Author: John Koetsier

Facebook deprecated Advanced Mobile Measurement. Tiktok deprecated advertiser accessibility to user-level impression data. While MMPs like Singular still have access to view-through attribution on TikTok and device-level install measurement data on Facebook, tightening privacy controls means only aggregated and privacy-safe summaries can be released to advertisers.

What does that mean for the future of mobile marketing?

The answers are here, in our recent webinar.

More questions about Facebook, TikTok, and marketing data

But there were some more questions about Facebook and TikTok, marketing data, and what this all means for the future of marketing measurement. As usual, we answered as many as we could during the webinar, and had a few left over.

Here they are, with answers:

Other channels?

Q: Do you think this shift with providing less info to marketers will force marketers to explore other platforms including broadcast, radio, etc. Social is going to become increasingly challenging …

How do you see the evolution of contextual with in app? Or is it just a buzzword?

A: Yes, I think marketers will broaden their reach and channel selection. We’ve seen it already with mid-tier ad networks. But let’s be real: Facebook and Google and the other self-attributing networks are 75% of mobile user acquisition spend, and that’s not going away anytime soon.

Also, on contextual advertising: it works incredibly well in some verticals. Gaming is one that stands out for me. I don’t think this is just a buzzword, and I do think it will get increasingly important. The downside: targeting whales will be harder.

Is the sky falling?

Q: Moving forward in an ecosystem without user level data, how do you see publishers assessing campaign performance?

A: First off, we still have device-level data on Android. We still have device-level data for about 20% of iOS. And we still have deterministic data in SKAdNetwork (yes, aggregated data, but still deterministic). Plus there are all kinds of probabilistic methodologies that mobile marketers are going to have to learn: incrementality, MMM, etc.

To get a good primer on where Singular sees this going, check out this article on post-IDFA user acquisition by Singular’s CGO Ron Konigsberg as well as my post on Google “killing” last-click attribution.

Social, I’m outta here

Q: Would you suggest that marketers shift from social altogether and shift to SEM and/or native? We have seen an 80-85% drop in revenue and number of transactions for some of our clients and some are doing the same or better from when before the iOS update was implemented.

A: We’ve seen some of those massive swings. Typically what we’ve seen is massive dips in campaign effectiveness that turn out to be artifacts of applying yesterday’s measurement methodology on today’s mobile advertising mechanics. In other words, if you’re using an IDFA growth stack under SKAdNetwork, it’ll look like the roof caved in.

You must, must, must adapt to the new realities.

That said, if the drop is real and not just perceived, that may be due to a severe impairment of the biggest channels’ ability to find whales specifically or payers in general. Give them some time: they are working through change just like you.

And, consider how you can use SKAdNetwork and day-one predictive insights to approach your former efficiencies.

Trust the process?

Q:In light of the Facebook changes, and their driving ad buyers into utilizing automated app ads, what’s the recommendation on running/scaling budget toward Automated App Ads versus a more granular, fully segmented approach?

A:Remember the first months of Google’s algorithm-driven mobile app install campaigns? Remember how much $$$ you needed to train Google’s ad-to-prospect matching AI?

First, give them some time. I do think they’ll figure it out. Second, if you’re going to use the giant platforms, I would assume they know more than you and let them stir, mix, and add the ingredients themselves. (Also, make your campaigns too granular and you’ll lose too much data to SKAdNetwork privacy cutoffs.)

That said, if you’re Rovio or another big team with massive data science and incredible BI, give it a shot.

Everything is crashing to the ground?

Q: So will MMPs not be able to disambiguate conversions between sources eventually? Will there be pools of overlapping conversions between sources? What will the role of MMPs be in this landscape?

A: MMPs are still able to disambiguate sources. And get access to a ton of granular data they cannot contractually share with advertisers. MMPs will not only start using multiple models to generate a better picture of reality; they’ll also need to be able to allow advertisers to run models in the MMP’s cloud to generate insights based on data that can’t be shared, and then export the resulting insights back to advertisers’ BI systems.

For more detail on what that might look like, check out Singular CEO Gadi Eliashiv’s blog post on exactly that topic.

Be specific, please

Q: When you say “We can’t share the device-level data, but we can share measurement insights derived — at least partially — from it …” what are the insights that will still be available?

A: Check out that blog post I linked to in the question above, specifically the section titled “How you can still do granular analysis.”

What’s the impact?

Q:What is the impact on small/medium-sized advertisers and publishers? Do you think it will be more difficult for them to acquire sales or generate revenue?

A: Larger advertisers can certainly use more campaigns via SKAdNetwork-based measurement, because they can feed enough volume into each to avoid privacy censorship levels from destroying their ability to optimize. But we also see plenty of smaller players being super-nimble in web-based acquisition flows that are much cheaper than in-app ad flows, and offer some other measurement advantages as well.

Web-to-App-Store flows

Q: Instead of sending users directly to the App/Play Store, could directing users to a first-party website and using MMP tracking links solve this hole?

A: That’s certainly an option. You might (see above in #7) try models that originate on the web as well, but there’s plenty of in-app inventory that you’d want to access, of course. Going app to web to app is an extra hop, but could enable a sign-up phase or a more detailed introduction to your app which could result in higher-value users/customers making it all the way through the funnel.

So it’s all one big melting pot now, huh?

Q: How will you measure the performance of a TikTok campaign vs Facebook in the future? If the data is in “one pot?”

A: It’s not in one pot. Sources are still very distinct — there are lots of pots — and there’s additional data about conversions and performance within each source. The changes just mean there’s a little less granularity in each pot.

Aggregation and consolidation

Q:Do you see data aggregators starting to offer media buying? or vice versa? Through acquisition of teams or growing their own?

A: Hmmm … you wouldn’t mean like Applovin acquiring Adjust, or InMobi acquiring Appsumer, would you?

First-party data

Q: What are the opt-in rates currently being observed for getting access to FPD?

A: It really, really, really depends on what kind of first-party data you’re referring to. If you’re talking IDFA, it’s about 20%. For more on first-party data, check out this iOS 15 app marketing webinar.

Top funnel versus bottom funnel

Q: Engagement with creative doesn’t necessarily correlate with conversions or ROAS … with this in mind, why the emphasis on changing the way we develop creative? Will creative benefit from being made for more broad audiences?

A: Good creative gets attention. Bad creative does not. After that, there are two questions. First, did you get the right kind of attention, and second, what are you going to do with that attention? High CTR is good, but if it’s the wrong kind of attention, it won’t hit your bottom line. Bad CTR is irredeemably bad … unless the one in a thousand person who clicks on it also becomes a whale.

More questions? More answers …

There are always more questions.

If you have more that are not answered here or in the webinar (check it out here) then there’s a good time and place to get them: in a demo with some of our experts.

Book some time here.

Most lists of influencers in mobile marketing completely suck.

That’s true of influencer lists and rankings in most topic areas, frankly.

They’re based on lists of people someone has taken from Buzzsumo or Klear or Upfluence, which too often find drones who might have some skill at SEO and hashtags but don’t really drive conversation, thinking, or actual action. Sometimes, the influencers you get back are not even remotely related to the topics you search for. I searched for “mobile advertising” on NinjaOutreach, and got Vlad and Niki, “the highest rated kids channel on YouTube,” Fail Army, CollegeHumor, and Supercell’s Brawl Stars.

So Ninja, right?

Even when the influencer search engines work, they fail. Buzzsumo, for instance, told me a website with no articles since 2018 was top-ten influential in mobile advertising. I and everyone else dealing with iOS 14.5 beg to differ.

Generally speaking: the tools come back with lists of people who don’t influence change. Who don’t inspire action. Who don’t answer questions. Who don’t drive the conversation.

In other words … who aren’t really influencers.

 

That’s not what this list of mobile influencers is

This list is my personal — and my friends and colleagues — list of people who are truly influential in mobile marketing, in mobile advertising, in mobile user acquisition.

They’re probably people that if you called them an influencer to their face would punch you in the nose. They might be people with almost no social footprint who share their insight in industry Slack channels. And they might be people you’ve never heard of.

But they are people I find interesting, insightful, influential.

In most cases, I’ve talked with them or interviewed them. In some cases, we’ve met multiple times in person. In other cases, we’ve communicated entirely digitally. In all, however, I’ve found them to be smart, impressive, creative, interesting people in mobile marketing and mobile advertising. To get their insight, you might need to be in Slack channels like Mobile Attribution Privacy, or in webinars, or in Twitter/Facebook/LinkedIn DMs.

But once you get it, you value it.

Of course, my list is incomplete. Help me grow it: if you know someone else who should be here, don’t be silent. Tell me, and I’ll do my best to let everyone know.

I’ve listed them in four categories:

• Creators
• Connectors
• Thinkers
• Kingpins

 

Creators

These influencers are in the mobile advertising trenches now. They invent, create, build, MacGyver crazy-smart solutions for our constantly changing tech environments, and DO.

