What this covers
What breaks first when cookies go away?
Last-click from the ad platform, then the analytics property, then anything that needed a client-side pixel on the cashier. Deposit events have to be emitted from the server that already knows the player funded an account.
How should a deposit event be mapped?
One event, one currency, a value that finance recognises, and a distinction between first-time and repeat. If 'purchase' means sign-up in one account and FTD in another, the grid is fiction.
What is a conversion API actually for?
It is a pipe for events the walled garden will accept, not a religion. Match rate, event quality and the delay window matter more than the vendor slide. The longer piece is the article on server-side tracking.
How do you avoid two sources of truth?
Platform reported FTDs, analytics FTDs and warehouse FTDs will never match to the euro. They must match in direction and in definition. MOTIV publishes the join rules so media cannot keep a private victory.
Where does modelling still help?
Geo and channel mix decisions when user-level joins are thin. Models are labelled as models. They do not replace a cashier event.
How it's measured
| KPI | What it tells you | When we act on it |
|---|---|---|
| Deposit match rate | Share of cashier FTDs that reach ad platforms. | Act below the threshold agreed in week one. |
| Event freshness | Delay from cashier to platform. | Act when delay exceeds the optimisation window. |
| Definition drift | Count of competing FTD definitions in use. | Act at two. One is the rule. |
| Unattributed FTD share | Deposits with no usable source. | Act when the share grows after a platform change. |
What the first 90 days look like
- Days 1–15: inventory pixels, APIs, warehouse, cashier events, affiliate postbacks. Write the single FTD definition.
- Days 16–40: server-side deposit event live, conversion APIs fed, obvious double-counts killed.
- Days 41–70: match-rate dashboard, discrepancy notes media can use without a meeting.
- Days 71–90: lock the ledger. Media and CRM consume the same event. Models, if any, are documented as such.
Common failure modes
A GTM soup instead of a cashier event
Tags on thank-you pages miss in-app deposits, retries and the player who funded from a different device. The source of truth is the wallet, not the dataLayer.
Optimising platforms on a diluted event
If 'deposit' includes failed payments and bonus claims, Meta will find you more of those. The event quality is the campaign quality.
Waiting for perfect identity
A join key that works for 70% of FTDs this month beats a six-month CDP project that ships nothing. Attribution at MOTIV is a sequence of honest pipes, which is why it sits next to paid acquisition rather than in a separate 'data' dream.
Related: paid acquisition that can only scale once the deposit event is real and CRM that needs the same player identity the ads use. Up to the services hub, where attribution is the ledger the other lines read.