How Catchbase handles your data
Catchbase pulls numbers from three places, stores them, and serves them back to you through the dashboard and the bidding model. This page is a short map of which source feeds which view, so you know where a given number on the screen came from and why two numbers that look similar can move on different clocks.
The three sources
Apple Ads. This is where spend, impressions, taps, and tap-attributed installs come from. Apple Ads owns the ad side of the record: what Apple charged you, what ran, and what Apple itself counted as an install from your ad. Anything you see in the dashboard labelled as spend or tap installs traces back here.
Your mobile measurement partner (MMP). Adjust or AppsFlyer is the source for installs measured on your side, for post-install events, and for all revenue. The MMP is how Catchbase knows that the person who tapped the ad later signed up, made a purchase, or returned on day seven. Revenue never comes from Apple Ads.
App Store Connect (ASC). This supplies app metadata and creative context: app IDs, Custom Product Pages (CPPs), and the material Creative Studio works with. ASC is not a performance source. It is a configuration source.
How the pieces fit together
Records from each of the three integrations are pulled in on a regular schedule and kept separate per source. They are joined together by campaign, ad group, keyword, country, and app at query time — Apple Ads rows by ad event date, MMP rows by install date. That join is where metrics like ROAS are computed: MMP revenue divided by Apple Ads spend.
Two views read from the same joined data:
- The analytics dashboard is what you see under Campaigns, Analytics, and keyword detail views.
- The bidding model uses the same records to compute per-keyword targets.
Both read from the same place at the same moment. Differences between what the bidding model does and what you see on the screen come from cohort maturity rules and from how each view aggregates, not from two different sources.
Where to go next
Each source has its own page explaining cadence, fields, and quirks:
- How Catchbase pulls Apple Ads data covers what Apple sends and how often.
- How your MMP feeds Catchbase covers how Adjust and AppsFlyer events become Catchbase metrics.
- Revenue and cohorts explains D0, D7, D14, D30 and why your most recent ROAS numbers change over time.
- Custom events explains how to point a campaign at an event other than installs.
References
The three upstream systems Catchbase reads from publish their own canonical documentation. Everything in this section is consistent with those sources.
- Apple Ads: https://searchads.apple.com/, Campaign Management API at https://developer.apple.com/documentation/apple_search_ads.
- Adjust (MMP data path A): https://help.adjust.com/, Reports API at https://dev.adjust.com/en/api/rs-api/.
- AppsFlyer (MMP data path B): https://support.appsflyer.com/, Pull API at https://dev.appsflyer.com/.
- App Store Connect (metadata and CPP publishing): https://developer.apple.com/app-store-connect/.