Liftoff is ready for iOS 14.5. Are you?

By Henry Wang | March 4, 2021
Product, User acquisition

Last June, Apple announced what is essentially the deprecation of Identifier for Advertisers (IDFA), the release of SKAdNetwork (SKAN) and App Transparency Tracker, Apple’s privacy first attribution framework. These changes affect all parties in the mobile ad tech industry – advertisers, measurement, demand, supply, and publishers. Today, we’re sharing how Liftoff is preparing for a mobile marketing future on SKAN without IDFA.

Here’s what we’ve been up to:

Testing Performance of Non-IDFA Traffic

Since day one of the announcement, we have been buying large amounts of “Limit Ad Tracking” traffic (iOS traffic without IDFA) to train our ML to find high quality users without relying on IDFA. Today this traffic makes up 25% of our global spend on iOS and we are seeing great campaign performance. To learn more, check out our case studies with Playrix, Yubo, and IMVU.

Supporting SKAdNetwork 2.0

We’re focusing on three things to be fully SKAdNetwork enabled. 

  1. Driving Publisher Adoption of SKAdNetwork: We’re working with supply partners to ensure that publishers update their SDK and integrate our ad-network-ID correctly so they can use SKAdNetwork for attribution. This ensures that we are able to access and buy SKAdNetwork compatible impressions from publishers. As of today, only 16% of traffic is SKAdNetwork compatible. (This is an ongoing effort.)
  2. Verifying Receipt of SKAdNetwork Postbacks: We’re working with Apple to verify that we’re properly receiving SKAdNetwork postbacks. This ensures that we are able to forward postbacks to the customer’s mobile measurement partners. (This has been completed.)
  3. Testing End-to-End SKAdNetwork flow: We’re working with customers and MMPs to test end-to-end SKAdNetwork flow. This ensures that we are able to bid on SKAdNetwork compatible impressions, receive SKAdNetwork postbacks from Apple and forward them to the customer’s mobile measurement partner. (This is an ongoing effort.)

Given our preparation, we are confident in our ability to help app marketers drive continued performance in an IDFA-less world on SKAdNetwork.