Webinar Recap: An Inside Look at iOS 14 Preparation

Webinar Overview

In a recent webinar hosted by Adjust titled “Mobile Perspectives: An Inside Look at iOS 14 Preparation,” guests from Vungle, ironSource, and Tapjoy came together to dive deep into best practices for helping advertisers and publishers prepare for the user privacy protections coming to iOS 14 and SKAdNetwork.

The guests outlined what their companies are doing to prepare for the upcoming changes around iOS 14 and SKAdNetwork, how advertisers and publishers like you can prepare for the impending changes with best practices that can be implemented today, and exclusive lessons each guest has learned so far about solutions for SKAdNetwork implementations and iOS 14 privacy readiness.

Summary of the Situation on iOS 14

As a mobile marketer who runs iOS ad campaigns, you’ve come to expect the ability to track a user and access the Apple device’s advertising identifier (IDFA).

But that’s all going to change come early 2021.

At some point in early 2021, developers who monetize through ads will be required to receive permission to track their users through Apple’s new AppTrackingTransparency (ATT) framework. The fewer users that grant permission to track them through the ATT framework means fewer users for mobile marketers to track and target using IDFA data.

But the decreased availability to IDFA data for mobile marketers doesn’t spell the end of paid UA as a viable growth strategy. For publishers, however, the effects of limiting mobile marketers’ ability to collect and track user data could impact their overall ad revenue performance starting in early 2021.

Vungler in This Webinar

Name: Rina Matsumoto

What she does: She’s a Product Manager at Vungle and responsible for Vungle’s advertising solutions from UI to bidding tools.

She spoke alongside an all-women group of ad tech experts in the webinar, including Adjust’s Miwa Inoue, ironSource’s Meredith Benzur, and Tapjoy’s Sarah Chafer.

5 Takeaways From the Webinar

In Rina’s words…

1. Use the extra time given by Apple to test SKAdNetwork and ATT framework

“My advice to advertisers, echoing everything that everyone has said, is to really take a serious look at integrating SKAdNetwork. I know there’s some advertisers out there that haven’t quite integrated SKAdNetwork yet. But the implementation itself is fairly straightforward and most MMPs including Adjust are supporting integration of it. And so, definitely, look into integrating SKAdNetwork. Alongside that, work closely with your network partners like Vungle, Tapjoy, ironSource to make sure all the parts of the implementation is working, too, from a data integrity standpoint, from a performance analysis standpoint. So, that means how can you get the raw SKAdNetwork postback from networks or, even better, can you get it through your MMPs?”

2. Be Prepared to Act With Speed and Agility Come 2021

“My motto during this process, too, as I learn more about SKAdNetwork and the Apple changes, we should expect more changes to come and more information to come out in the coming months.”

3. It’s a Privacy-First App World, and We’re Just Living in It

“From my point of view, definitely think it’s an important change for user privacy. I will say I’m cautiously optimistic about iOS 14 and the future of iOS in general just because the transitional way from IDFA can’t happen overnight, and it needs to be approached with care. From Vungle’s perspective, we take privacy really seriously, and we’ve been preparing for a potential IDFA-less world for quite some time now by focusing on context-based ad serving. And along with Tapjoy and ironSource, we have a direct SDK footprint, which enables us to collect contextual data signals while preserving user privacy.”

4. Probabilistic LTV Measurement: The Key to Campaign Performance Growth in a World Without IDFA

“In terms of performance, it’ll depend on, probably, the attribution method. If it’s purely based on LAT traffic as we see today with fingerprint attribution, I don’t see a performance degradation, per se. In fact, like Meredith said, we’ve seen strong user quality compared to where the IDFA is there. And so, no concerns there.

“It’ll depend on when and how the SKAdNetwork enforcement happens. Because of the lack of data granularity, the data delay, there could be a chance for CPM and campaign performance degradation. But I think that’s where partners like AlgoLift will come in, where they support probabilistic LTV measurement where IDFA is not available and you’ll have limited data to work with. So, we’re excited to see how our partnership with AlgoLift will go with acquiring higher quality users with minimal disruption when all this moves forward.”

5. Android Will Most Likely Follow in the Footsteps of Apple’s Privacy Changes

“In 2021, I do expect Android to follow suit on some level, with diminishing Google advertising ID availability and coming out with Android’s version of SKAdNetwork. In the meantime, I think advertisers will have a renewed importance on Android ads and making sure that their marketing is successful on Android with the limitation on the iOS side. I would also just be cautious of using Android as a benchmark for iOS because I see, a lot of times, where the performance is just drastically different on the different platforms. And so, I would just be cautious of that because they tend to serve different markets. But some data can be better than no data at all, too.”

Helpful Links and Articles

• Introduction to iOS 14 and SKAdNetwork: How This Affects Advertisers
• Introduction to iOS 14: How This Affects Publishers
• How iOS 14 Will Affect Ad Networks
• How Does iOS 14 Affect the Ad Tech Ecosystem?
• Vungle Acquires AlgoLift, a Leading Marketing Intelligence Platform for Mobile Advertising
• Apple Developer Documentation – SKAdNetwork
• iOS & iPadOS 14 Release Notes – SKAdNetwork
• Apple’s Privacy-Safe Mobile Attribution Solution Is Buggy: Core Functions Missing From SKAdNetwork