Singular’s Fraud Prevention Suite is critical to protecting your advertising dollars. Digital advertising fraud is expected to hit $45 billion in 2022, diverting brands’ hard-earned dollars away from legitimate marketing to toward unscrupulous fraudsters. But a huge percentage of marketers — up to 63% according to Gartner — still do not utilize fraud prevention techniques in their mobile marketing systems.
At Singular, we don’t want our customers to be another statistic.
This is why we have taken a new approach to fraud prevention. While most attribution providers are treating fraud prevention as a luxury, charging exorbitant fees to “add on” prevention technology, Singular believes it is a necessity and should be included as part of our core attribution solution. Additionally, while many providers offer comprehensive insights into the fraud that is taking place, these insights are not necessarily actionable or proactive. Marketers don’t just need best-in-class fraud prevention, they also need control over how fraud is defined and how it’s treated.
As such, Singular is excited to offer an enhanced Fraud Prevention Suite that is included by default with our mobile attribution suite. It both proactively rejects fraud and adapts to your app’s ecosystem, your advertising partners, the ad networks and channels you use, and how you see fraud.
What you can expect in Singular’s fraud tools
Every performance marketers knows: fraud takes place in many different forms and is always evolving. This is why Singular considers all fraud detection signals and all known fraud prevention methods to:
Show you where and when fraud is taking place
Proactively reject fraud clicks, installs, and conversion events
Give you complete control over when and how to take action on fraudulent activity
Using Singular’s Fraud Prevention Suite, you are equipped with the sophistication, control, and adaptability to keep sources clean and media budgets focused on quality users. We simply offer more fraud prevention technologies and methodologies, including:
Android Install Validation (a first in the industry)
Here are just a few key highlights of our Fraud Prevention Suite:
Comprehensive protection against fraud Singular considers all detection indicators and protection methods to actively reject fraudulent installs, clicks, and events within pre-defined thresholds.
Adaptive to evolving fraud Singular evolves as fraud evolves adapting based on the trends of various fraud signals within your app’s environment.
Controllable rejection methods Singular gives you complete control over how to take action on fraud. Turn on and off preset rejection rules or create custom rules to reject or flag fraudulent installs.
Advanced, flexible reporting Singular offers the same powerful reporting to quickly investigate both rejected and suspicious traffic sources, and drill down to the publisher, campaign, geo, and site level.
Transparency of protected assets Singular provides complete transparency of all your reporting. Understand where and how your app is being targeted by fraudsters and see how your ROI is being protected.
Visualization of fraud metrics Singular gives you clean and easy-to-analyze fraud insights with graphical representation of the fraud metrics that matter to you such as rejected installs and cost savings.
We are dedicated to combatting fraud and have engineers working around the clock to understand the latest fraud threats and implement the best prevention methods available. In our research we have uncovered the current state of mobile ad fraud prevention and the percent prevalence of each type of fraud, as well as the top 20 least fraudulent networks.
Over the last several months, we’ve heard from many clients about their interest in implementing Snapchat app install ad campaigns. The good news for you: Singular is a Snap measurement partner.
This post provides a bit of background information on the platform and its ad products, and outlines how Singular clients can leverage our combined attribution and analytics toolsets to measure and optimize Snapchat campaigns.
A massive mobile platform
Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you know about the meteoric rise of this powerful mobile platform. Some eye-popping stats:
More than 238 million daily active users (DAUs)
More than 180 million who engage with augmented reality on Snapchat
An average of 30+ minutes in the Snapchat app per user per day
Over 60% of users create Snaps with the Snapchat camera every day
18 billion daily view views (!!)
The Snapchat audience has celebrated strength among millennials. But its reach and footprint have grown rapidly in other audience segments as well, and the social media giant offers significant reach into many major audience cohorts globally. As a Snap measurement partner, Singular can help you access this audience.
Singular is an official Snap measurement partner
Snapchatters love the platform, spending more than 30 minutes per day on average posting and viewing content. With that kind of reach and engagement, it’s only natural that many advertisers are looking to add the platform to their acquisition programs.
Digital analysis shows that Snapchat has a variety of unique characteristics that heighten user engagement and keep people coming back again and again throughout the day. That’s making brands more interested in working with this major mobile player and leveraging its digital advertising products.
What’s unique about Snapchat?
For those that aren’t super familiar with Snapchat, you should really take a look, as it is different in a variety of respects from other social platforms. At its core, this platform is built around content: vertical videos and images, not text. Images and videos are the center of virtually every Snapchat screen. It is also a mobile-centric experience, relying on the uber portability of smartphones AND their mobile cameras to gather content, and their vertical phone screens to view it.
From the beginning, Snapchat created a personality and set of tools that seem to have made millions of people more people comfortable with frequently creating content. Snapchat constantly makes it clear that authenticity and timeliness are what matters, not necessarily million-dollar production values.
That focus on organic experience is part of the reason why users have been so quick to adopt Snapchat and happily devote big blocks of their time to Snapchat. For most platforms, the percentage of content creators versus content consumers is relatively small. (Think YouTube for an extreme example.)
Snapchat also enables users to set specific privacy and sharing parameters for each piece of content they produce. Users can create and share content with individual friends, as part of a “user story,” or they can submit content to “Our Stories” which lets Snapchatters build community narratives together (think first day of college, or Coachella). These temporary experiences play off what is arguably Snapchat’s most powerful trait: authenticity.