Jayne Peressini
“Most badass mobile marketer, period” Jayne has been at DraftKings, EA, and Gala Games. She’s now at Dapper Labs growing games, NFTs, and blockchain. Smart, opinionated, unafraid to share, and far too giving of her time for the benefit of others. Great humor, smart hot takes, and a take-no-prisoners attitude. Superpower: eating snacks while intrepidly dropping knowledge on webinars.
Claire Rozain
“French Connection” Claire is super nice, super sweet, super generous, and super smart. She’s been at Match, led user acquisition at Product Madness, spent time at Gameloft, and is now a UA team lead at Rovio. Translation: she’s been places, and she’s going places. Superpower: you literally can’t stop listening to her soft French accent while she drops insights on webinars.
Rose Agozzino
“Marketing wizard” Harry Potter has nothing on Rose (yep, she’s got “marketing wizard” in her LinkedIn bio; I didn’t just make it up). She has worked her way up through multiple roles to marketing manager at Ludia, managing user acquisition for games like Jurassic World, Dragons: Rise of Berk, and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Superpower: unassuming but deeply knowledgable.
Gabe Kwakyi
“Jack of all trades, master of most” There is something super-valuable in people who have seen/built/grown/analyzed mobile user acquisition and mobile marketing at literally dozens if not hundreds of startups and enterprises, and that’s Gabe. Super smart, super analytical, he knows data, ASO, paid acquisition, organic growth … and how to grow his own company. Now with Phiture, growing mobile growth expertise in the U.S. Superpower: has been there, done that, knows how to do it better in the future.
Thomas Hopkins
“T.hop” Nothing may be certain in life but you are almost guaranteed to enjoy a conversation with Thomas, generally from his home office: an Airstream parked out in the back yard. Thomas is a serial founder and marketing leader. He led UA at RockYou and Rocket Games, managed a Lyft division, ran performance and lifecycle marketing at MasterClass, founded a teach-and-share startup, and is now consulting. Superpower: has been there, done that, knows how to do it better in the future.
Annica Lin
“Fitter than you” Annica has humor and chutzpah in equal proportions, and she uses both in conversation, webinars, and work. From marketing intern to VP of growth marketing, Annica has done it all. She’s led marketing at Stash and Thimble, and is now at Sable. And she does it all while running marathons and lifting weights, hopefully not at the same time. Superpower: she will beat you up, then outrun you … all while teaching you how to do your job better.
Lomit Patel
“Eats challenges for lunch” Best-selling book on AI? Check. 30K followers on LinkedIn? Check. Multiple SVP roles at companies like IMVU and Together Labs? Check. Contributing writer at ClickZ? Check. Clearly this dude has a clone, but both have a sense of humor to go with an insatiable appetite for accomplishment. Superpower: what, I can only have one?
Drew Frost
“Billion-dollar business badass” Do you need to be with a we-don’t-have-old-fashioned-things-like-offices startup or unicorn gaming company to really, really get it in mobile marketing? Check out Drew, and the answer is obviously no. While the rest of us are building million-dollar, maybe even billion-dollar businesses, Drew’s leading product and growth marketing for Sam’s Club, part of the yes-we-do-half-a-trillion-in-revenue-annually Walmart empire. Superpower: ridiculous amount of brain power. Probably illegal, in fact.
Patrick Stal
“The analytical CMO” Some CMOs can’t wait to do a rebrand. Must have a new logo. Are dreaming of new colors and brand expressions. Patrick’s got the logo and colors (check!) but he’s much more focused on relentlessly attacking the metrics that make his company grow. Formerly at Uber and TomTom, now VP of global marketing at fintech leader N26. Superpower: focus, focus, focus on the customer.
Jon Hook
“Smart money” Some money is dumb. But Jon has not only been an investor through 5-6 roles, he’s the former chief revenue officer for Homa Games. He’s now at BoomBit and BoomHits, which I can never keep apart but which (I think) basically make mobile games go boom (in a good way, hopefully). Superpower: knows what makes mobile games explode (this is a good thing).
Thomas Petit
“Works on more apps than you” Yet another French mobile growth expert, Thomas lives and works in Mallorca, which is already enough to make anyone insanely jealous. But he’s also super-connected and super-informed, and — like Gabe Kwakyi, has worked on SO. MANY. APPS that he has an amazing sense of what will work and what won’t. Thomas has an abiding distaste for monopolies and monopolistic power and the way some of the major platforms through their weight around, and runs his own consultancy for seemingly half of the interesting companies in mobile. Superpower: way more logos in his portfolio of clients than yours.
Matej Lancaric
“Spent 25 million Euros profitably” Budgets in mobile marketing are big, but there are a lot more mobile growth experts who spend $250,000/year than millions. Matej has spent over 25 million Euros for 26 games in just eight years (!!!). And apparently … that was profitable ad spend. That’s a bit of a wow. One of the few on this list who I haven’t met or spoken to personally, he’s personally recommended by people I trust. Matej runs his own mobile growth consultancy. Superpower: clearly, making it rain.
Warren Woodward
“Rock and roll” Warren’s been in the band. Now he is the band. Look: I have moderated hundreds of webinars. And let’s be honest … your average expert drones on for about 175% of the time needed to convey his or her idea. Or answers questions better left to a different expert. Warren a) knows his stuff, b) condenses it marvelously, c) delivers it concisely … all while being pleasant and professional. Warren is the co-founder and chief growth officer at Upptic, but I bet he still jams a bit here and there. Superpower: clear, concise, information-dense communication.
Ido Naim
“The real deal” Sometimes you chat with someone and you just know immediately … this person gets it. Knows his stuff. Or is an expert in her field. That’s Ido, times 10. The amazing thing about Ido, who is a great webinar guest by the way, is that he’s super smart and analytical and data-driven, but also has a massive appreciation for the creative, je-ne-sais-quoi parts of marketing that don’t show up on a spreadsheet or in your BI system but … still make a massive difference. Superpower: Data and heart.

 

Connectors

These mobile marketing influencers connect people. Talk to people. Make people blow up in the media, or feature them on podcasts.

Seb Joseph
“Unusually clueful” Look, most journalists don’t get marketing or advertising at any deep level. I once spent literally 70 minutes on the phone with an Ad Age reporter who used literally nothing from the interview … because they just couldn’t understand SKAdNetwork. That is not Seb Joseph. Seb has written some of the most insightful commentary on privacy and mobile user acquisition that you can find outside of the thinker category (coming below). Super-smart, he’s been at Marketing Week, The Drum, and is now an editor at Digiday. Superpower: a brands person who gets tech
Peggy Anne Salz
“My rolodex is bigger than yours” Okay, I know I’m dating myself with the “rolodex” thing, but in my defense, I never had one either. In any case, if we actually had these things that measured the sizes of our networks, Peggy’s would be massive. No desk could contain it. I’m biased because I work with Peggy on a bunch of video podcasts, but if there’s someone interesting in mobile or marketing … she probably knows them. Or knows someone who knows them. Superpower: aggressively but somehow sweetly persistent. If Peggy wants something from you, she’s gonna get it. (Hint: save yourself some trouble, just give it to her right away.)
Shamanth Rao
“Rocket Man” Shamanth interviews people, obviously, on his Mobile User Acquisition show, but he’s also a good interview when you have him on yours. And Shamanth runs Rocketship HQ, leveraging his experience from Zynga and InMobi and FreshPlanet and multiple other companies to help mobile app companies grow faster. Superpower: connector, cheerleader, learner, sharer. (Wait, that might be too many.)
Dean Takahashi
“Dean the Machine” Forever known to insiders as Dean the Machine for the frequency with which he churns out 10-story days at GamesBeat and VentureBeat, Dean’s first love is games. That love has led him to often write about the business of games, and how games grow. Boom: Dean’s in the mobile user acquisition world. He has appeared in cosplay on-stage at in-person pre-COVID conferences as game characters, and has a very, very big heart. He’s also a pretty bloody good writer and games journalist. Superpower: words flow from Dean’s fingers like rain in Seattle.
Allison Schiff
“Quiet genius” The club of clueful mobile marketing journalists is very, very small. But Allison is a charter member. She takes the time to understand, get the real deal, and present it factually and insightfully. Allison is also a ridiculously nice person (I’m tempted to make her an honorary Canadian) who doesn’t let that innate kindness block her from asking the tough questions and excavating the excrement, metaphorically speaking, when she meets PR-speak obfuscation. Superpower: actually answers her email. (Allison … how?!?)
Susan Kuo
“Passionate perfectionist … and a people person” Exec of a company acquired by Facebook? Yup. Former head of marketing for InMobi? Sure. VP of sales for multiple tech companies? Uh-huh. Founder and COO of a successful marketing measurement company (shhh … it’s Singular) … also check. Susan is a major connector and benefactor for women in tech, but if you want her insight, you’ll be very lucky to get it on a webinar or at a conference. One on one or more intimate groups is where Susan shares her insight much more frequently. Superpower: sweating the details and getting it right.

 

Thinkers

These influencers ran marketing for major companies in the past. Or they lead teams with deep expertise currently. Now they consult, think deeply, and share insight freely.

Andrew Chen
“The mastermind” 300,000+ followers on LinkedIn, one of the most influential newsletters on growth, a new book out on the biggest problem for network effect companies (starting)? Andrew’s got all of that, and more. He led Uber’s most important growth team, is a partner at the hottest VC over the past decade, Andreessen Horowitz, and one of the most strategic thinkers on growth globally. Superpower: Big brain, creative thinker, super connected
Eric Seufert
“Dr Evil” Eric is not evil. (I mean, just look at that smile.) But like Dr Evil, his tentacles extend everywhere. Founder of MobileDevMemo, the website and Slack channel for mobile growth professionals, Eric sees everything that happens in mobile and growth and analyzes, reports, and consults on it with the wisdom and perspective you’d expect from someone who led growth at Rovio. Which is why private equity firms hire him to guide their acquisition efforts. Superpower: Spidey senses triggered by the highest-value collective of mobile growth talent anywhere … all feeding data into a big brain. Plus the ability to aggregate and synthesize that data, and ultimately express the resulting knowledge with clarity.
Alex Bauer
“Janus … AKA TwoFace” Much like the ancient Roman god Janus who had two faces and could look in all directions, Alex sees a lot. Thanks to his previous roles in consulting and growth, as well as his time as a developer advocate, he’s able to bring a ton of perspective and insight to his current gig as head of product marketing and strategy for Branch. Then he shares that data generously with all who ask on Slack or in webinars or on LinkedIn. Superpower: X-ray data.
Andreas Naumann
“Scourge of cheaters” The monk look is relatively new, but this monk is wired. Andreas has a very deep understanding on inauthentic traffic, fake clicks, fraudulent installs, and everything associated with cheating honest marketers out of their all-too-small budgets. Currently director of fraud prevention at Adjust, Andreas has been at Glispa, Trademob, and Zanox and — who knew — was a bartender back in the day. (There is a little Friar Tuck to him, no?) Superpower: Sherlock Holmesian powers of analysis and deduction.
Raja Rajamannar
“Quantum of Solace” CMO of Mastercard, huh? It doesn’t get much higher level than that. But Raja is shockingly down-to-earth and easy to talk to … even though he’s not just a super-successful chief marketing officer but also the Wall Street Journal best-selling author of Quantum Marketing. Not, it’s not about quantum computing. It’s about the next generation of marketing as we are all bombarded by almost two dozen new kinds of technologies that are coming at us. Superpower: a big heart to go along with all that insight.
Andy Carvell
“Father of the mobile growth stack” A lot of people have many claims to fame in mobile marketing. Few are the originators of an iconic image like the mobile growth stack. And, few can speak as graciously and insightfully as Andy on the mechanics and drivers of mobile user acquisition. Currently co-founder and partner at Phiture — which just expanded to the U.S. — he led growth and retention at SoundCloud, has his MBA, and led product or marketing Infospace, LikedBy, and other companies. And, like Eric Seufert, he’s got dev chops too, with prior roles in game development. Superpower: Synthesizing data into insight.

