Who hasn’t heard the expression, “Hindsight is 20/20,” or proclaimed, “If I knew then what I know now…”? While we can’t go back in time to change the past, we can reevaluate the effectiveness of our past choices, consider the results, and decide whether or not these decisions still work best for us now, and if they will in the future.
Two months after Apple’s release of iOS 14.5, our CEO, Levi Matkins, asked a group of subject matter experts from Adjust, InMobi, and LifeStreet how ATT has actually impacted their roles, the mobile ecosystem as a whole, and to share helpful insights for performance marketers to consider when reexamining their marketing strategies, budgets, and post-IDFA attribution alternatives.
Below are a few highlights from the session followed by the webinar.
- What have you seen in terms of revenue impact from iOS 14.5?
- Our exchange has a healthy mix of brand and performance advertisers. I think the attitude of both segments of demand have been slightly different. Performance advertisers have been much quicker to adopt a lot of things in this new world and brand advertisers have been on a “wait and watch” kind of state and that is showing up in how it impacts revenue.
One thing we’re seeing is brand advertisers have shifted a lot more budgets to other platforms like CTV, web, and even on Android. I think the effect on the performance side is much less pronounced and I think people are being careful with their iOS budgets, but generally spend has not gone away like a “doomsday” kind of thing, like what we had been imagining last year. Part of it is because there are advertisers who are running contextual ads and it is easier to work with SKAdNetwork versus nothing for a brand advertiser. Some of these things are showing up in the revenue impact.
-Utkarsh Sinha, Head of Product Marketing, InMobi
- Do you have suggestions for marketers when they’re working with SKAN?
- Be more strategic with your conversion value mapping. You only have 24 hours to get as much volume and the conversions that will make sense to you, in order for you to identify and start to segment your users. So, rethink which are the first 24 hour in-app behaviors that will lead you to identify engaging users and quality users.
Not only revamp your in-app events that will lead you to those conclusions, but also make sure that you keep your users engaged as much as you can in the first 24 hours. Think of high impact push notification campaigns, or creating a push to sign up UX. Do all of that so you can get the volume you need to start segmenting your users which really gets concrete value out of the aggregate data.
– Tatiana Hoffman, Product Team Lead, Adjust
- What is your prediction looking into more medium long-term impacts and how should advertisers prepare and think about that?
- As long as attribution options on SKAdNetwork eligible traffic exist, I don’t expect there to be much of an impact to those who can figure out how to find success using contextual bidding, targeting, and optimization. If you can work with a DSP partner who has success in those areas, then for now I think performance will be stable and impact should be very minimal. This as we know definitely will change if Apple does start enforcing the sole use of SKAdNetworks.
We want to make sure, and believe it is very important as a DSP, to have a plan A, a plan B, and a plan C for different levels of enforcement in different scenarios. That way we can set ourselves and our advertiser partners up for success in that SKAdNetwork-only world and to mitigate any negative impact that may arise. For our advertisers specifically, we really encourage them to come up with a very solid SKAdNetwork strategy even if they are not currently reliant on it, because we do know it is going to be important at some point in the future.
-Samantha Freeny, Director, Product, LifeStreet