Snapchat attracts a lean-forward, mobile-centric, youth audience coveted by many types of apps.
Snap measurement partner: app marketers are leveraging Snapchat
With its broad, youthful demos and massive reach, Snapchat is fast becoming a popular way for app marketers to quickly grow install counts.
For many of our marketer clients, Snapchat is interesting as a way of both growing scale and diversifying install streams – something many marketers are interested in doing as the industry consolidates to fewer, larger players. With Snapchat, companies get access to a massive, deeply engaged audience.
Advertising products
Snapchat offers a full-screen ad format for app install campaigns. Its foundation is a Snap Ad; an up to 10-second full-screen vertical video unit. After seeing the video, those Snapchatters interested in learning more or downloading the app can swipe up for options. Here a brand can connect the user to a longer-form video, other local content, or directly to one of the app stores to download. The introduction of goal-based bidding for install ads further enhances the unit by allowing app advertisers to optimize towards installs.
Currently, advertisers can buy directly from the Snapchat company sales team, through a self-serve ad manager, or field campaigns through one of Snapchat’s growing number of Snapchat Partners.
Here is an example of a Snapchat video ad:
Snap measurement partner: Singular’s relationship with Snapchat
As an official Snap measurement partner, Singular has comprehensive access to Snapchat ad campaign performance and spend data metrics, for maximum insight into Snapchat campaigns.
Singular clients can easily measure their Snapchat campaigns using the tools and workflows that they already know and appreciate.
As with each of our more than 2,000 partner integrations, we can de-duplicate installs and re-engagement events, as well as provide the full range of ad measurement at the campaign, creative and provider levels. All tracking and cohort reports are available.
Singular can also capture your Snapchat campaign spend data down to the ad level. That means you can perform precision ROI analysis, just as you can with any other Singular media partner. This will contribute to unprecedented campaign insights for your Snapchat efforts.
With Singular, you can monitor Snapchat campaign performance in real-time for maximum insight. Use our powerful, unified analytics platform to measure:
Impressions: Keep track of every Snap Ad exposure across Snapchat
Video views: Measure the number of Snap Ad video plays that occur on the platform
Swipe ups: Get a precise count of the swipe-ups that occur on your campaigns and executions
eCPM: Get a precise measure of the effective cost per thousand impressions for your app campaign
eCPV: Ensure maximum insight with comprehensive measurement of the effective cost per video play for your creative
eCPI: Get true visibility into your effective cost per install on Snapchat
App install conversions: Learn how many clicks result in installs
De-duplication: Prevent double payment and accurate data for ROI analytics with mobile app tracking deduplication from Singular
With our access to time stamps for Snapchat-driven clicks as a Snap measurement partner, we can precisely measure ad performance. Since Snapchat is a “self-attributing network” like Facebook, Google and Twitter, you do not need to create special tags for your Snapchat campaigns. Simply use Singular’s easy-to-use campaign set-up and you’ll be measuring in minutes.
Visit this page for information on trackable app event metrics on Snapchat.
We’re pleased to be a Snap measurement partner and expect more and more of our clients to field programs in the coming months.
Today marketers have access to a huge amount of data about their users and customers. App remarketing is a good example.
On the mobile app side of business, attribution and analytics can provide an amazing view into both the health and vitality of your business and the in-app behaviors of your users. We can leverage mobile app remarketing to capitalize on these signals and meet critical business needs.
a way to connect with people who previously interacted with your website or mobile app. It allows you to strategically position your ads in front of these audiences as they browse Google or its partner websites, thus helping you increase your brand awareness or remind those audiences to make a purchase.
One of the reasons why we created the Singular marketing analytics platform was because we wanted to empower marketers to take what they have learned and put it into immediate use building their businesses through data-driven marketing programs that really move the needle on revenue and ROI. One of the best ways to do that is to focus on delivering a one-to-one user experience that reflects the wants and needs of that person. Such data-driven marketing initiatives leverage the signals gathered through the attribution and analytics processes to define and refine what, when and how we speak to app users.
Our audience segmentation offering enables clients to define high-performing audience segments for tailored media and messaging programs. By combining people who have completed a common set of actions, for example, we make it possible to deliver custom messages to those users.
Probably the easiest way to understand the power of this approach is to think in terms of specific use cases …
App remarketing for new user activation
More and more market research is showing that the first hours and days after an install are a critical time for determining whether someone will become a regular user or customer. By defining high-performing custom audiences of new installs, we can develop and deliver ad messages designed to make regular mobile app usage a habit.
And the more times they return to the app during that early period, the more likely they are to become regular users and customers.
Win back uninstallers
People uninstall mobile apps for a variety of reasons. Uninstalls that occur early in the app user’s life cycle are the most interesting to marketers because they can provide signals on how to improve user relationships. Many mobile app marketers are now defining audiences of recent uninstallers in order to create messaging and media programs for ads designed to get people to reinstall the apps.
App remarketing efforts targeted to these individuals can bring some of them back.
Turning intent into purchases
When an individual searches for products and services in your app, you have a great indication of purchase intent. But one of the realities of our business is that many more people will search than will actually make a purchase in your app.
