Apple’s annual Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) will take place in less than one month, beginning on the 6th of June, and lasting for 4 days. As every year, one of the biggest announcements will be the official unveiling of the iOS update, this year the iOS16.
The burning question we want to know is what will this have in store for mobile user acquisition? Will there be a game changer like the privacy-centric IDFA shockers of the iOS14.5 update?
As the countdown begins for this highly anticipated conference, now is the perfect time to take a look at how the iOS14.5 update transformed the way we look at mobile user acquisition forever.
Privacy Becomes A Non-Negotiable
As part of iOS14, Apple introduced the ATT prompt which allows people to hide their IDFA, and the vast majority of iOS users chose not to be tracked. This of course forced the industry to change completely and reinvent itself. Without IDFA, deterministic attribution is not possible anymore, meaning the whole mobile advertising ecosystem had to find new solutions.
SKADNetwork Is More Important Than It Used Be
SKADNetwork is Apple’s privacy-friendly way to attribute impressions and clicks to app installs on iOS apps. It shares conversion data with advertisers without revealing any user-level or device-level data. This means that advertisers get a smaller, filtered fraction of the data.
Everything runs on apple properties: the attribution happens within the app store and then is verified on apple’s servers, where data is “cleaned” and then sent to the advertiser. The goal for Apple here is to preserve sensitive data, such as the person’s identity or the IDFA, (if the user has decided not to share it). The data is processed in order to guarantee the user’s privacy.
One drawback is that SKAdNetwork doesn’t track post-install events as MMPs used to do, but sends information about those events through a 6-bit system, with a delay of 24–48 hours, which make it difficult to optimize app install campaigns in real time.
Probabilistic Attribution Enters The Game
Probabilistic Attribution model is applied as an alternative to IDFA and SKAdNetwork, and on websites as an alternative to cookies. Probabilistic attribution is a type of mobile attribution that relies on probabilities and not on IDFA, therefore, it is fully aligned with Apple’s new changes that came with the introduction of the ATT prompt in iOS14.5. It is based on patterns and uses machine learning in order to identify probable conversions, so, in the context of an app install campaign, there is a set of probabilities that one or more campaigns drove an install.
“WWDC will give developers access to Apple engineers and technologies to learn how to create groundbreaking apps and interactive experiences”
- Susan Prescott, Apple’s vice president of Worldwide Developer Relations
Mapendo, like everybody else, awaits the WWDC announcements with great anticipation, looking forward in particular to learning Apple’s thoughts on what ‘creating groundbreaking apps’ entails (but we are sure it is nothing we don’t know already).
In this post iOS14.5 era, it is more important than ever to optimize your mobile user acquisition strategies in order to target high quality users and scale your in-app revenues. To help you in this quest we have put together our ultimate guide of the top 5 UA strategies. Follow this and you will learn how to navigate the world of mobile app marketing and become a top mobile app player.
Mapendo is a performance DSP for app install campaigns you can rely on to grow your mobile app.
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