Liftoff’s Approach to User Acquisition in a Post-IDFA World

When Apple releases it’s proposed change to the IDFA, millions of iOS users are expected to opt-out of IDFA sharing, impacting advertisers’ ability to track and target new and old users alike in unforeseen ways. However, based on recent Liftoff testing, there are clear signals that mobile advertising performance may in fact benefit from a larger pool of cost-effective, non-personalized traffic.

While Apple’s announcement has sent the industry searching for answers, since mid-July, Liftoff acted to ramp up spending on non-personalized traffic across all of our customer campaigns to provide insights into the performance of what we called “blended LAT traffic”, a precursor of what to expect with the rollout of IDFA opt-in changes. This effort included adding users who have limit ad tracking (LAT) settings switched on to existing campaigns targeting iOS users across all regions of the world. All other aspects of campaigns remained the same including setup, KPIs, ad creatives, regions and ML models. 

Performance of Non-Personalized Traffic is Promising

Liftoff’s customers are discovering surprising benefits by adding LAT traffic to their existing Liftoff campaigns. As a wholly new and underutilized cohort, LAT users are both cheaper to acquire and, in most cases, equally engaged. A case study conducted with gaming juggernaut Playrix proved that this inventory delivered campaign performance on par or better than IDFA traffic.

Analysis of our non-personalized campaigns over the last four weeks reveal that these trends hold for almost all app categories, with results either on par or better than IDFA-only inventory:

While Social/Dating and Finance apps saw the most significant decrease in cost per install, Gaming apps also saw a large reduction, even at volume. Our study shows that LAT traffic delivers an average saving of over 4% across all app categories while allowing marketers to spend more on a larger pool of previously untapped users. These results hold true for other relevant down-funnel metrics.

“LAT traffic combined with IDFA traffic is proving to be a viable, if not preferable, option for companies wanting to drive app marketing performance at scale,” said Mark Ellis, Liftoff’s co-founder and CEO. “Given the design of the Liftoff ML platform, with its lack of dependence on IDFA, these early tests are demonstrating the potential to deliver better campaign performance than with IDFA traffic alone.

If you’d like to learn more about our offering, please reach out to us directly, either on our contact form or through your dedicated customer success manager. We are also rolling out even more case studies on LAT over the next few weeks. Stay in the know and sign up to our mailing list in the sidebar to receive updates straight into your inbox.