If you can deliver marketing messages that can drive even modest increases in the number of people who transact in your app, you can have a profound effect on your revenue and profitability. By featuring recently searched items in custom messaging ads — or in an area in your app — you can remind app users that your app is a great way to get the things they want and need. This is a great example of how using app remarketing can help close sales.
App remarketing: engaging cart abandoners
An even better signal of purchase intent is if someone places an item in a shopping cart. For most mobile apps, 90%, 95%, 99% or more people will abandon their carts before making a purchase.
By using custom audiences and dynamic deferred deep-linking app remarketing ads featuring the items in an individual’s cart, we can drive more users to return to the app to buy. For a profound impact on app revenue and profitability.
Upsell or cross sell
The people most likely to make a purchase in your mobile app are those who have already made a purchase in the past. You can get more of those people to transact again through focused messaging that reflects their past purchases and current needs. Further, many app marketers are now cross-marketing one app to the users of another, related app as a means of driving highly efficient user acquisition.
Again, a great example of app remarketing to help close sales.
Better lookalike modeling
Many brands use lookalike modeling – targeting prospects who behave similarly to their users. But what if you could do your modeling based on the characteristics of your best customers and payers? If you could attract more people like them, you can drive your KPIs. By analyzing your best customers and creating audience segments of those individuals, you can work with partners to reach and drive installs from people who hold incredible revenue potential.
I am sure you see how action – closing the loop on data-driven marketing – offers profound advantages versus knowledge alone. Getting that knowledge is essential, but it really only the opening gambit for the highly effective marketer.
We are beyond pleased to share that Singular has been selected as a finalist for the App Growth Awards 2020 in the App Analytics Platform category.
The App Growth Awards are presented by App Promotion Summit, and include finalists such as App Annie, SensorTower, MoPub, and much more in 20 categories, including app store optimization, innovation, engagement, data, and analytics. There are also categories for best campaigns on Facebook, Google, Apple Search Ads, Snap, and TikTok.
Singular is nominated in the analytics category, where the award is given to “the mobile analytics, app analytics, ad tracking and attribution platform that has delivered the most value and understanding of big data analytics in the past 12 months.” It’s a broad category, but we’re happy to be part of it.
“Our international panel of 20 expert judges whittled down over 250 submissions from around the globe to 62 finalists in 20 different categories,” App Promotion Summit says. “The vast array of entries from a myriad of companies highlights the growing size of an increasingly sophisticated app growth ecosystem.”
One thing we’re particularly proud of in 2020?
Singular built the industry’s first-to-market support for SKAdNetwork, Singular SKAN, making it scalable, simple, and seamless for mobile marketers.
As you know, MMPs are designed to provide unbiased third-party measurement of your mobile marketing efforts. Up to now, much of that promise was facilitated with the aid of mobile ad identifiers like Apple’s IDFA on iOS and GAID (Google’s Advertising ID) for Android. Moving forward, we face a significant challenge: finding new ways to keep that promise and help marketers optimize their campaigns … while preserving end-user privacy. Singular is leading that charge, and it’s great to see even more external validation of that effort.
There’s been a lot going on in 2020, but one other thing we’re thankful for is the opportunity to deliver class-leading fraud prevention for mobile app marketers. This has been a game-changer for clients who have literally saved six figures, and as we see massive new sources of potential fraud opening up, we’re continuing to innovate on this front.
There’s a lot of change coming, but marketers have dealt with change before, and we’ll continue to deal with it in the future. Based on what we’ve already shipped and are continuing to deliver, we have no fear that mobile marketers will continue to be able to get smart insights for out-sized growth.
Huge thanks to the App Promotion Summit for recognizing Singular as a finalist. Ultimately, the only reward we seek for our efforts is the continued success of our clients.
But it’s always nice to get a pat on the back once in a while too.
My personal goal for Singular for the past two years has been to get ready for this scenario: the deprecation of the IDFA.
Well, it happened.
At Singular, we’ve been writing and speaking about IDFA deprecation for a long time. We’ve formed the Mobile Attribution Privacy group with top brands to plan out a PII attribution future, and we’ve been speaking to as many people as possible.
It has been a crazy week so far, and it’s only the beginning. Fortunately, Singular has a SKAdNetwork solution for marketers that you’ll be able to see and test very soon. But I have to say I am quite surprised that an event so dramatic as this one — throwing an $80 billion market into upheaval — is getting very little publicity, and I also see very little content on this topic outside of Singular.
In what has been published, I’ve seen some interesting thoughts and claims, and some obvious falsehoods. I want to share my educated opinions on those.
I’ll start by saying that this all depends on whose point of view we’re taking. In this case, I’m trying to take Apple’s POV, which, based on everything I’ve seen them do on the web and now on mobile, is very (VERY) privacy oriented. I may also refer to them as the “law” since they are pretty much the law when it comes to iOS.
Finally, be aware that this is my opinion based on the facts at hand, and things may change. I will, however, try to update this every couple of days with what I’m learning.
The IDFA iOS 14 FAQ
Claim: “This is not the end of the world.” Assessment: True
I think the next few months will be challenging for the entire mobile ad ecosystem (publishers, advertisers, ad networks, mobile measurement partners) and anyone in adjacent spaces since we’ll have to adjust to yet-another-new-normal.
