John Koetsier, Author at Singular

8 things SKAN 4 provides that you can’t get from SKAN 3

What does SKAN 4 provide that SKAN 3 doesn’t?

We are finally seeing sustained SKAN 4 growth again. It’s steady but slow, with SKAN 4 postbacks hitting the 20% threshold for the first time since the SKAN 4 CV reset bug in July of 2023. And while it’s slow, as big players adopt SKAN 4 this year, we’ll see massive jumps. Reddit was the most recent, and at some point in Q1 or Q2 of 2024, Meta will take the plunge (again), Google will slip a switch, TikTok will toggle a setting, and we’ll very quickly approach majority SKAN 4.

That’s why 66% of iOS marketers are working on or testing SKAN 4 right now, according to the survey numbers from one of our recent webinars.

(Take the number with a grain of salt: this is not a representative audience, necessarily. But it’s likely indicative: everyone knows SKAN 4 is coming.)

But what are 8 things SKAN 4 provides that actually give you what SKAN 3 does not? We asked 5 experts in a recent SKANATHON webinar to dig into SKAN 4 in 2024:

Richard Eiseman, DraftKings
Mollie Sheridan, Tinuiti
Eran Friedman, Singular
Itai Kafri, TikTok
Matthew Ellinwood, Liftoff

Here’s just a small slice of what a few of them had to say:

1. SKAN 4 fixes SKAN 3’s volume limitations

Crowd anonymity is better for returning data than privacy thresholds: ad campaigns with lower volume get more data back.

“Basically any advertiser who just has initial budgets, they’re very familiar with the fact that they can’t get enough conversion values because they don’t pass the privacy thresholds,” says Singular CTO Eran Friedman.

SKAN 4 makes that better.

That makes optimization faster, and it reduces the need to consolidate spend into fewer and fewer campaigns, allowing marketers to test better.

“I think that the things that were missing in SKAN 3 were addressed to some extent, and they are mostly around the loss of cohorts and long-term conversion funnels,” says TikTok’s Itai Kafri.

2. SKAN 4 adds a longer data collection time frame

SKAN 3 offers 1 postback which most people opt to get within 24 hours. That makes cohorts hard to compare and user value hard to compute.

“The big limitation that I hear all around from customers is just the limited time window to really understand the value of the user,” says Friedman.

SKAN 4 offers 3 postbacks for fast feedback plus updates around a week and a month, depending on whether you lock conversion values to get them earlier or not. That provides much more data to model cohort behavior, engagement, and revenue.

“With SKAN 4, you will have a longer attribution window or multiple attribution windows up to 35 days,” says Kafri. “That’s a huge change on its own. That change is so significant because the golden standard used to be a seven-day ROAS or seven-day CPA, and that was taken away a long time ago. We are now finally getting it back to some extent, and we can go back to that golden standard.”

3. SKAN 4 provides better creative optimization insight

SKAN 3 offers so little data it’s almost impossible to do creation optimization, forcing ad networks, agencies, and mobile marketers to rely on upper-funnel network metrics and reducing insight into creative’s impact on lower-funnel goals, conversions, and revenue.

“When you want to get to the creative level, now you need to do much more modeling or not really rely on SKAN as much, to be honest,” says Friedman.

At high levels of crowd anonymity under SKAN 4, the new source identifier will offer 4 digits of data on elements like publisher, placement, geo, language, and — if you wish — creative. That offers an opportunity to make SKAN relevant for creative optimization for the first time ever, really.

4. SKAN 4 provides data for more effective ad network optimization

Data for marketers is good and necessary. But attribution data is the end of the line.

To make mobile marketing better, ad networks need to be able to optimize live campaigns for targeting, reach, interest, engagement, and action. Without data, that’s hard to do, and top-funnel metrics aren’t always enough.

SKAN 4 provides what’s needed:

“Now that we have some adoption, we can already see how this can impact not only the reporting side, but also the delivery side and also the optimization and so on,” says TikTok’s Kafri. “And definitely, the accuracy of the modeling. So, there’s a lot of things that we’ve been able to add with SKAN 4 with all the additional data that we have.”

When ad networks have more signals, they have more data. More data means better and faster optimization.

5. SKAN 4 provides better measurement of reality

Measurement needs to measure reality. If it doesn’t, it’s either useless or misleading. And bottom line, rubber meeting road, SKAN 4 does a better job of measurement than SKAN 3.