 

Kingpins

Kingpins are those who are owners, execs, movers and shakers who see the entire space, understand the massive shifts, and —- occasionally — share their insight for others.

Offer Yehudai
“Prime mover” Besides having the perfect name for a marketer, Offer has been embedded in mobile marketing for so long and with such great vantage points, he sees moves before they happen. Consolidation is accelerating in mobile adtech; he’s been doing that since 2017. From selling Inneractive (congrats on screwing up the world’s spellcheckers, Offer) to Fyber and then Fyber to Digital Turbine and becoming CMO of DT; Offer’s had a front-row seat on the evolution of adtech. And he hasn’t been sitting on the bench. Superpower: just a little bit faster than you at picking up trends.
Gadi Eliashiv
“Future programmer” How many CEOs still code in Python? Or contribute code to their company’s innovation efforts? Or code for fun? Answer: not many. But there is something special about companies with engineers as CEOs (perhaps Elon Musk is the best example). Gadi sees the machinations of perhaps the most technical vertical in business from a global all the way down to atomic scale, resulting in insights others can’t see and pivots in strategy, when necessary, on the proverbial dime. If the best way to predict the future is to invent it, Gadi’s got a leg up on the competition. Superpower: understanding adtech like a mechanic understands cars. Except with the ability to also drive one like Max Verstappen.
Abhay Singhal
“Pathfinder” Robert Frost saw two roads, took the least traveled one, and that made all the difference. Abhay has done something similar, helping cofound InMobi in 2006 and growing it in all kinds of unique and interesting ways in the 15 years since. An ad network with products for telcos? An ad network with a marketing cloud? An ad network that has grown as fast and as large as InMobi? All those things are unlikely, and require unusual thinking. And part of that is due to Abhay’s unique perspective on how to succeed in mobile advertising, monetization, and user acquisition. Superpower: global vision to see opportunity everywhere, not just in North America.
Sheri Bachstein
“Omniverser” Sheri’s not just the general manager of IBM Watson Advertising, she’s also the CEO of The Weather Company, which IBM owns. That’s a significant mix of responsibilities, with some overlap, which requires multi-dimensional perspectives. Good news: she’s got them. Even better news, she can communicate them — and the insights that proceed — extremely clearly. Also impressive: she’s quick, thanks partly to an early career stint as a live TV producer. Superpower: makes diamonds under pressure.
Kieran O’Leary
“The Gamer” Kieran is insane. Everyone says fail fast, but deep down, no-one actually wants to. Kieran legitimately enjoys failing and grinding and hitting his head on a metaphorical (I think) wall … as long as it ultimately leads to success. There must be some method to his madness, however: Kieran deeply understands games, product, marketing, and mobile, and he’s been super-successful wherever he goes. Confusing everyone with his Irish name and French accent, Kieran has a who’s who of global companies (especially in gaming) on his resume: Gameloft, Outfit7, Ubisoft, IBM, and of course Rovio, where he is currently the chief operating officer. Catch his insight on podcasts and webinars, and on LinkedIn, where he recently welcomed Ruby Games to the Rovio family. Err, flock. Superpower: dumbfounds everyone with rapid progression.
Adam Foroughi
“Mastermind” Imagine a conversation in the Foroughi household. “What’d you do today, honey?” Bought a company from Twitter for a billion dollars. “Oh, nice. By the way, the Joneses are coming over for dinner tonight.” Applovin is a beast. Ad network, monetization, first-party content, user acquisition, growth strategies, marketing measurement (hey, that sounds familiar), and more. Plus 200+ games, studios to develop more games, and yep, that massive acquisition of MoPub. And if Applovin is the beast, the lion tamer is Adam, who has been sharing deep insights on mobile, growth, and the ecosystem itself for more than a decade. Superpower: shocking the mobile world with massive acquisitions. Making everyone wonder … why they didn’t do that afterwards.

That’s my list. I just know I’m forgetting about 50 people, so apologies in advance.

If we know each other and I missed you, please reach through that Zoom screen and slap me. If there’s someone you know that should be on this list, let me know.

Here’s an easy way: fill out this (very brief) form.

Is last-click measurement dead?

That would appear to be the logical conclusion if you read Google VP Vidhya Srinivasan’s blog post last week. She’s the general manager of buying, analytics, and measurement for Google Ads, and her blog post was a massive shot across the bow of last-click measurement.

Of course, mobile attribution continues to be last-click. Apple’s SKAdNetwork is last click. Facebook is last click. App installs driven by Google are still … last click. With a few small exceptions, the entire mobile measurement industry is last click.

(None of which guarantees that last click is necessarily a great, amazing, foolproof model for all time and all purposes, of course.)

But despite the fact that last-click attribution is basically the default today in the wider marketing industry and to an even greater extent pretty much the only methodology that the average user acquisition specialist uses, the mobile user acquisition industry hasn’t really responded to Google’s post.

So let’s do that.

 

Google’s last-click argument: privacy, effectiveness, data

Privacy requires change, Srinivasan says:

In the face of a changing privacy landscape, marketers need new measurement approaches that meet their objectives and put users first …

Last click isn’t effective, according to her post:

As the industry continues to evolve, last-click attribution will increasingly fall short of advertisers’ needs …

The answer is data-driven attribution:

Advertisers around the world have seen better results by switching to data-driven attribution.

None of the above is particularly controversial. Despite the fact that Google has oddly contrasted last-click with data-driven attribution (is last click somehow not data-driven?) there’s probably not a lot of argument to the contentions that privacy requires changes to marketing measurement, that last-click attribution has challenges, and that there are potentially better models.

The new attribution model will become “the default attribution model for all new conversion actions in Google Ads,” Srinivasan says.

The question is: which model? What is it, really?

Google’s term “data-driven attribution” is odd: all attribution is data-driven. It’s not one of the recognized attribution models, nor is it clearly an incrementality-driven solution:

• First click attribution
• Last click attribution
• Multi-touch attribution
• Linear attribution
• Time-decay attribution

While not 100% obvious, Google’s new “data-driven attribution” appears to be a sort of mix of multi-touch attribution and modeled attribution. More touches in more places, with some AI/machine learning thrown in to make sense of it all when you don’t have cookies or IDFAs or AAIDs.

“It’s really blurry … wasn’t deterministic ‘data driven’ as well?” asks growth consultant Thomas Petit. “Modelled attribution would be more descriptive. It’s basically extrapolated attribution [with] more inputs.”

And clearly, given what Google itself is doing in mobile user acquisition measurement, this is much more about brand ads driving web visits, retail purchases, or other types of activity. Right now it’s not really about mobile app install measurement.

“For mobile first businesses (or mobile and web), the claim of death of last click attribution is premature,” says Paul Bowen, general manager of AlgoLift. “SKAN and MMP attribution are both last touch and deterministic models. Any other attribution model (e.g. MMM or data-driven attribution) are probabilistic and should be built on top of these attribution methodologies given that they are deterministic.”

 

Privacy, data, and measurement

It’s also not hard to argue that multi-touch attribution can easily be much more privacy-invasive than last click.

Last click is literally looking at one point in time, and a deliberate action taken by a person to access a resource. Multi-touch attribution by virtue of being multi-touch needs to look at more activity, from direct action like clicks to indirect activity such as ad views. In fact if you were going to achieve full marketing measurement of every single action or view on every iota of marketing effort, you’d require full awareness of what people are doing.

Talk about an invasion of privacy …

Of course, this is not what Google is suggesting. And modeling and incrementality are ways of reducing that privacy overhead.

It’s interesting that Apple’s answer to mobile attribution is SKAdNetwork. That’s privacy-safe by hiding individual action in aggregations of activity. It is also last-click, though via “loser postbacks” introduced in iOS 14.6, Apple is still providing context around a more complex user or customer journey.

From my post back in May:

Most postbacks are “winner” postbacks: a notification that your ad network’s ad impression was successful. It generated a click and the click resulted in an app install. With iOS 14.6 and SKAdNetwork 3.0, however, we got a little gift from Apple: postbacks to up to five other ad networks whose ads were seen but not clicked on, or, at least were not responsible for the app install.

So modeling is not the only possible solution when you need to solve for both privacy and marketing measurement.

And, of course, it’s not exactly simple, either.

“When I entered the market five years ago, it was more or less clear how to attribute, how to measure events,” Nakusi Games user acquisition lead Vladimir Ilchenko told me recently. “Everything should become better and better and easier and easier for marketers … but nowadays I understand that it’s vice versa.”

That’s one challenge. Another is that a solution needs to be broader than just one company or ad partner, even one as large as Google.

A solution for brands needs to be comprehensive. Not of all customer or user activity — which breaks privacy protocols — but of all channels. In other words, not just what happens in the Google ecosystem, not just what happens on Apple devices, and not just what happens in the Facebook ecosystem.