Seeing how Apple kept iterating on its parallel solution for the web (ITP), I am convinced that there will be more iterations on SKAdNetwork that will make it better. Our job as a leading MMP is to define how marketers can still get unbiased measurement and understand their ROAS, and that’s where we’ll spend most of our energy.
Claim: “Device identifiers are never used across different app publishers for attribution.” Assessment: Incorrect
I think this is incorrect because the way mobile attribution works today does involve sharing a device ID between the publisher app to the advertiser app. In fact, just connecting a click to an app open is a connection that’s created between user activity in two different apps. And it’s certainly something that goes from a personal device to a third-party company as well as the app publisher.
Claim: “But we’re a GDPR and CCPA compliant MMP/network/etc.” Assessment: Irrelevant
I don’t think Apple cares. Apple takes GDPR and CCPA as the baseline. It’s table stakes, and they are now raising the bar, according to their own standards.
Claim: “The IDFA is not going away completely.” Assessment: Functionally False
Look, here’s my thinking on the topic:
You need people to opt-in. The message is scary, and while you can customize at least some of it, most people will say no. I think Apple doesn’t want people to click it.
But let’s say, by some magic, you do get people to click it, and your app can now access the IDFA: it is likely still useless because people are just as unlikely to click it in other apps, and then you’ll start having partial views of people.
And that means that the IDFA is basically useless… you can’t use it to target, or attribute, or anything else. It’s almost equivalent to IDFV at this point.
Claim: “Fingerprinting will always be an option to provide compliant attribution.” Assessment: False
I would love for fingerprinting to “always be an option,” and I’m not a complete privacy zealot by any means, but it’s incorrect:
In this video released as part of WWDC, they describe that fingerprinting is indeed a form of tracking this applies for:
Also – In the past two to three years, Apple did a lot of work on Safari, their browser, to reduce cross-site tracking by imposing aggressive limits on cookies and other website data. This project is called ITP, and I believe it was the precursor to all the work Apple did on the IDFA.If you read this ITP article about “Privacy Preserving Ad Click Attribution For the Web” – you will see it bears a lot of resemblance to some mechanisms they added to SKAdNetwork 2.0. And if you look at ITP’s Tracking Prevention Policy, they are very clear about fingerprinting:
Besides, I don’t think that’s the spirit of the law. Or, in other words: in what universe would Apple be cool with fingerprinting when they’re making these very apparent steps towards privacy?
Claim: “There’s no role for the MMP in iOS.” Assessment: False
While some of the mechanisms have changed, the role of the MMP stays exactly the same: provide unbiased measurement that leads to actionable decisions about media buying and mobile marketing efforts.
That job has not changed one bit. SKAdNetwork is going to cause more mess than before, where you’ll now have those “apple-signed install notifications” sent to all sorts of endpoints, and you’ll need a third party to ingest them and validate them.
You’ll also have to deal with details like:
How do I assign campaign IDs in such a small space (a number between 0 to 99, a total of 100 options)?
How do I translate these IDs to something meaningful?
How do I associate cost to it?
How do I translate my “conversionValue” from a 6-bit number (64 options only) to something meaningful?
How do I then translate that to ROAS?
All that mess is the job of your measurement provider. That’s where Singular comes in, and I’m sure other MMPs will follow suit (they also don’t have that much time to figure things out because in October iOS 14 will have 50%+ adoption in the market).
IDFA Alternative: “iOS Referrer, similar to the Google PlayStore Referrer.” Assessment: Unlikely
This is a nice idea that everybody wished for, but I can’t see Apple going for it.
Why? For the simple reason that it lets the advertiser’s app know exactly where a user came from. And that means that even if you can’t access the IDFA, there’s still some cross-app tracking taking place … which is against the spirit of the law. So I can’t see how it would be compliant with Apple’s push for privacy.
IDFA Alternative: “Mandatory or incentivized opt-ins will work” Assessment: Not going to work
First of all, mandatory opt-ins will certainly anger Apple. And they probably won’t like incentivized opt-ins either. But that’s not even the biggest problem.
The biggest problem is that you need opt-in everywhere for this to have any meaning:
Let’s say that I play “CoolGame 3” and they did a great job forcing/incentivizing me to opt-in. Great for them.
Let’s say that now I see an ad for Uber in CoolGame 3.
I go on and install Uber.
Uber wants my ride $$$, so they won’t force me to opt-in. So I would probably opt-out given that scary popup.
Uber can’t attribute me.
CoolGame 3 doesn’t get paid.
CoolGame 3’s great attempts to get me to give them my IDFA didn’t help.
Fail.
IDFA Alternative: “More granular tracking permissions with attribution as an exception.” Assessment: Doubt it’ll make iOS 14
That’s great, and I’d love for it to become a reality, but so far, it seems that attribution doesn’t fit the criteria that Apple put in place for exceptions. Additionally, IDFA is simply not accessible by the API without an opt-in.
It’s possible that Apple would expand SKAdnetwork to support more attribution use-cases, but in my opinion, an outright exception to use identifiers would be off the table. Looking at how they handled ITP, they made no exception and considered all of this as collateral damage:
Claim: “This will impact the SDK ad networks more than the SANs.” Assessment: I think both are equally impacted
SANs are the most powerful networks out there, with extremely precise targeting, and according to our data and ROI Index, they are the top-performing channels that capture the lion share of the spend.
