For most integrated ad network partners on iOS and Android, you create a campaign in the Localytics Attribution Dashboard—which generates a "redirect template" that you should give to your ad network.
When an end user clicks on your ad, their device will make a call to a Localytics server, which stores information about the ad-click and then redirects the user to your app’s listing in the Google Play or App Store. This process typically happens extremely quickly (<50ms) and is not visible to an end user.
Then, if the end user downloads your app and has a first session, Localytics matches the data stored from the user’s ad-click with data from the user’s first session to attribute the user to the campaign you created.
For Facebook, Twitter, and Google AdWords, the Localytics Attribution service operates differently—specifically, you create and manage your campaigns entirely in the Facebook/Twitter/Google dashboards and not in Localytics. Each time your app acquires a new user, the Localytics Attribution service sends a request to one (or more) of these partners to determine whether the new user was acquired from advertising.