 

The attribution solution we need

Look: Google is on to something. We need more than last-click attribution for a number of different reasons, including both privacy and the fact that the journey which leads to action is much more complex than a single click.

Even if it is the last one before a purchase or important event.

And we need that, eventually, in mobile user acquisition as well as other areas of marketing measurement. Modeling is part of the answer here. But it needs to be based on privacy-safe datasets from multiple places, channels, funnel levels, and partners.

From Singular’s chief growth officer, Ron Konigsberg, on the future of mobile attribution:

That future involves building out varying views of reality and integrating them intelligently into a single source of truth. At Singular, we’re looking at marketing performance from known and aggregated spend data, from deterministic last-click measurement, from probabilistic aggregated results data, from first-party data, and from other sources. All of those have their unique perspective on what is actually happening as marketers market, whether putting dollars to work or investing in organic promotion. Each of them has value.

But then they also need to coalesce into a single source of truth to provide a simpler modeled view of reality.

That’s the attribution solution we need. It’s data-driven (thanks, Google), it’s privacy-safe (thanks, Apple), it’s comprehensive (thanks, all ad partners everywhere), and it’s going to be the best way to meld aggregate and granular and deterministic and probabilistic data together to understand the impact of marketing spend and the best options for future allocation.

It’s coming.

iOS 15 is here, and so is Private Relay, Apple’s new privacy-centric technology for the web. How is it going to affect marketing measurement and advertising?

It’s going to hit like a bomb. A soft bomb.

Let me explain …

Private Relay is iOS 15’s App Tracking Transparency

iOS 14.5 was Apple’s opening salvo for app-based privacy with App Tracking Transparency and SKAdNetwork. iOS 15 with Private Relay and Hide My Email, both available in iCloud+, is Apple’s opening salvo for web-based privacy.

“Opening salvo” are the key words in the above paragraph.

Neither iOS 14.5’s ATT nor iOS 15’s Private Relay and Hide My Email are complete and fully-finished products, frameworks, and services. All will evolve over time.

(Yes, that’s part of the “soft” in “soft bomb. But just part; keep reading.)

As marketers and advertisers know, these technologies enhance privacy at the cost of marketing measurement. But thanks to the excessive tracking and data sharing of the recent past, consumers and privacy advocates don’t really care about that price. And even, honestly, most marketers want more privacy. Private Relay achieves that by separating your requests for the stuff you want on mobile web from the place that request goes, essentially by putting in two proxy servers. The inbound proxy gets your request. The outbound proxy relays it to the server, and they shake hands on the way back with your web page or resources.

You’re invisible to the server, and even Apple doesn’t have the full end-to-end picture.

Privacy solved (maybe).

Of course, it’s only mobile web, and it’s only Safari. At least, for now.

The first big question for marketers and advertisers is: how many people will be on Private Relay? The second is: will this eventually be extended to all in-app connections to the internet?

Let’s hit the first one first.

Everyone’s going to be on Private Relay

The plain answer is: almost everyone with an iPhone.

Look, mobile Safari is pretty much the default for iOS users. If you take a peek at Statcounter’s mobile browser market share for North America, you see that Safari has about 49% share right now to Chrome’s 44%, with a few anklebiters like Samsung, Firefox, Opera, and UC Browser fighting for crumbs under the table.

While that percentage doesn’t line up perfectly with iOS market share in the U.S., Canada, and Mexico, it’s pretty close. Basically, if you use an iPhone, you use the browser that shipped with the device. (Microsoft clearly taught Apple everything it knows about default system choices.)

iPhone market share in the U.S., from Piplsay via Asymco:

So everyone’s on Safari.

But what about access to Privacy Relay and other privacy features like Hide My Email? They are premium add-ons to basic iCloud, so they’re only for paid accounts. So that will only be a few people, right? Actually, no. Not even close.

The question here is: how many people pay for iCloud+?

A lot of people. In fact, hundreds of millions of them.

“We now have more than 700 million paid subscriptions across the services on our platform, which is up more than 150 million from last year and nearly four times the number of paid subscriptions we had only four years ago,” Apple CFO Luca Maestri said in the company’s June 2021 quarterly earnings call.

Are all of those iCloud+? Probably not. There are, after all, just under 20 million people who pay for Apple TV+. And Apple has some other subscriptions, like the iPhone Upgrade Program: pay a monthly fee to always have the latest and greatest shiny new iPhone.

But most of them are.

Drop your guess wherever you wish, but to me, it looks pretty clear that literally hundreds of millions of people, and likely something near 600 million or higher pay for at least a little bit of extra iCloud space. The base price is literally 99 cents/month in the U.S., and with HD photos and 4K videos and Pro Res, basically everyone with a modern iPhone needs iCloud+.

That means almost everyone, and it almost means disproportionately the most valuable users with the most disposable income.

Sure, there are some caveats (and the bomb is soft)

Yes, it will take some time. iOS 15 will take some months to fully percolate through the iPhone userbase, and yes, right now Private Relay is in beta, is buried in settings, and needs to be turned on manually.

(Plus — you’re right — some Apple customers use Chrome or other browsers.)

Also, there are some countries Private Relay is not available in. Apple doesn’t offer Private Relay in China, Belarus, Colombia, Egypt, Kazakhstan, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Turkmenistan, Uganda, the Philippines, and Russia. (Those countries, of course, want to see what their citizens are doing digitally.)

But, just like ATT in iOS 14.5 — and don’t forget it was originally scheduled to arrive six months earlier with iOS 14 — Private Relay and other Apple privacy innovations will almost certainly be rolled out to the wider and eventually complete iOS ecosystem just about everywhere else.

And probably become opt-out rather than opt-in.

But you can basically expect most high-value iPhone owners to become less visible digitally.

That’s the soft bomb.

The bomb part is that almost everyone will be Private Relayed out of visibility. The soft part is that it will take some time. iOS 14.5 took half a year to arrive: much later than promised. The changes that iOS 15 brings for privacy — and the ones that are still coming — will be perhaps just as significant, and impact plenty of different services and parts of the online ecosystem.

So the full impact won’t be immediate. But like iOS 14.5 … those who survive it best are those who prepare for it first.

But what about in-app?

Of course, I still haven’t addressed in-app traffic. Will Apple extend Private Relay to in-app traffic?

First of all, this isn’t easy. In-app is a much bigger technical challenge at a much greater scope, simply because we spend 80% or more of our device time in apps. That’s a lot of traffic to manage, and there’s a lot of things that could break if Apple does it wrong, or if Apple’s implementation isn’t completely seamless to app developers’ code. Or the user experience could be poor, if the service isn’t globally accessible and state-of-the-art fast.

And there’s some significant cost to proxying 1.5 billion devices’ internet traffic.

So it’s not an easy yes.

But I can imagine Apple tackling it, possibly at high-value levels of iCloud+ thanks to the extra costs. And that would be a pretty significant privacy game-changer and marketing measurement milestone. Even if Apple doesn’t, however, my assumption is that Apple will change what metadata can accompany requests and potentially even scramble any metadata that it does allow to break non-privacy-compliant forms of attribution.

Time, ultimately, will tell.

What this means for marketers

This will have a number of impacts on mobile marketers and advertisers.

• Shift to SKAdNetwork
  Fingerprinting attempts are a violation of Apple’s privacy guidelines for mobile app tracking, and are getting less and less viable. More marketers are buying in to privacy-safe attribution via Apple’s SKAdNetwork framework.
• App-to-web-to-app attribution changes
  Marketers adopting web-to-app attribution to use owned properties to track users via first-party non-Apple-guidelines-covered data will have to consider if it still works. Some will move to web-based onboarding. Others will ask for a phone number or email address to send a download link to (hint: pick phone number). Others may just use it to forward anonymous traffic but use it as one more efficacy check on ad partners.
• SKAdNetwork for web
  We’ve been wondering where the SKAdNetwork functionality for web is, given how important the web can be for mobile user acquisition. While Apple’s enabled private click measurement for app-to-web measurement, it doesn’t complete the journey back to app. If Apple for privacy reasons wouldn’t want to complete the journey, it should at least provide the mobile Safari version of SKAdNetwork for web to app marketing measurement.
• More first-party data
  Expect a continuing and ongoing move to first-party data: getting it, keeping it, using it, and consolidating sources of it.

iOS 15: the webinar

Why yes, we are doing a webinar about iOS 15 and what it means for marketers and advertisers. And yes, you totally should come.

Sign up here …

Is media mix modeling the answer for mobile apps user acquisitions leaders who want to measure and optimize marketing and advertising?

Here’s the UA leader’s dream:

• Immediate, accurate marketing intelligence
• Actionable insights on channel, creatives, bids, and budgets
• Privacy-safe, Apple compliant, GDPR-happy, CCPA-OK methodologies and mechanics
• … all of which result in smart insights that generate massive growth

It’s a tall order for any methodology of marketing measurement. Can media mix modeling deliver that for mobile marketers?

Let’s dive in.

Media mix modeling is a senior citizen in marketing (not that that’s a bad thing)

There’s no really kind way to put it: media mix modeling is old.

Often referred to as marketing mix modeling, it’s been around since literally the 1950s and 1960s. Neil Borden, a professor at Harvard Business School, first coined the term marketing mix in 1949, and big brands used the concept in the emerging age of mass media to build statistical models of marketing effectiveness.

In that form, media mix modeling was effective at answering questions like these:

“If I spend $10 million on a TV campaign on the three big networks, what impact will it have on my sales of Cheerios?”

To build those answers, media mix modeling needed data: prior sales, ideally for years. Impacts on those sales. Seasonal trends. Competitive actions. Economic indicators like the consumer price index. Pricing comparisons. Availability data. Wider cultural movements, and so on. Marketing mix modeling typically used (and uses: it’s still in operation) intensive analysis of lots of data from lots of different sources over a long period of time. When it works, marketing executives get answers to the big “what if” questions like what will tossing $10 million at ABC, NBC, and CBS do to our bottom line?