That being said, unless SANs like Facebook and Google get special access, this impact could change things for them just as much as it’s changing things for the SDK Ad Networks, and potentially even more because much of their superiority lies with accurate data, the kind of data Apple will be taking away by anonymizing everything. Also – SANs may also have a large dependency on View-Through attribution, which these changes impact too.
Claim: “Apple already provided exceptions to obtain IDFAs without user opt-in.” Assessment: Seems false in the beta so far
We tested iOS 14, and the method that gives the app the IDFA is returning 0s in case the user didn’t opt-in. This also aligns with Apple’s documentation, IDFA wouldn’t be accessible without a user opt-in.
I don’t think Apple ever said that you could obtain IDFA without opt-in, and what I do see in their docs doesn’t speak about IDFA:
Idea: “Let’s hash IDFAs, and so the actual IDFA will never leave the device.” Assessment: Doesn’t solve for privacy
Doing a one-time hash creates a really easy way to utilize the IDFA still. If everybody could collect IDFA, and hash it, then you now essentially got a new IDFA (let’s call it HIDFA – Hashed IDFA).
To illustrate:
CoolGame 3 takes my IDFA and hashes it. They now have my HIDFA, and they send it to CoolGame’s servers.
Uber takes my IDFA and hashes it. They send my HIDFA it to Uber’s servers.
Uber and CoolGame 3 can now track me across apps.
So we ended up with the IDFA again.
Claim: “We’ve done fine when Apple deprecated UDID and MAC addresses.” Assessment: I think it’s irrelevant this time
Yes, we have gone through a lot as an industry, but I don’t think this one is the same. I’d love to be wrong, but in the past, when permanent device identifiers went away, temporary ad IDs gave us what we needed. This is a different scenario entirely, where the OS has stepped into the attribution flow.
Claim: “Facebook will not be affected.” Assessment: Not sure
Apple has been known to give Facebook an unfair advantage before, whether it’s native integration into the OS or other things. But, in this move, Apple seems to have impacted their own ad network (Apple Search Ads), and play by the same rules.
There is an open question about whether ASA will be able to track installs on LAT users and bill you based on that, but they’re making such a big deal about privacy, it would be SO WEIRD if they just gave ASA or Facebook some magic access… but who knows.
Claim: “This will push all the ad dollars to Android.” Assessment: I think it’s unlikely
There may be some initial push towards Android where things “simply work,” but I don’t think that’s sustainable. iOS revenue share in most western markets is 65%+, and I doubt app developers will give up that revenue stream. Some of the UA/Advertising capabilities will be impacted on iOS; there’s no doubt about it… but there will be some tools and capabilities that will still enable the advertisers to do their job, and I think these will get much better over time.
Join the conversation
Have questions? You’re not alone. Our entire industry needs to adapt to these new privacy enhancements, and we have to do it fast. We invite you to join our community coalition, Mobile Action Privacy (MAP), on Slack to connect with other thought leaders, ask questions, and share ideas.
You can also watch our on-demand webinar, iOS 14 & IDFA changes: What you need to know, where I reviewed what losing the IDFA means for marketers and what data-driven marketing will look like in the very near future. Stay tuned! More to come. 😊
For the past couple of years we’ve been preparing for the eventuality that Apple would deprecate the IDFA. What was once an unfathomable scenario will now become a reality this September when iOS 14 launches publicly.
While the IDFA isn’t completely gone, Apple created an opt-in mechanism that will effectively render it useless, and as a result, thousands of companies and millions of developers are scratching their heads and wondering what’s next.
MMPs are designed to provide unbiased third-party measurement of your mobile marketing efforts. Up to now, much of that promise was facilitated with the aid of mobile ad identifiers like Apple’s IDFA on iOS and GAID (Google’s Advertising ID) for Android. Moving forward, we face a significant challenge: finding new ways to keep that promise and help marketers optimize their campaigns … while preserving end-user privacy. Even in the middle of massive market shifts like the one we’re going through now.
That is why I’m very excited to announce Singular’s first-to-market support for SKAdNetwork, making it scalable, simple, and seamless for mobile marketers.
Yesterday’s announcement at WWDC is a tectonic shift for mobile marketers. Some are probably wondering how they can optimize ad campaigns in the future. It will still be possible, and you will be able to understand which marketing inputs are driving the results you need.
Context: what is SKAdNetwork?
SKAdNetwork is a library provided as part of iOS to help marketers attribute marketing in a privacy-safe way.
Apple’s been working on it for some time. Thankfully, we’ve also been working on how to support it for over a year now. But in iOS 14, Apple has given SKAdNetwork some major renovations that made it a whole lot more useful and usable. And it definitely feels like Apple listened to us and other marketers in the Mobile Attribution Privacy Coalition who spent time analyzing its strengths and weaknesses.
The key concept in SKAdNetwork is that the iOS operating system will now play a central role in facilitating marketing attribution.
If SKAdNetwork is enabled in an app, the App Store will now receive attribution parameters when it’s opened due to a click on an ad. Then, if this click results in a conversion — an app download — iOS itself will send a postback accompanied by those attribution parameters.
