Alongside the release of iOS 16.1 last week, Apple quietly rolled out SkAdNetwork 4.0 (SKAN 4), the latest version of its privacy-based campaign measurement framework. The new iteration of SKAN contains key improvements that promise to make the tool more effective for mobile app developers and marketers.
Apple launched the first edition of SKAN in 2018, with the aim of enhancing user privacy while providing marketers with the data they need to grow their business. To do this, SKAN shares conversion data with advertisers without revealing any user- or device-level data.
Several key updates to SKAN 4 promise to make the framework more accessible and useful for businesses looking to measure the performance of their mobile marketing campaigns. Digiday spoke with several experts to find out how the launch of SKAdNetwork 4.0 could impact the mobile app marketing and measurement space.
The key numbers :
- The first version of SKAdNetwork was released in 2018, with later versions rolling out in 2020 and 2021. (Release notes for all versions, including SKAN 4, are publicly available on Apple’s developer website. )
- Since its release, SKAN has become relatively widespread in mobile app marketing and measurement, but not entirely ubiquitous. “On the publishing side, we have all of the SKANs of the various ad providers that serve their ads in our apps,” said Dom Davies, mobile games consultant. “When it comes to user acquisition, I would say about 75% of our spend goes through ad networks that use SKAN attribution.”
- Observers had been anticipating the release of SKAN 4 since early June, when Apple announced the imminent release of the updated framework at its 2022 Worldwide Developers Conference. But some were surprised when SKAN 4 was not released alongside the Initial release of iOS 16 on September 12.
Problems with older versions:
Increased privacy is certainly a good thing for users, but less so for developers. And SKAN has struggled to achieve mass adoption in the mobile app development landscape. Some marketers complain that older versions of SKAN simply don’t give them enough information to take action.
“The majority of our customers are still trying to figure out how well they can get reporting and metrics for them with SKAN as it is today,” said Katie Madding, product manager of the mobile measurement company. Adjust.
At the moment, Madding said, Adjust still has customers who are hesitant to dip their toes into SKAN due to the complexity of the tool. Skepticism in some corners could be a big factor behind the changes Apple is implementing in SKAN 4.
“At the moment there are so many issues and a lack of measurement data that there’s really no incentive for customers to switch to this new framework,” Madding said of SKAN 3. unless, of course, Apple throws down the gauntlet and says, “Everyone, you gotta do this now.”
Major changes:
There are three major areas of improvement in the latest version of SKAN that experts believe could make the tool more attractive to users:
- Campaign measurement: Simply put, SKAN 4 updates give marketers a better understanding of which campaigns are successfully driving quality users to their apps. In previous versions of SKAN, campaigns could only be identified via a campaign ID number between 0 and 99. SKAN 4 includes a feature called “Source ID”, which assigns a detailed four-digit ID to each campaign . Now there are 10,000 different ID combinations, compared to only 100 campaign IDs.
- Conversion values: SKAN 4 expands marketers’ options for measuring the quality of in-app engagement – in other words, whether users actually make purchases or drive other users to purchase. Marketers can assign conversion values to low, medium, or high grains, which essentially gives them more opportunities to understand the value of specific users.
- Web Support: SKAN 4 gives marketers access to enhanced web-to-app attribution, allowing them to better understand how advertising in traditional web browsers connects to in-app engagement. If companies have both in-app and web ad inventory, it makes it easier for them to execute multi-channel attribution. “Previous versions of SKAN didn’t support this at all,” Madding said.
- (This Madding blog post provides a more detailed technical breakdown of how these improvements work.)
The future of SKAN:
Despite the aforementioned fixes, SKAN 4 is still far from perfect. And while it may make life easier for developers and marketers in the mobile app development space, its release is a relatively subtle change for most users.
“It’s a change behind the scenes,” Davies said. “We know SKAdNetwork has its issues, and we’ve already accounted for those shortcomings in our model, so we’re pretty comfortable buying with it. At this point, whatever comes up will only make it easier for us. . »
As the industry adjusts to SKAN 4, Davies said he expects more framework updates and changes in the future, but doesn’t see any major shake-ups on the horizon.
“I think it will always be a work in progress; there will always be small refinements,” he said. “But I think we have overcome the worst at this stage. At this point it works – it’s just a matter of refinement.
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