This reliance on scale and history and long periods of time would seem to disqualify MMM as a methodology for the much faster-paced and lower-scale mobile user acquisition campaigns. And, indeed, when I recently talked to Adobe about their brand-new still-in-beta marketing AI-driven media mix modeling product, that suspicion seems to be accurate.

It works well: the system allowed one customer to cut ad spend by 50% while still growing 10%.

But there’s a big caveat: you need to be spending $50 million a year.

Well, some of the biggest mobile publishers are at that level, and beyond it. But certainly not the average mobile publisher. Most mobile marketers have much smaller budgets and need to know what’s going on with their $100,000/month spend or their $50,000/month budget.

Mobile marketing has been drunk on data

Let’s just be honest. Mobile advertising has been drunk on data: immediate data, accurate data, actionable data. Mobile growth professionals haven’t had to bother with pre-digital modes of marketing measurement … partly because they seemed ancient and inexact and cumbersome and expensive and slow.

But mostly because digital offered a dream: a pure and clean and bold dream of exact knowledge and perfect awareness and scientific marketing resulting in no wasted dollars.

(Fraudsters, of course, loved that dream.)

But despite challenges — and there are some beyond fraud — that dream required a level of tracking that 1960s marketers would be amazed at, if not shocked. It started with cookies on the web in 1994, continued with hard-coded device IDs on smartphones in the early 2010s, shifted to more user-controllable advertising IDs shortly thereafter, and is currently trending to largely disappear in the early to mid-2020s.

No data to gobs of data to much less data, all in about a quarter of a century.

But for the complete to-date lifespan of the mobile-first computing era until now, we’ve been in an era of data glut.

“We’ve had a data addiction in mobile,” says Brian Krebs, who runs MetricWorks and builds media mix models. “Because it has always been available.”

Hello again, media mix modeling (the times they are a-changin’)

Because those times are changing, driven by Apple, iOS 14.5, government regulation, and changing social attitudes, media mix modeling is coming back into the conversation. If you can’t get as much granular data via IDFA on iOS, and you’re wondering what might happen with AAID/GAID on Android, maybe there’s another way.

Maybe it doesn’t take a $50 million budget, and maybe it also doesn’t take as much crazy math and exogenous data about the surrounding world and competitor’s actions and economic shifts as we once thought.

If you pour in first-party data like day-of-week trends, vertical-specific trends like time of year seasonality, broad industry trends for app install frequency, plus specific-to-you events like getting featured by Google or Apple or having your game reviewed by GamesBeat or PocketGamer, that’s actually enough, says Krebs. Add to it the marketing activity for your app — spend and impressions — and you’ve got a good basis for MMM for mobile user acquisition.

You do need to vary spend from time to time — a steady-state drone makes efficacy hard to pinpoint — but that happens naturally with changing competition for impressions and availability of supply.

The reality might be that media mix modeling is better for mobile user acquisition than it is for its originally intended purpose: big, slow, spendy campaigns by massive national and global brands. And it may show incrementality better than traditional methods as well.

“It was surprising to us to be perfectly honest: MMM just works better in mobile,” Krebs says. “It’s simpler … you need fewer data points.”

But is it good enough?

What media mix modeling won’t give you

Look. A technique doesn’t have to be perfect to be useful. Anyone who thinks last-click attribution is a perfect measure of marketing performance is, frankly, delusional. And yet we’ve been largely using it for the last decade with, arguably, good effect.

Because it’s been good enough.

So the question is: is MMM good enough to drive decision-making?

Before we answer that, here’s what media mix modeling won’t provide.

Perhaps the three words that capture it best are immediacy, granularity, and clarity. Immediacy was of course the incomparable glory of the IDFA (which still exists, clearly, for 10-20% of iOS traffic) and still is the shining north star of GAID-based attribution. (It’s lacking — to an extent driven somewhat by your own decisions — in Apple’s SKAdNetwork framework, of course. You could reset the SKAN postback to as long as 7 days.)

Knowing what works as soon as possible is critical to quick optimization. Knowing what doesn’t work as soon as possible is critical to not wasting budget.

Media mix modeling for mobile doesn’t take the weeks and months it requires in the big brand consumer space. But it’s not quite as fast as a postback, either.

Granularity is similar: IDFA/GAID and even SKAdNetwork give you pinpoint precision data on a number of factors: source and campaign, a few configurable factors for SKAdNetwork, plus of course much more granular user-level data and cohorting for IDFA/GAID. There’s less data from SKAdNetwork, but smart customization and hybrid postbacks with encoded values for multiple events and/or timers can help.

MMM will provide less in each of these areas, including a little less clarity into helper networks, assists, and last touches, especially for mobile growth marketers who are accustomed to running with many different ad partners simultaneously. (Yes, you can argue that all those networks are casting hooks into the same river, and that’s true. But it’s hard to argue that all the hooks — and the bait on them — are of identical value, and are all cast into the very best parts of the river where fish congregate.)

Incrementality will also struggle with creative optimization, which of course you can address by manually limiting creative variations by campaign to see impact over time. And bids and budgets on individual platforms will be a little more opaque to MMM.

So … a hybrid model: next-gen attribution

Media mix modeling isn’t a silver bullet, someone who sells media mix modeling for mobile user acquisition teams told me. But it is useful. And, alongside an MMP, it adds context and insight.

The reality is that the age of tracking is ending.

IDFA is largely gone, fingerprinting is against Apple’s guidelines, and Google will be making some privacy changes over time as well.

So you do need next-gen attribution.

That means impressions, clicks, and costs, sure. Installs, when you can get them. Creative insights, as much as possible. Channel and partner-specific results, as available. Upper funnel data and lower funnel data. First-party data from within your own app: new users, engagement patterns, sign-ups, purchases. Bids and budgets, and normalization and standardization across all your data sources.

The reality is that it’s getting tougher out there. Last click on an advertising identifier was simple. Now, mobile growth professionals need a complete marketing data infrastructure, not just a mobile tracker. And you need that, by the way, across more than just mobile ads. There’s out of doors, TV, web, and other channels that are starting to matter.

Combining all that signal while simultaneously silencing the noise to generate insights for growth: that’s the next challenge. And MMM has a seat at that table as part of next-gen attribution.

Talk to us

Interested in learning more about how you can futureproof your marketing growth with next-gen analytics and attribution?

Let us know. We’ll be in touch.

You’re kicking off a mobile ad campaign. You want crazy good results. You want massively high ROI and incredible ROAS. And you don’t want to spend 70% of your budget teaching the platforms what works to attract the best users for your app. So how do you do A/B testing to find the best ads?

Here’s 13 different (and lucky!) things to consider …

1. There are algorithms for that (but start with a clue)

You know the algorithms do a lot of the work in finding the best versions of your ads, but you also know that there needs to be a starting point for your A/B tests. And that you just might be a little bit smarter than AI, at least for a few years yet.

There’s also a financial challenge if you just rely on Facebook’s or Google’s or any other ad platform’s machine learning algorithms to find the best ad. The reality is that they can chew through a lot of budget in a short time running split tests just to find out what you already know.

This doesn’t mean they’re bad. Doesn’t mean they’re not helpful. Doesn’t mean you don’t want to use them. And it doesn’t mean that it’s impossible to find out that actually, you were completely wrong about finding the best way to get new players, customers, and people in your app.

But let’s assume you’re smart and you have a clue. Start somewhere intelligent, and let the algorithms refine your tests.

And then, yes, occasionally throw caution to the winds and try a few campaigns that are just completely out of left field, just to see if AI has a card or two up its sleeve and it can teach you a few things about how to connect with your core audience.

2. Formulate a plan

What are you going to test first? What’s the full list of things you want to test? Do you have a hypothesis? Random action may unexpectedly produce a Picasso … but it’s not likely. Start your A/B testing with at least some of the scientific rigor that you hope to harness in selecting winning campaigns, creative, and copy.

What do you expect to happen? (OK, hope will happen.)

Document, report, and iterate.

3. Pick an audience

We’d all like to appeal to everyone but we’re not all Google. (And even then some people choose DuckDuckGo or Bing.) Even the simplest hypercasual game has different groups of people who want to use it; pick which one you’re going to target with your first A/B test.

Typically you’d start with the expected highest-value players, customers, or people. As you proceed with additional tests, at some point you will want to switch targeting to next-most-valuable categories. And, be open to the possibility that some groups will be either more or less valuable than you first imagined.

4. Test one thing at a time

There’s a time and a place for starting with totally different ad sets, calls to action, brand promises, etc. As you get deeper into optimization, however, A/B tests work best with smaller, definable, quantifiable changes.

If you change two things at once you won’t know what influenced your target audiences.

(That said, yes, we can get very meta here and postulate that test A with red text and a green logo does better than test B with green text and a red logo, and so on. So: limit the changes to see impact more clearly, but use your best judgement as you go.)

Caveat:

If you have massive budget and/or lots of time, consider kicking off multivariate testing so you can change multiple things at the same time. It’s more complicated and significantly more expensive, but it will get you deeper answers faster. Be sure, however, you have enough budget to reach statistical significance: it’s going to be much harder than A/B testing.

5. Assign cohorts to those audiences

OK, I’m cheating here by calling this #5 in best practices for A/B testing because it’s technically something to do AFTER your split testing, but not toooo egregiously. (I hope.)

Keep track of the cohorts of new customers/players/users you get in your app based on the segment that you were targeting. Work with product/development/live ops to customize their onboarding and app experience.

6. Be patient

Waiting sucks.

If you can get Chipotle via delivery drone in 5 minutes flat (it’s real, I promise), why can’t you get your A/B tests just as quickly? Because they need some time to develop.

The last thing you want is to prematurely declare a victor, and make poor decisions. You could theoretically accelerate spend to burn budget faster and achieve a result quicker, but does that really prove the point? Or does it show that at this point in the morning, that point at night, people want X rather than Y?