(And, potentially, some important post-install conversion data, which we’ll cover later.)
This may sound somewhat similar to Google’s Play Referral mechanism, but what makes SKAdNetwork privacy-preserving is the fact that the attribution parameters cannot contain any device IDs or personally-identifying information. In addition, the install postback is sent by the operating system itself, and not by the installed app. As such advertisers will know that an install has happened, but they won’t be able to connect a specific install with a specific device, thus preserving privacy.
SKAdNetwork 1.0 was initially released over two years ago, and it offered very limited granularity plus no support for post-install measurements, making it practically unusable for optimization purposes.
The good news is that in SKAdNetwork 2.0, Apple added “publisher-app” granularity. In other words, marketers can now get data on which publisher drove which install. That’s critical: now we can provide publisher-level insights to marketers. In addition, Apple also added limited support for post-install tracking with their new updateConversionValue and registerAppForAdNetworkAttribution methods.
A high level flow looks like this:
What does this mean for marketers?
Currently, marketers have two main sources of data for measuring marketing campaigns:
From MMPs: metrics on installs and post-install cohorted metrics
From ad networks: metrics on impressions, clicks, video-views, spend
As things currently stand, Singular combines those two datasets together. Then marketers can get both granular and high-level insights on the results of their marketing investments. With those insights, they can optimize acquisition and retargeting campaigns, test new networks, and more.
With iOS 14, everything changes.
For starters, the data flow for mobile app attributions will change. Instead of apps sending postbacks to Singular, now Apple will be sending install postbacks to ad networks whose ads caused the app install. These postbacks include information about the install that is cryptographically signed by Apple, and can be verified using Apple’s public key.
Another key issue with iOS 14: measuring post-install activity. SKAdNetwork includes functionality for an app to send a small amount of post-install conversion data back to the ad networks, but this is limited in both scope and timing. (More details on this shortly in our next post.)
There’s a significant positive here, by the way. In iOS 14, Apple vouches for app installs, which dramatically reduces the likelihood of ad fraud.
All of this means major change for marketers. Whereas previously MMPs collected all the data they needed, now iOS advertisers will need to collect all install postbacks (and any post-install conversion data) from every ad network they run campaigns with. Plus, advertisers will need to validate these postbacks, store them, translate the attribution parameters to human readable data, and then connect it to campaign spend data to determine return on ad spend. Oh, and the closer you can do it real-time, the better you can be at optimizing your future ad spend.
That’s exactly where Singular comes in.
Singular’s solution: making SKAdNetwork simple and scalable
Singular is the leader in aggregating data from thousands of data sources. We collect more data from more sources in more ways than anyone else, which we then standardize, aggregate, and present. And that’s perfectly aligned with our MMP attribution product, which has gained incredible momentum in the last two years with many of the world’s best brands switching from legacy MMPs to Singular as a unified aggregation and attribution solution.
Our primary advantage as a platform becomes even stronger in this new SKAdNetwork reality.
We already are by far the best in the world in gathering full data sets from every single channel. After all, that’s our core strength. In supporting SKAdNetwork, we will be adding the role of collecting the various Apple-generated postbacks from all of your ad network partners. We’ll then verify them, de-dupe them, parse them, and connect them to your ad spend to report on ROI.
And Singular will still help you achieve publisher-level granularity for marketing reporting (what some in the industry have called sub-publisher granularity).
Plus, of course, the SKAdNetwork stack will have to work side by side with the existing MMP capabilities of the Singular stack, including continued support for:
iOS fingerprinting (adhering to any Apple updates)
Spend and ROAS reporting (critical for marketing optimization)
SKAdNetwork is going to introduce new challenges and complexities. There’s no doubt about that. However, we commit to helping you navigate these challenges.
And we will ensure you have the ability to do your job … while preserving user privacy.
Today at WWDC 2020, Apple announced several new privacy enhancements in iOS14 that will debut in September. We’ve been long anticipating these changes, and have been working to prepare for this since our announcement a year ago on the formation of the Mobile Attribution Privacy group. (See more details here, and join the Slack group here).
The good news for consumers: more privacy.
The good news for marketers: it’s not game over for data-driven marketing.
Some of the changes to Apple’s SKAdNetwork framework are extremely promising. Apple’s SKAdNetwork improvements suggest that not only are they listening to what app publishers need, but that we will still be able to provide tools for sophisticated marketers.
In addition, Singular has a number of upcoming privacy-preserving solutions that we will announce shortly.
Opt-In for IDFA
Starting with iOS 14, apps will need to receive permission from users in order to use the Identifier for Advertisers, the IDFA. To be clear, this is explicitly granting permission to track users across apps and services.
Straight from the documentation:
“Your app needs to request permission to track sometime before tracking occurs. This could be at first launch or when certain app features are used. For example, when signing on with a third-party SSO.”
Looking at the documentation for iOS 14, we can confirm that when the “Ask App Not To Track” button is clicked, the app will not be able to access the device’s IDFA, and receive the same value as if the Limit Ad Tracking mechanism is turned on. In short, until a user grants authorization, all identifiers will be zeroed out.
One piece of good news if you want to use the IDFA and believe it’s something that your users will want?
