currencies and order IDs, together with MNTN's own impression record, including the IP address and timestamp of the impression.

Two configuration choices stand out. MNTN instructs advertisers to send events for users from all media sources, including organic users, rather than only for users AppsFlyer attributes to MNTN. If the setting is left on the partner-only option, the help centre states, MNTN will not receive the event data it needs to measure performance. In practice, MNTN receives the advertiser's app activity across channels and performs its own matching. Separately, MNTN recommends disabling AppsFlyer's Advanced Privacy setting in order to see full attribution credit, while leaving the decision to each advertiser. MNTN's permissions inside the advertiser's AppsFlyer account are limited to MNTN campaign data, according to the documentation.

The attribution settings MNTN requires

The AppsFlyer-side settings are specific. Install view-through attribution must be switched on, which MNTN describes as required because television advertisements are seen rather than clicked. Re-engagement view-through attribution is also enabled. Cross-platform equal attribution is turned on with an attribution priority lookback of six hours, which gives eligible MNTN impressions the same priority as clicks during that period. The standard view-through lookback is set to 24 hours and the cross-platform view-through window to 72 hours.

Any later change to those settings requires a fresh impression attribution link to be copied into MNTN. Campaigns meant to optimise toward app activity use a campaign objective MNTN labels App Promotion, and app and website campaigns can share one account, with the MNTN pixel measuring the site.

Two systems, two answers

MNTN's documentation acknowledges that the two platforms will disagree, and explains why. Three differences are listed.

The first is time. MNTN reporting uses the conversion window set inside MNTN, which defaults to 30 days and can be shortened or extended. AppsFlyer, according to the same help centre table, supports a maximum 72-hour probabilistic view-through window for connected television. A 30-day lookback window spans 720 hours, ten times AppsFlyer's ceiling. MNTN also applies one conversion window to both app and web activity within an account; separate windows are not supported.

The second is priority. AppsFlyer may assign credit to other channels that rank higher in its attribution model, while MNTN measures its own campaigns using its own methodology.

The third is identity. AppsFlyer requires the install to occur on a device using the same IP network as the television exposure. MNTN uses household-level, ID-agnostic attribution to connect exposure to installs across devices. The conclusion MNTN draws is plain: its reporting may show higher attributed performance, and AppsFlyer's may show lower performance for MNTN campaigns. Advertisers wanting a more conservative comparison can shorten the MNTN window, the help centre says.

What sits behind the household match

According to MNTN's August paper, its device graph combines its tracking pixels on tens of thousands of websites, device-to-household resolution across hundreds of millions of devices, and identifiers including device IDs, IP addresses, Google IDs and third-party partner IDs. The company says a converting device need not remain on the home network for a match to hold, that devices per household are capped so hotels and airports are not treated as homes, and that coverage exceeds 99% of US connected television households. These are MNTN's own figures; no independent audit was cited.

How much the difference matters depends on when installs actually happen. Moloco said in April 2026 that roughly two-thirds of users who installed an app after seeing its connected television advertisements did so within six hours. That is a vendor-supplied figure from a different platform. If a similar pattern held on MNTN inventory, most installs would sit inside both windows, and the disagreement would concentrate in the tail between the third day and the 30th. Neither MNTN nor AppsFlyer has published timing data for MNTN campaigns.

Reports that go dark for app-only campaigns

Several of MNTN's own measurement products do not apply to app campaigns. According to the help centre, visit metrics - cost per visit, Verified Visits, visit assist and visit rate - rely on website traffic, as do the Site Impact report, the Attribution Paths report and the Incrementality report. App install campaigns generate none of that data.

The last omission is the most consequential. MNTN's paper describes a holdout built into its bidder, withholding one audience decile per campaign group to create a 10% control group - the company's route to measuring what advertising caused rather than what it can claim. App advertisers therefore receive attribution from two systems but no causal read from MNTN's own experiment.

One further question is left open. Neither the release nor the help centre states which attribution result trains the bidder when a campaign optimises toward app events - MNTN's 30-day household match or AppsFlyer's 72-hour, same-network match. The instruction to forward events from all media sources indicates that MNTN performs its own attribution on the returned data, but the documentation does not say so explicitly.

Why MNTN is courting app marketers

The customer base helps explain the timing. MNTN counted 4,225 active Performance TV customers on a trailing twelve-month basis at June 30, 2026, up 40% year on year, while second-quarter revenue rose 21% to $82.5 million. Average trailing revenue per customer fell by close to 14%, to about $74,200. Roughly 95% of customers that began campaigns during 2025 had never advertised on television before, and the company's investor presentation claimed attribution across more than 400 million devices.

A platform adding customers faster than revenue needs new categories of spend. Mobile app marketers are an obvious one: their budgets are already organised around independently attributed installs and post-install events. Drawing in advertisers who have never bought television is familiar ground for MNTN; when PubMatic and MNTN connected in October 2025, 97% of MNTN's demand was described as new to connected television.

The geography is limited, however. MNTN's quarterly filing describes a single operating segment located entirely within the United States, so the integration is, for now, a US proposition.