Better to give it some time, walk away, have a coffee, play a game, do some other work, and come back a couple days later to analyze the data.

If the platform itself doesn’t offer it, Google “A/B testing significance calculator” to easily check if you have enough data to be authoritative.

7. Declare victory. Then start a new war.

Found a winner? Pop the champagne, break out the cigars, and drop the beat on the party music.

But do that all in VR, because there is no finish line, all wins are contingent, all success is temporary. Once you’ve found a great ad, start a new series of testing.

8. Test for freeeeee

A/B testing is expensive. You burn budget to find the best way to burn more budget. If you’re completely starting out, you can kick off your testing for free in person. You can do some of it for free on social.

Caveat: free doesn’t really scale, and it’s much more inductive than deductive, directional than definitive.

But it can still have value.

Another way to (somewhat) cheaply get insight is via surveys. Pop-up mobile surveys can cost you a dollar per person on Pollfish or similar tools, so you can spend $300 or $500 to get insights that might cost you $3,000 or $5,000 in real ad campaigns. Another caveat: surveys aren’t real-world ad tests. They don’t have to deal with adblindness in the way real ads in the real world do.

So be warned: YMMV. Real ads in the wild over a significant interval of time with a significant number of views and actions are the gold standard here.

9. Pick an outcome to test for that matters

It’s tempting to pick click-through rate as the determining factor in your split testing. It’s quick, obvious, and available right in the same platform you’re doing the test in. While I’m sure there’s cases where this makes sense for you, generally speaking this is a Very Bad Idea™.

Test for a variable as far down your funnel as you can. That might be app installs, but the deeper you can go — engagement, sign-ups, purchases — the more useful the results of your A/B testing will be.

Rule of thumb: test for something you care about. Ideally, a KPI that is critical to the success of your business.

10. Be honest about the results

If you get results back from your 5,000 install A/B test and version B is 1.5% better than version A … you have a problem. The “improvement” is probably well within the margin of error and therefore illusory.

It’s tempting to declare victory and move on, but be honest: you might have two awesome results (if both convert well) or two complete dogs (basically blank ads work better).

Suck it up. Restart with a blank sheet. Stickhandle the impatience of your boss.

11. Pick smart things to optimize

Look. The world is full of examples like “people from Azmenistan think purple is the color of death, so your ad was like a funeral invitation.” (Why yes, that is a fake country from The Expendables 3.)

Few things are so upfront and obvious.

Test variables that matter.

Calls to action, offers, promises, value statements probably fit the bill. Key character featured, if your app is a game, is very likely significant. Gameplay featured, particularly in a video ad, is clearly important. Font size might be, especially in the extremes.

Changing a button color from sapphire to cerulean? Maybe not quite so much.

12. BONUS: Know when not to A/B test

When VP GrowFastNowAtAllCosts tells you to put the pedal to the metal, it’s not time to spend 2-3 days on A/B testing. When you have a seriously small ad budget, live A/B testing isn’t going to be your best option.

When you work for a brand that thinks Apple is way too fast and loose with their brand guidelines and takes three weeks to approve moving a piece of punctuation … yep … not the place for A/B testing. When there’s a HIPPO in residence so that the Highest Paid Person’s Opinion matters more than anyone else’s, and more than any data … also probably not a good context for A/B testing.

13. LUCKY BONUS number 13: A/B test your Android (and now iOS!) app listings

Great, your ads are amazing. They’re driving a huge number of clicks and traffic to your app listing.

But … is it converting?

Any lack of conversion adds marketing cost, even if you only pay for installs: more impressions per click and view equals less likelihood an ad partner will show your ad, meaning your bid has to go up.

So optimize your app listing page. Google Play has enabled that for a long time; very soon iOS will be joining the party.

One more thing: Apple is releasing the ability to optimize your App Store listing for different purposes. So if people use your app in very different ways — say remittances as well as payments in your fintech app — you can optimize your marketing for one and show an App Store listing customized to that purpose, which should increase conversion rate.

Need help with next-gen marketing measurement?

If you’re looking for solutions that help you zig when the world zags — and reap the benefits — you should chat with Singular. Book some time for a chat, and one of our experts will walk you through how the platform could help you supercharge growth.

“Isn’t it an epic judgement?”

InMobi CEO Abhay Singhal couldn’t be happier at the court ruling handed down late last week in the Epic Games vs Apple lawsuit. Apple will be required to allow apps to offer alternate means of payment, which means competition in payments — and commission rates — for in-app purchases for the first time ever.

 

But first, InMobi Telco

But he’s also excited about the InMobi’s just-released telco product, which is years in the making and, absent about 500,000 additional court rulings further opening up the crown jewels of iOS, will be Android-only for the foreseeable future.

“There are over 800 telcos in the world and each one, if you talk to them today, has an ambition of becoming a large media company,” Singhal says.

Their path to doing so?

Owning the Android experience.

It’s a path with some similarities to what we’ve seen hit home runs in the Singular ROI Index. Players like ironSource Aura, AppNext, and Digital Turbine — which has been on an acquisition spree lately, picking up Appreciate, AdColony, and Fyber —  have seen great success in on-device app discovery.

From the latest ROI Index:

OEM or on-device platforms such as Digital Turbine, ironSource Aura, and AppNext are performing extremely well. They perform on-device app discovery via a persistent experience on new devices and a set-up wizard upon activation. They can tie into the home and/or lock screens, and offer live updates on new apps to try.

Digital Turbine and ironSource Aura together account for eight spots in the 2021 ROI top charts, and offer extremely impressive ROI.

InMobi Telco is the newest contestant in the on-device sweepstakes, but it already has a history. Three telcos in North America and others globally, including some of the largest in the Middle East and Latin America are already using it. The solution includes Glance, which offers lock-screen content, Swish, a “home screen concierge” that dynamically updates to users’ preferences, plus of course app discovery via advertising. All of them offer ways for telcos to monetize … and marketers to grow.

“Glance is taking over the lock screen of your device and converting the lock screen into the biggest live platform in the world where live content is getting broadcast. Live TV, live shows, live commerce, live entertainment, live interviews …” says Singhal, adding that it’s customized to different audiences.

The other is reinventing the home screen.

“Your home screen is nothing but just collection of all the icons … and that feels so yesterday to us,” adds Singhal. “For the users of today, we can totally reimagine how those surfaces can look like, which are extremely futuristic.”

In other words: on-device app discovery platforms have new competition.

And mobile app marketers on Android have new options for app promotion.

 

Epic vs Apple: multiple payment systems in iOS apps

But of course we couldn’t conclude our conversation without talking about the biggest news of the day. Apple actually won the lawsuit or 90% of it. U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers ruled for Apple on nine out of ten of the claims that Epic brought in the suit. But one of the most critical ones, perhaps, was the one that Epic won: Apple has to offer competing payment processing options in-app on iOS.

“It’s one of those things which I think is truly, truly good for the ecosystem, truly good for the industry, truly good for the innovation of new platforms,” Singhal says. “Can you imagine that today you are in a Chrome browser or a Safari browser, and you’re buying goods from Amazon and you’re buying goods from Macy’s and Nordstrom, and you’re only allowed to use the payment services that are offered by Google? Like … how awkward it sounds. And you know, that Google at that point in time is also going to charge 30% that it just looks so awkward … I understand that it’s your ecosystem, it’s your world, but the browser is not different than the App Store in that way.”

Given that Apple is facing similar pressure in Korea — where Epic has already applied for reinstatement to the App Store — and Japan, and likely the EU, this is likely going to change globally, and soon.

 

IDFA, privacy, first-party data, and customer journeys

Finally, we chatted on data privacy, the massive rush for mergers and acquisitions, and loss of the IDFA.

Ultimately, says Singhal, marketing has remained marketing. The sky didn’t actually fall.

“Last time when we were talking about the IDFA-related change, we were all extremely nervous about what’s going to happen in the ecosystem,” he says. “It came and it went away and the world is still the same … it seems like nothing changed.”

App growth marketers who tossed IDFA-based growth stacks out the window and re-engineered their BI systems might feel just a bit differently and point at InMobi’s Android-leaning business as the genesis of that comment. But fundamentally, what Singhal is saying is that mobile growth is still a thing, advertising is still a thing, and despite the fact that some of the processes changed, apps and brands can still grow on mobile.

And that’s fundamentally true.

The changes, though, have impacted InMobi’s strategy. At least to encourage it to continue in the path Singhal wanted to go.

He hinted that there’s more to come from InMobi:

“We’re an enterprise first organization … our strategy has always been enterprise first,” Singhal says. “We’re definitely working with our telco partners, our handset manufacturer partners, and making them better in terms of their consumer experiences. So any story where InMobi, data, and identity and content comes together, that includes our enterprise partners front and center into that strategy.”

That includes InMobi being able to stitch the user journey together end-to-end, he says, in a privacy-compliant way. (My guess: that means first-party data, not shared across entities, built into InMobi’s telco strategy. And the rumor mill says that InMobi is in discussion to buy AT&T’s ad unit, Xandr, which was the result of AT&T’s “$1.6 billion acquisition of AppNexus, an ad exchange, and a smaller acquisition of Clypd, a TV ad tech company.”)

But for now we have to stay tuned:

“So I don’t have anything specific to share this point in time, other than to say that it is, it is a very, very interesting space. And my view is that a lot more is going to change in that over the next two to three years, then what we have seen in the last one to two weeks.”

 

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In the past couple of years, fintech has become a lot like mobile gaming.

Seriously.

Not because finance and investment is gambling, or a game. And not because managing your money is a fun and exciting thing to do (at least for most of us). Mostly because the growth marketers in fintech are adopting customer acquisition tactics and know-how from the gaming industry. And growth marketers in mobile gaming are not like other growth marketers.

Don’t take my word for it. I recently asked Rovio COO Kieran O’Leary what mobile growth experts at brands can learn from the mobile gaming space.