The message will be customizable. “App developers need to provide custom text, known as a usage description string, which is displayed as a system-permission alert request,” Apple’s documentation says.
That means you’ll be able to make the case to your users that opting in is a good thing for them.
Let’s be frank, however.
The vast majority of people who see a message like the above are not going to opt in. When they see that a publisher wants permission to track them across apps and websites owned by other companies … forget about it.
So you’re going to have to be ready to live without IDFAs.
Checking for IDFA status
Apple is deprecating the isAdvertisingTrackingEnabled function. In order to check if a user has actually enabled measurement, developers will need to check the AppTrackingTransparency framework.
Changes to SKAdNetwork
Apple has also made multiple changes to SKAdNetwork, the class that validates advertiser-driven app installations. We’re going to go in-depth on this in a follow-up blog post tomorrow — and a webinar — but here’s the quick overview:
Apple added timers, which likely means that the conversion notification won’t be immediate. This is probably a privacy-enhancing move.
Apple added a mechanism to update a conversion value. This may be an initial method to attach limited post-install KPIs to the conversion notification, which of course is crucial for optimizations.
Apple added Redownload/Reinstall support, which is always nice to know.
Apple added Source App ID to recognize the publishing app (this is huge because we can now facilitate publisher-level granularity).
There are quite a few more changes, but we’ll continue researching them and update on those later in our in-depth follow-up post.
Finally: new App Privacy section
Later this year, your app’s App Store product pages will start to feature summaries of your self-reported privacy practices, plus a link to your privacy policy. That includes both data gather via the app that is used to track users elsewhere plus data that publishers might access outside the app and link to users’ profiles in the app. Example: purchases, web browsing history, location data, and other demographic information.
Who says working mothers in tech can’t find the perfect work-life balance?
Unfortunately, that was the word on the street—or more accurately, among my friends at tech companies—when I mentioned I wanted to return to work at 20% time after having my second child, Talya.
The First Maternity Leave
A bit of background: In one of the first posts on my personal blog, I discussed returning to work after maternity leave for Gaya, my eldest.
You’d think I wouldn’t worry about a second maternity leave. However, with Gaya, I was working in a global, relatively slow-moving corporation. By the time I had Talya, I was at Singular, an innovative startup in hyper-growth. Being away for half a year is an eternity in Singular terms. I knew what I was leaving but had no idea what would happen when I came back.
On top of that, most of my current colleagues aren’t parents. Very few are mothers of small children. Although this is gradually changing at the company, I often feel the difference—I have non-standard working hours and late meetings, and engage less in office small talk.
Enter Baby No. 2
Over the two years I’d been at Singular, we always found a way to make things work for me and the company. We were flexible and creative and just made it happen.
And yet—when I shared the news about my pregnancy, I was still insecure. All my concerns came back: What would the reaction be? Would it affect my advancement? How would we ramp my work back up when I returned?
But hey…
There was actually nothing to stress about. Everything had worked out so far, and I was sure it would again. I already knew the culture. There was simply no reason giving birth again would have a work impact. Still, I couldn’t shake my anxieties around it. (I also wrote about it on my blog.)
Striking a Post-Maternity Balance
When I was on maternity leave with Gaya, I didn’t really disconnect. I kept track of major developments in the office and with clients. This made it much easier to return to full-time work.
This time, I thought it’d be great to come back to work gradually, instead of being so plugged-in while trying to care for a newborn.
Instead of going from zero to 200%, it seemed wiser to ramp back up slowly—starting part-time, a few hours a day, a few days a week.
As I explained to the company, this way I’d be there for Talya in her first months while keeping up with company business.
To my pleasant surprise, Singular said yes.
I still had some concerns and reasons to hesitate. But, I was optimistic and hoped we could really make it work.
Ready, Set…Work
The thing is, I wasn’t ready to go back to work at all. Things at home were too hectic, and my every thought centered on my children and my family.
Despite all of this, Singular management was extremely supportive. They understood the changes my family was going through, and didn’t pressure me to come back.
After four or five months, things suddenly shifted for me. I thought about work—I figured I could start in a 20%-time position, and after a set period of time, I’d go back to full-time.
I suggested to the company that during the part-time period, I’d do anything to help the team, such as admin or back office.
I set low expectations, knowing no one had done this before—only two female employees had come back in a full-time capacity after three months. I hoped for the best.
Thankfully, my initial, little idea became a big breakthrough for me and my family. The company not only accepted my terms—my managers thought out of the box and created a special project tailored to me, where I could use my skills, increase my value, and help my team (way to go!).
As I started working part-time, I realized how much our product had changed, and I was delighted to have an easy restart. Talya was getting used to her new nanny. (Plus a special thanks to my mother, who took care of Talya while I was away and helped me out a lot.)
On Singular’s side, it meant I came back earlier than planned.
Most importantly, it signaled to all other female employees that Singular welcomes mothers and supports a flexible framework for coming back from maternity leave.
This was a pure win-win.
An Added Bonus
Now, about breastfeeding and pumping—breastfeeding is super important to me. But I hate pumping so much! I can’t stand the noise, the mess, and sitting there waiting for the bottle to fill.