A crowded route from the living room to the phone

MNTN is not alone in routing television exposure through an app marketer's existing measurement stack. Moloco's Performance CTV, announced on April 15, 2026, sends attribution through the advertiser's measurement partner of choice, naming platforms such as Adjust, AppsFlyer, Branch and Kochava. Comcast's Universal Ads added Adjust, AppsFlyer, Branch, Kochava and Singular as mobile measurement partners on July 30, 2026, with setup typically requiring no additional software development kit. Magnite's acquisition of streamr.ai brought a small-business television tool that already supported AppsFlyer connectivity for mobile-to-CTV attribution. Earlier still, Amazon DSP opened its Events Manager to mobile measurement partners in February 2024, naming Kochava, Adjust and Singular.

AppsFlyer, meanwhile, has been extending its reach across new ad surfaces. OpenAI connected ChatGPT Ads to AppsFlyer and Adjust across seven markets in July 2026, and Snap confirmed a global rollout of Unified Attribution on August 31, 2026 for advertisers using AppsFlyer or Adjust. AppsFlyer's November 2025 product release had already positioned its Signal Hub around measuring performance across mobile, web and connected television. According to AppsFlyer, more than 15,000 businesses use its platform.

Ownership adds a wrinkle. Google, Meta, Moloco and Unity agreed on June 22, 2026 to invest in AppsFlyer at a $2.7 billion valuation, in minority, non-controlling and non-exclusive stakes. The terms bar preferential treatment for investors in AppsFlyer's APIs, measurement signals, attribution logic and commercial terms. Moloco is thus both a shareholder in the measurement partner MNTN has just promoted and a direct competitor for the same app marketers' television budgets. The neutrality commitments are the contractual answer to that tension; whether advertisers regard them as sufficient is a separate matter.

Why this matters for the marketing community

Attribution has been the sticking point for connected television as a performance channel, and app marketing sharpens it. IAB Europe's CTV Working Group said in March 2026 that mobile measurement partners could now connect a television exposure to downstream app installs using household-level signals and cross-device graphs. The same group warned that journeys frequently span several days, so short windows miss real effects - and that in Germany, private IP addresses change so often that assigning devices to a household is harder even with a delay. Both points bear on this integration: AppsFlyer's same-network requirement depends on stable IP addresses, and its 72-hour ceiling is precisely the kind of short window the working group questioned.

The opposite concern is equally documented. A longer window tends to lift reported conversions without adding a single sale; it moves credit between touchpoints rather than creating any. Platforms have been moving in the stricter direction on view-based credit: Meta removed 7-day and 28-day view-through windows from its Ads Insights API, with the change taking effect on January 12, 2026. A 30-day default for a medium that cannot be clicked sits at the generous end of that spectrum.

Buyer confidence is not high. IAB research published in July 2026 found that 43% of CTV buyers doubt where their advertisements actually ran, with smaller buyers reporting cost-per-acquisition concerns at nearly twice the rate of large spenders - the segment MNTN serves.

What the integration offers, then, is a common ledger rather than a single answer. Television impressions now sit in the tool app marketers already use to adjudicate between Meta, Google, TikTok and dozens of smaller networks, and AppsFlyer's stricter reading is available alongside MNTN's more expansive one. For a finance team deciding whether television earned its place in an app budget, the gap between those two readings may say more than either number does on its own.

Timeline

Summary

Who: MNTN (NYSE: MNTN), a US connected television advertising platform selling self-serve Performance TV campaigns, and AppsFlyer, a mobile measurement company serving more than 15,000 businesses. The only named spokesperson was Alex Yip, Director of Product Strategy for AppsFlyer. The integration affects MNTN advertisers that hold an AppsFlyer account and an iOS or Android app.

What: A two-way integration in which MNTN sends impression-level data - campaign, creative and impression IDs plus IP address - to AppsFlyer, and AppsFlyer returns installs and configured in-app events, including values and revenue, to MNTN reporting and optimisation. MNTN's documentation shows its reporting uses a 30-day default conversion window with household-level attribution, while AppsFlyer applies a maximum 72-hour probabilistic view-through window for CTV and requires the install to occur on the same IP network as the exposure. MNTN's visit-based and incrementality reports do not apply to app-only campaigns.

When: The integration was presented publicly on September 28, 2026. MNTN's help centre dates the two-way release to June 30, 2026, and the outbound AppsFlyer connection dates back to MNTN's Next Gen TV update in November 2023.

Where: The integration operates between MNTN's Performance TV platform and AppsFlyer's partner marketplace. MNTN reports a single operating segment entirely within the United States.

Why: Connecting a television impression to an action on a phone has been one of the main obstacles to treating connected television as a performance channel for app marketers. MNTN, whose customer count grew 40% while average revenue per customer fell about 14%, is seeking mobile app budgets organised around independently attributed installs. The two platforms' different windows, priorities and matching methods mean advertisers will see two counts for the same campaign, and the documentation does not state which one trains MNTN's bidder.