“I think we can humbly say that we’re a step ahead,” he answered. “I think we’re way more advanced than a lot of other verticals out there because we segment and provide personalization to players.”

O’Leary is indeed being humble.

The mobile gaming vertical competes basically only with dating and media apps for supremacy on the top grossing charts for Google Play and the App Store. Most “apps” are games (even if you have to add up the game sub-categories to get a total), and 62% of all in-app purchase App Store revenue is driven by games. That intense competition drives aggressive technology purchases, hard-core data-driven performance marketing, and massive innovation. Gaming marketers might be 10 steps ahead, and not just in segmentation.

Fintech was a bit of a sleepy category three years ago.

Not any more.

COVID supercharged fintech app adoption, almost doubling use as the use of cash dropped by 42%. As of February 2021, there were a staggering 26,000 fintech startups, and in the first quarter of this year, fintech startups raised $22.8 billion, 50% more than all of 2020. And the number of Singular customers in fintech has grown by over 500%.

Sound familiar? Massive market, huge number of startups, heavy usage propelled by COVID, and significant investment? All those billions of invested dollars have to go somewhere, and one of those somewheres is customer acquisition. On mobile, we more frequently call that user acquisition, and hence the comparison with gaming apps.

So what’s going on in fintech mobile marketing?

Given all this massive change, I thought I would take a look at fintech mobile ad spend since January 2019 and see what might be happening.

Turns out: something very, very interesting.

 

2020-2021: when fintech growth went BOOM

Maybe fintech wasn’t exactly sleepy in 2018 and early 2019. Apple Pay existed. Google Pay existed. PayPal had been around forever, and the iconic retail investor app Robinhood was no longer a bright shiny startup, having been founded in 2013.

But barns weren’t exactly being burned down.

Until COVID, of course.

First, the big picture:

• Fintech spend tends to balloon in and around the end of one year and the beginning of the next … the December-January new device cycle
• COVID initially scared fintech marketers, depressing spend in April-May 2020
• COVID then hyper-accelerated and massively fueled that trend in mid to late 2020
• 2021 has been a massive growth story with unprecedented spikes in fintech market spend

(Discount August 2021 in the chart above: there’s incomplete data for that month.)

It became very clear, very early, that COVID lockdowns created conditions that were ripe for mobile. But fintech apps were a little cautious. Maybe a lot cautious, because in fact the bottom fell out of acquisition spending for fintech apps in April 2020.

From my post back then:

Fintech has actually done really well during coronavirus because, like other things where a mobile/digital solution can take the place of an on-premise/real-world activity, banking, insurance, and investment apps actually saw decent install and usage activity early in the pandemic.

In the beginning of April, however, fintechs turned the tap of paid user acquisition off, reducing activity considerably.

Fintech marketers got the memo in May, however, and fintech ad spend increased for eight straight months, culminating in January 2021 and staying significantly above “normal” levels for much of this year.

 

When the world zigged, fintech growth marketers zagged

But there was something else perhaps even more interesting going on with fintech mobile spending. To see it, you have to look at spend data by platform: iOS vs Android.

Here’s an overview of fintech ad spend measured via the Singular growth platform since January 2019 that highlights the shifting ad spend by mobile platform over the past two years and seven months:

Anyone who’s been closely following the massive and ongoing iOS 14.5/iOS 15 privacy story — and what it’s doing to ad spend — will immediately spot a huge oddity. If you haven’t, you might need to refresh your knowledge of overall ad spend per platform, and how it’s been impacted by Apple’s iOS 14.5 privacy changes and the release of SKAdNetwork.

For instance, check out this chart from our June blog post on iOS vs Android ad spend trends:

 

From that post in June 2021:

iOS ad spend is now down 32% from its peak in 2021.

In early February, mobile advertisers that have both an Android and iOS app split their buying almost evenly between Android and iOS. Between February 2 to 7, marketers spent 56.16% of their budgets on Android app install campaigns and 43.84% on iOS.

But last week, from June 14 to June 20, the split was 70.29% to 29.71%.

That’s a massive difference in just four months.

Fintech publishers’ ad spend followed some of that trend, but not nearly to the extent of the broader industry. Over the past three years, the average split for fintech publishers’ ad spend between iOS and Android has been 65% to 35%. In August 2021, it was essentially 60% to 40%, and in July it was 59% to 42%.

In fintech, there was significant movement to iOS in December 2020 to April 2021, where iOS hovered around the 70% share, and significant shift to Android from May to August, where Android bumps up near 40% as iOS dropped to the 60% level, but nowhere near the shift that the non-fintech market saw.

Why?

The market as a whole moved because iOS 14.5 dropped in late April and the IDFA, the device identifier that the entire mobile marketing industry on iOS was built around, started to disappear.

Without user identifiers, supply optimization is the first step to ensure relevancy and scale in your programmatic campaigns. Advertisers will demand more control over supply decisions to ensure all their programmatic is run with accountability and a high level of quality.

In response, many marketers moved acquisition and growth budgets to Android, where the GAID/AAID is still available.

Not fintech.

Fintech shifted somewhat to Android, but stayed overweight on iOS.

A few clues: like gaming publishers, fintech app marketers are smart. Fintechs live and die by LTV and CAC. Fintech publishers have invested in technology and are generally ahead of the curve. And top fintech companies are massive spenders: high six figures to seven figures per month. They can afford to prepare for changes like iOS 14.5: buying software, putting significant data science teams to work, building new in-house BI solutions, and so on.

(To put it another way, many can’t afford not to. Besides the traditional banks, which make up only 15% of the top 100 fintech apps on Google Play and the App Store, the lion’s share of their revenue comes from customers using their apps; most don’t have stores, multiple channels, brick and mortar revenue-generating facilities, or any other plan B.)

Like major gaming publisher Rovio, they prepared for the shift very early, and were able to find ways to measure the results of ad spend under SKAdNetwork, and continue growing where they found revenue.

In other words, to a large extent in North American and European markets at least, on iOS primarily and Android secondarily.

And that turned out to be a prescient decision. As Tinuiti’s Liz Emery told me recently, continuing to invest in marketing on iOS when the majority of the market fled in panic to Android resulted in some extremely good deals and better rates on iOS user acquisition.

Our aim is to simplify programmatic advertising for apps so your business can keep on a desirable growth trajectory. Consider Programmatic App Impact campaigns your new tool to achieve the consistent uplift you aim for. We’re happy to consult you on this and run a new campaign strategy for your mobile business.

 

Need help with next-gen marketing measurement?

If you’re looking for solutions that help you zig when the world zags — and reap the benefits — you should chat with Singular. Book some time for a chat, and one of our experts will walk you through how the platform could help you supercharge growth.

 

 

We are witnessing one of the biggest changes in the history of mobile in real time as we see the unraveling of the App Store payments model on a worldwide basis.

Steve Jobs launched the iOS App Store in 2008. It was, perhaps, a global first as a single, unified place to find, pay for, and install all software on a computing platform that would eventually grow to massive scale. It eventually became a key plank in Apple’s plan to evolve into a services-not-just-devices company, putting about $90 billion into Apple’s coffers while also pouring a staggering $230 billion in the pockets of app publishers over the past 13 years.

 

Evolution of App Store payments

The App Store is not just about revenue, of course. It’s about control.

Ensuring app experiences are good. Ensuring scammers can’t easily enter the fortress. Ensuring iPhone owners don’t get their credit cards stolen. Blocking malware. Blocking apps with racist or violent content that Apple doesn’t want on its platform, and so on.

All of this makes sense from many perspectives.

But it’s all also unprecedented. In the desktop-centric 1990s if someone told you that in the future the dominant computing platforms of the 2020s would have essentially one front door for software distribution, one payment gateway, one store, and one global overmaster who decides what software gets published and what doesn’t, you’d probably re-create Apple’s 1984 commercial in protest.

It’s not natural that computing platforms be closed. It’s natural that appliances are closed. When you’re post-appliance,  typically you have to open. Or half-open, as Jobs designed the App Store. Apps could come in, but they had to pass muster first.

And use Apple payments, and pay Apple a commission.

(Interestingly, Apple payments were an innovation in themselves: no-one knew how to take 99-cent purchases in volume without losing their shirts over processing fees.)

Just over a year ago, however, Epic Games, makers of the massive Fortnite gaming franchise, the Unreal Engine that powers thousands of games and apps, and a games store, started allowing Fortnite payments by web. Click the link in Fortnite, go to Epic’s site, buy the skin, go back to the app, and BOOM … no 30% cut for Apple. Apple booted the app from the App Store, and Epic sued.

Fast-forward to today, and the EU is investigating Apple, thanks partially to pressure from Spotify and others. Rumors abound that the U.S. Department of Justice is considering antitrust moves against Apple. Heavily Android-using home-of-Samsung South Korea passed a law requiring App Store owners like Apple and Google to allow developers to bypass on-platform payment systems. (Samsung offers the Galaxy Store, which clearly of course could not have influenced South Korean legislators at all in this decision.) Japan’s Fair Trade Commission made moves to do the same.

Add it all up, and Apple decided to make some changes.

Two weeks ago, Apple told developers it would allow them to email app users about different payment options. Last week, it changed again, and now Apple is allowing reader apps (Kindle, Netflix, etc.) to link out to external payment systems. It’s important to contextualize: these are just the latest concessions, as Apple had previously reduced commission rates for smaller developers and made other changes over the past few years in concessions to app companies.

Much of this doesn’t take the heat off from the EU or the DOJ, so most mobile analysts and experts think this will inevitably be extended to other types of apps, and ultimately all apps and games.

If so — and it looks likely, given the trajectory — what does that mean?