When I went back to work after having Gaya, I refused to pump. The second time around, it’s been different because we have a nursing room. It’s a nice, cozy, private little space, with a small refrigerator and a sofa, that gives me all the privacy and intimacy I need for pumping. Pumping at work isn’t so bad anymore.
A Modern and Sympathetic Workplace
This is the organizational culture I always go on about. I’ve written about the major role that corporate culture plays for me. As a mother of two small children, the unfortunate truth is that wanting to work is not enough. I have to belong to a company that understands me and accepts me as a mother. A company with a flexible mindset that allows me to maneuver according to my needs. I’m thrilled Singular is here for me and grows just like its loyal employees do. No wonder our turnover rate is one of the lowest in the industry.
And I grew, too. I now know when stresses are mostly mine and when they’re unwarranted, even if I still don’t understand the source of the stress itself—why was I so afraid? Is it all just me? Am I hypercritical of myself because I think of pregnancy and birth as obstacles to a career? Or is it because I feel my needs as a mother are special in the office and require unique adjustments?
No matter what stories and speculations I hear, I can trust myself more now. I know that I started by carefully choosing a company with a great culture, and that there’s no reason why things would be different with a family-changing event like birth. Singular chose me very carefully for the skills, knowledge, and experience I contribute, and provided me with the flexibility I needed to maintain a strong work/motherhood balance. That’s a great way of solidifying an already solid commitment to one’s work, team, and company.
We’re excited to announce we’ve achieved Amazon Web Services (AWS) Retail Competency status. So what exactly does that mean? As an AWS Retail Competency Partner, we’ve demonstrated technical expertise and proven success with our retail customers including StitchFix, Wish, Warby Parker, Minted, Souq, Atom Tickets, Snapdeal, Tophatter, plus several other Fortune 500 brands (we can’t list publicly).
Singular is built to provide a single source of truth for marketing performance – a challenge marketers & BI teams everywhere desperately need to solve for with today’s complex ecosystem. We simplify marketing data by automatically combining your most important datasets including marketing campaign data, user-behavior/attribution data and BI data for accurate insights needed to grow at scale. As experts in AWS technologies and as a certified Advanced Technology Partner in the AWS Partner Network (APN), we consult our customers on how to build advanced marketing tech stacks. We’ve become the de facto solution to power the internal BI of the top growth marketing teams in the world.
Check out some recent resources on how we’re helping retail brands:
“We’re excited to have achieved the AWS Retail Competency,” Eran Friedman, our CTO & Co-founder reflects. “Our team has been dedicated to helping growth teams of top global brands scale their businesses by better leveraging their marketing data, which is especially important for retail companies where customer engagement is a critical component of their overall strategy. And with the agility, breadth of services and pace of innovation that AWS provides, we’ve been able to make marketing data more accessible than ever to BI teams.”
AWS enables scalable, flexible, and cost-effective solutions for startups to global enterprises. To support the seamless integration and deployment of these, AWS established theAWS Competency Program to help customers identify Technology APN Partners with deep industry experience and expertise.
Our retail customers see huge returns after investing in Singular to streamline their growth marketing data. South Korea’s largest retail app,Home & Shopping, saw a 73% increase in ROI after Singular automatically collected and unified campaign data from 30+ sources with our native attribution to understand and optimize marketing performance.
With Singular, Home & Shopping sees 73% increase in ROI
I was recently speaking at a mobile marketing conference in San Francisco and saw a competitor’s booth.
In the booth, the competitor showed the relative market share of the various mobile attribution providers. Predictably, theirs was highest. Other players didn’t show very well, and Singular was one of them.
I loved it. Because they don’t understand what we do.
Playing a different game
Mobile Attribution is a very critical piece in a much larger puzzle.
That’s why we acquired an MMP, re-architected it as part of a holistic solution instead of a point solution, and that’s why we are winning over a massive number of tier one customers.
In fact, Singular has more customers, bar none, in the top 100 grossing apps on Android and the top 100 grossing apps on iOS than any of our competitors. 46% of the top 100 grossing iOS apps are Singular customers (and 50% of the top 50) and 46% of the top 100 grossing Android apps are Singular customers (and 50% of the top 50).
That’s because we offer something different.
Something bigger.
Singular is a marketing intelligence platform. Our mission is to provide actionable insights to our customers, the best scientific marketers in the world.
We do that by solving the massive problem of data explosion and fragmentation in the marketing ecosystem across mobile, web, TV, offline, as well as paid, email, push, organic and any other form of marketing. We go beyond the confines of mobile advertising and mobile attribution, and are the only single pane of glass for all your marketing activity.
Every company in the world needs this.
Looking to the future
Today, we unify the biggest spectrum of more than 2,000 marketing technologies. And it’s just the beginning.
For us what matters is having the best North Star. And that is the top customers. In every market, the top companies are a constant source of envy and imitation by the up-and-comers and smaller companies.
Since our launch in 2014, and up until this very moment of me typing this, these top customers are the strongest source of influence on our roadmap. That, combined with our vision, is helping us move forward.
We’ve got a lot in the kitchen. You’re going to start hearing more about it in January. Our vision is huge, and we’re well capitalized to make it happen.
For our amazing Singular customers, our sole mission is to be a great, innovative partner that will always put you two steps ahead of the competition. Accept nothing but relentless drive to serve, topped with the whipping cream of world-class innovation.
