SKAd 4.0 & App Promotion: What Does App Marketers Need To Know?

WWDC 2022 has released SKAd version 4.0, and Apple has listened to developer feedback and added new features that give advertisers more data. We've gathered all of these updates and will start working on how to improve and adapt our current solution, SKAd Flexible Mapping, to make sure we're ready when this new version comes out.

What's better: Apple makes sure DSPs and networks get hidden attribute data to protect user privacy when install counts are low. They call it the anonymity of the crowd. The number of installs determines the level of granularity of Apple shares. Fewer installations limit the amount of traceable information. As the number of users grows, and as installs grow, Apple can send more information because it will be harder to identify individual users.

In this article, we are going to explain what is new in SKAd 4.0 and a new vision of app promotion for 2022. Here is the content: 
● What is SKAdNetwork？
● From SKAd 3.0 to SKAd 4.0: What is new?
● The mixed reactions to SKAd 4.0
● Perspective on privacy and fresh ideas

What is SKAdNetwork？

While protecting user privacy, the ad network API aids advertisers in evaluating the performance of advertising campaigns. Three parties are involved in the API:

● Ad networks that approve advertisements and get install-validation postbacks when they generate sales
● Source apps that show advertisements delivered by ad networks
● Apps that are promoted and shown in signed ads

Developers must set up their apps to work with ad networks, and ad networks must register with Apple. See Registering an Ad Network, Configuring a Source App, and Configuring an Advertised App for setup details.

Advertisers show an ad with cryptographically signed parameters. It will identify the ad campaign when users tap an advertisement. Starting with iOS 14.5, advertisers have the option of displaying a StoreKit-rendered ad or a bespoke view-through ad. The device sends an install attribution postback to the ad network if the user downloads the promoted program inside an attribution time window.

Devices begin sending install-validation postbacks to various ad networks that sign their ads using version 3.0 as of iOS 14.6.

For the ad impression that obtains the ad attribution, one advertising network receives a postback with the did-win parameter value of true.

If more than five other ad networks' ad impressions fit the criteria for the attribution but weren't successful, they will receive a postback with a did-win parameter value of false.

Beginning with iOS 15, developers of promoted applications have the option to request copies of the winning postbacks that show their app's successful ad conversions. Set up a postback URL in your app to enable opt-in.

The campaign ID is among the data in the postback that Apple cryptographically signed, but no user- or device-specific data is present. If Apple decides that giving the values passes Apple's privacy standard, the postback may contain a conversion value and the ID of the source app. Postbacks now include a did-win flag to show whether the ad network got the attribution as of SKAdNetwork version 3.0.



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From SKAd 3.0 to SKAd 4.0: What is new?

After privacy thresholds are met, more campaign IDs

These initial changes were made to provide more data to advertisers. SKAd is known to be a hindrance to properties and optimizations in the current version, and from what we've seen, version 4.0 is trying to address this. The campaign ID field we have is now called the source identifier. This number has been increased from 2 to 4 digits. Different parts of the source identifier will be returned depending on the installed privacy level. Therefore, in order to receive the third and fourth digits of the source identifier, we must reach a certain privacy threshold. Basically, the availability of campaign IDs is tied to ad spending. More installation, more information.

Conversion rate with fewer limitations relating to privacy

Additionally, the conversion value has undergone various modifications and has been split into two types. a number that is coarsely and finely grained. The latter, which is a 6 bits value and was present in both current and previous versions of SKAd, is unchanged (64 different combinations). Low, medium, and high are the three various values for the coarse-grained value. Compared to fine-grained conversion values, coarse-grained values are received at a significantly lower granularity level. Similar to the source identification, the number of installs will determine whether we receive no information, the simpler coarse-grained value, or the conversion value we previously had.

several postbacks

The windows used for postbacks conversion are another new feature. Since we only got one postback with the earlier SKAd versions, it was difficult to gauge engagement. To counteract this effect in the next version, there will be three postbacks instead of one, each with a specific timeframe for when it can be triggered. 0–2 days, 3–7 days, and 8–35 days are the windows. Then, for instance, advertisers might get the buy in the first window and the buys or level advancements in the other windows. The fine-grained conversion value will only be included in the initial postback; all subsequent postbacks will only carry the coarse-grained conversion value.

Web-to-app support

The most recent and anticipated development relates to the web. The SKAd Network will be prepared to handle web traffic. When the links reroute to the App Store product page for the advertised ad, first-party websites and embedded cross-site iframes will be able to begin attributing SKAd installs. This will be a fantastic chance for the advertisers using Smadex to take advantage of its ability to purchase mobile web ads.

The mixed reactions to SKAd 4.0

The reality remains that Apple didn't contact the industry before establishing SKAdNetwork, which would have resulted in much less uncertainty and agita, although these four changes to SKAdNetwork 4.0 were based on comments Apple requested from the mobile ad business.

“Arguably, if Apple had done some market research before the first version, they could have learned the right way to approach this,” Bauer said. “Instead, it took two years to get there, which is unfortunate.”

But it's still a better improvement than ever.

“While we wished to see these improvements being released much earlier, they are a great step forward for the entire ecosystem,” said Oren Kaniel, CEO and co-founder of AppsFlyer.

Jake Moskowitz, VP of data strategy at Emodo, is a little more skeptical. Although Apple’s plans for SKAdNetwork appear to be an effort to “make up for some of the limitations of the initial version,” he said, it’s important to wait and see how it actually works after launch.

But Mike Woosley, COO of Lotame, is having none of it. “Apple is going to give developers more information but, unfortunately, no tools to do anything about it,” he said. “Those are reserved for Apple.”

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Perspective on privacy and fresh ideas

Apple gave iCloud+ users the option to enable Private Relay in the previous release, iOS 15, to stop iOS users from being tracked on Safari. Despite rumors that Private Relay would be enabled by default as part of the release of iOS 16, Apple has not yet made such an announcement. The mobile marketing and advertising ecosystem are moving in a certain direction, though, and we think there will be plenty more changes in the future.

Predictive analytics is one of the main areas we'll be concentrating on going forward. Working with SKAdNetwork data has made predictive analytics substantially more difficult on iOS. Important events that we were previously able to identify later in the customer journey are no longer visible because the data currently received is anonymized and based on activity from only the first 24 hours post-install (although the updates to postback windows on SKAdNetwork 4.0 could change this).
 
For more details, you can learn more through our iOS15 section: iOS 15 ASO & SKAdNetwork