 

13 thoughts on App Store payments changes

1. Thank you, Epic
   Adding non-compliant payments to your app and suing the most important mobile platforms (Epic also sued Google) that your customers use is a ballsy step. It might not be quite a bet-the-company move, but it’s a huge risk with, at the time, a seemingly small chance of reward. Epic, with others like Spotify, has made a huge impact here in highlighting an issue that others have now amplified.
2. Complexity awaits
   Prison is simple: sit in your box. The army is simple: do what you’re told. Escaping, graduating, or being released is complicated, because now you have choices, decisions, options, and all of them have consequences. As mobile developers and marketers slowly get released into the wild of open payment systems, the world becomes more complicated. Publishers will have to navigate this carefully, because messing up payments is not an option … and how they are currently built is typical Apple “just works.”
3. This won’t work for everyone
   No-one wants 12,000 tiny companies to have their credit card info. Consumers have had enough of that on the web, and it’s easier to input credit card details there. Big companies and big brands are likely to be able to get players, customers, and users on their own payment systems; others will struggle. (The solution, of course, is likely payment services, perhaps like Stripe, that manage the payment without proliferating your payment credentials all over the metaverse.)
4. It’s time to love your customers
   Apps until now, especially post iOS 14.5, connected with customers via the Apple umbilical. Expanded payment options will allow unmediated multi-platform customer connection. With great power … comes great responsibility.
5. If we thought subscriptions were hot before …
   Subscriptions have been incandescent for a while now. (I mean, who doesn’t like automating the process of people shipping them money on a regular basis. Sign me up, Scotty.) Now with the ability to mechanically pluck $1 or $3 or $10 from customers’ digital wallets every month and keep it all … whoa. (Repeat “with great power” statement from #4.)
6. Antitrust, David, and Goliath
   No-one notices David, but Goliath can’t hide. Look: when you’re tiny, no-one cares what you do. When Steve Ballmer laughs at your first phone and says he likes his strategy for mobile, the DOJ winks at you and the EU doesn’t even know you exist. But when you’re literally the most valuable company on the planet … you can’t burp without 50 lawyers taking notes and analyzing the effluent for suspicious compounds.
7. Globalization has consequences
   The US has looked at this. Korea. EU. Japan. India is making noises about opening up an investigation. Pretty soon basically every jurisdiction that matters will have their own interpretation of what a major App Store can do and can’t do. Let’s just be real: countries like their own heroes. Legislators are going to legislate ways for home-town contenders to get a seat at the table. We haven’t seen the last concession from Apple, and there may never again be a global one-rule-for-all. (And of course, we know that there really wasn’t ever one rule for Debby Developer and Netflix or Amazon.)
8. Google, brace for impact
   Very clearly, this isn’t just about Apple. Google’s always been more open: side-loading, anyone? But there’s more impact that we’re going to see on Google as well. As in privacy, Apple first.
9. Easy beats hard
   Just because developers can starting using their own payments processes doesn’t mean that they should. On-platform ease of use will very likely always be best with fully-native built-in Apple-controlled payment processes. So people who are worried about switching costs or friction costs should stay primarily with Apple’s systems. Note: this hits different verticals and different apps in different ways … hyper-casual and mid-core are different than a diet or fitness app, for instance. And how engaged and retained your user base is will say a lot about how successfully you can migrate payments off-platform.
10. Percentages are going to go down
    Apple started at 30%. Now, small developers and second-year subscription businesses are at 15%. When Apple has to compete with developers having the option of taking payments off-platform, further changes will ensue. Look: grocery stores make about 5-7% profit margin. They probably do more work in selling food than Apple and Google do in building and maintaining an app discovery, installation, and payments platform. 30% has a very limited lifespan. 15% is more defensible. And it’s likely to go lower.
11. Apple acquisitions possible in payments?
    The Apple Card works with Goldman Sachs and Mastercard’s involvement. Apple payments on iOS and Mac operate with multiple processors and credit card companies. You have to imagine Apple has considered acquiring a payments processing company and/or even a bank, and you have to wonder, as Apple considers the looming loss of both revenue and business intelligence as payments evaporate away from its control, if that might help Apple offer a price-competitive solution to taking your payments in-house.
12. Look for preferred apps or certified apps in the future
    If Apple is forced to massively open payments up, we could see a certified or preferred apps program for apps that Apple has checked and guarantees safe … and which use Apple payments at some percentage. This would be a sweetener for publishers thinking about taking payments off platform, promising more visibility, and better ease of use in exchange for slightly higher costs of doing business.
13. Wider app store freedom?
    As massive global conglomerates, Apple and Google are convenient targets. They accommodate a big bullseye. But will this trend to opening up app stores and marketplaces go beyond mobile app markets? Could legislators mandate that all app stores built by companies that have created a platform over a certain size (think Salesforce) might need to open up? Possibly.

 

These changes will impact marketing and user acquisition too

If you can save 15-20% of the costs of revenue right off the top, that enables significantly more expenditure on marketing and user acquisition. Or it makes your apps that much more profitable.

Changing where payments happen and how users/customers/players engage with your brand also changes how you acquire them. If you know you want them to pay on your website, that might make web-to-app mobile growth flows even more attractive.

Ultimately, we’re still in the process of this massive change.

How it really impacts mobile, growth, UA, engagement, retention, and monetization is something that we’ll continue to learn over the next 12 to 18 months.

Can you get great performance out of SKAdNetwork? And can you make it as performant as IDFA or fingerprinting?

It’s a valid question, because as we saw in a recent Singular webinar, some parts of the mobile marketing ecosystem are still using fingerprinting whenever they can to attribute app installs … in spite of the fact that Apple has explicitly forbidden tracking without consumer opt-in.

Making SKAdNetwork performant

According to Singular CTO Eran Friedman, you can actually make SKAN performant, and the top mobile marketers at major brands are doing exactly that today. And while — let’s be honest — it’s tough to approach the IDFA-powered levels of marketing measurement mobile marketers enjoyed in iOS 13 and earlier … you can get 80% accurate predictive lifetime value, and smart marketers are learning the ropes on SKAdNetwork now.

That’s important because those who aren’t jumping on the SKAN bandwagon now run the risk of cratering their performance in a few months when iOS 15 or 15.3 or 15.6 destroys marketers’ ability to get fingerprinting-based marketing measurement even on the few places that still allow it.

“It’s not that easy for sure.

I think most of the industry today is struggling with SKAN trying to make it work.”

– Eran Friedman, CTO, Singular

Elephant in the room first: it’s tough. It’s not easy. It’s a massive change in thinking, in technology, in process, and even — in some cases — in how your mobile app experience is engineered, particularly for the onboarding and first few experience stages. But early adopters who jumped on SKAdNetwork early and have been working at it for some time have seen success, says Friedman.

Better success than some might think, in fact.

“For the marketers who could make it work … definitely they’ve been able to get comparable results [to] IDFA, without the device-level data.”

– Eran Friedman

That’s a big statement. IDFA is still the gold standard, along with AAID/GAID on the Android side, of course. Full access to a fairly persistent device identifier which allows you to see impressions, clicks, installs, and basically unlimited post-install events is powerful. It’s addictive. It’s the One Ring of mobile marketing that connects all the dots and makes everything possible.

Or, it did.

In the past.

The risk of not adopting SKAN

On iOS, that’s just simply not there anymore. While some marketers are turning to fingerprinting to solve the problem, it’s risky — Apple’s rules prohibit it — and it likely comes with an expiration date. iOS 15 will bring additional intelligent tracking prevention, HTTPS upgrades, privacy reports, Private Relay for running web traffic in a VPN, and more. Most of iOS 15’s new privacy features are focused on the web, but given that Apple continually innovates and iterates, you can safely assume they will come in app environments as well.

Apple, after all, is not unaware of the fact that people spend most of their smartphone time in apps.

So saying that top marketers who are using SKAdNetwork for mobile marketing measurement are achieving results in the same ballpark as IDFA — even if not quite as good — is a big deal. It’s surprising, even shocking.

But it’s also very, very good news.

It means that the death of mobile measurement has been greatly exaggerated.

Making it happen, Friedman says, requires work: lots of it. And time: plenty of it. And significantly good BI teams who help you generate good insights from highly predictive behaviors. Importantly, it also requires persistence: many who invested early in integrating SKAN into their growth tech and data stacks got horrible results at first. Initial models were “a complete wreck,” with data that didn’t make any sense.

pLTV is the key to making SKAN work

But the first step was building the reporting to see the data. The second step was figuring out how to make it accurate, despite privacy thresholds, timing delays, and other gaps.

While top brands with the best teams and most money are over-represented on the list of those who have now figured it out, there’s some smaller companies who have done well, Friedman says. Including some hyper-casual companies.

“If you’ve invested the time in your BI, in your prediction models, then it becomes much easier to optimize your campaigns.”

– Eran Friedman

And that’s the third stage: optimizing.

Here, pLTV, or predictive lifetime value, is absolutely essential.

“Now that you have data that you can trust, then the companies are thinking: how can I optimize and scale, which is kind of the next big challenge,” Friedman says. “And for that, you actually need the networks to optimize a lot on your campaigns … and for that, you need to give them proper signals and the best signals really are ROAS or LTV, right? If you can tell them what’s the predicted LTV of that user within the 24 hours as part of the SKAN postbacks, then the networks find it much easier to find more of these users.”

Which is challenging, of course.

But, clearly possible.

The critical component, obviously, is a pLTV model that reliably highlights your most valuable users and customers very early on in their experience with your app.

“The holy grail, the ideal, is to actually encode the conversion values in real time, based on pLTV … basically you’re already notifying to the ad networks when they get postbacks, what the predicted value of that user. That requires a bit more engineering.”

– Eran Friedman

Top marketing and product teams are able to boost reliability of those predictions to around the 80% level, Friedman says. Which is startling good: better than I ever expected in the early days of iOS 14.5. And it has the potential to get better, as Apple continues to add features and functionality to SKAdNetwork over time.

Which, potentially, shows the carrot and the stick, right?

The stick might just be iOS 15 or 15.5, where it becomes harder and harder to circumvent iOS 14.5’s privacy rules. The carrot might just be an increased ability to accurately measure mobile app install marketing in a privacy-safe way.

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