Perhaps 17% better, says TikTok:

“After a big analysis that we’ve done, we’ve seen an increase of more than 17% in the number of conversions that we can capture because of the longer attribution windows, the threshold changes, and all that,” says Kafri. “And that is a huge differentiator.”

We always knew SKAN 3 was missing conversions, partly due to privacy thresholds and partly due to short measurement windows. SKAN 4 will be leaky too in that sense … but not quite as leaky.

6. SKAN 4 is more complex (yeah, not everything on this list is a positive)

On the downer side, SKAN 4 is more complex and harder to learn and implement. One of the early adopters I’ve talked to says SKAN 4 requires you to completely rethink iOS attribution after SKAN 3 … not necessarily a pleasant prospect.

“It’s an increase in complexity,” says Liftoff’s Ellinwood. “It’s just become much more challenging to handle an entirely new framework and an entirely new set of signals. So, I’d say it’s mostly good news, but with the good news comes some effort.”

So the silver lining doesn’t come without the cloud.

The good news is that there’s an easy button, sort of.

“Our focus is to build that big easy button, like you said, right?” says Singular’s Friedman. “So, anyone who’s just starting with SKAN, just click a button, you know, configure their initial conversion model, and boom, they get the reports as they expect to get them, seeing all your campaigns, any additional granularity that the networks would be able to provide, bits of the hierarchical ideas as we’ve mentioned, basically seeing all the costs, the installs, the KPIs, the events that you’ve done, and, of course, the cohorted rows that you’re used to across any cohorts that you’re trying to aim for.”

Singular is, he says, trying to “bring 2019 back” for mobile marketers.

7. SKAN 4 offers better reporting for subscription apps

Thanks to #2 in this list, SKAN 4 is just better for subscription apps … and any apps with a long conversion window.

“We’ve heard from many advertisers who are pretty excited about SKAN 4 because they’ve been struggling with the previous versions and it kind of opens up opportunities for them,” Friedman says. “Especially the ones who usually monetize after longer cohorts.”

8. SKAN 4 offers better reporting for low-user-count apps

Some apps are built on aggregating audiences of millions or billions and then making fractions of a penny off each individual user via advertising. Other apps are built on a small number of high-value users.

Think construction apps. Vertical-specific apps. Perhaps marketplace apps … apps where you might have just hundreds or thousands of customers, but each represents thousands or tens of thousands of dollars in value.

SKAN 4’s coarse conversion values could be their savior:

“There’s also cases we’ve seen of business models in which they don’t have such a high volume of users,” Friedman says. “I remember, speaking with a marketplace app, for example … they’re selling pretty expensive types of products, and they can’t pass the privacy thresholds with the required volume … with the coarse conversion values, they’ve been testing and seeing great success.”

Thanks to #1 on this list, these types of mobile developers and publishers are potentially back in the game.

Much more in the full webinar

As usual, there’s much more in the full webinar. Check it out (and the other SKANATHON webinars) right over here.

There’s a ton of insight we haven’t been able to share here that you can get on-demand, right now. In particular, Mollie Sheridan from Liftoff and Richard Eiseman from DraftKings shared insights on other, related topics.

Check out all their insights in the full webinar.

GPT-4 for building SKAN 4 conversion schema

Can AI help you with your SKAN 4 conversion schema? Absolutely, thanks to the custom GPT that Lucas Moscon trained for building out SKAN 4 conversion models. Check it out in our recent Growth Masterminds episode. Hit play and keep reading.

We know SKAN 4 will be the default attribution methodology on iOS at some point in the future.

That’s likely to be fairly soon: this quarter or the next. SKAN 4 postbacks jumped as a percentage of all SKAdNetwork postbacks in November as Reddit made the switch from SKAN 3, and the trend is continuing in the new year. The Trade Desk, Unity, Persona.ly, Smadex, AppLovin, and Twitter are others who are driving SKAN 4 adoption.

Singular’s SKAN 4 adoption dashboard currently shows a definite if slow upward trend over the past few months:

The challenge for busy mobile marketers is how to get started.

Yeah, this isn’t always easy

For many, building out your SKAN 4 conversion schema from scratch is super-challenging.

Part of the problem is that SKAN 4 is new and complex, and part of the problem is that many just haven’t been able to dedicate the significant amount of time needed to dig into SKAdNetwork and understand it in detail yet.

“We are more than 2 and a half years since SKAN was introduced into the industry and maybe more than 90% of people working here don’t get the fundamentals yet,” Moscon says.

Lucas Moscon is a senior user acquisition manager for Monkey Taps. He led performance at Goin, worked at Winclap as a performance specialist, and was a professor of paid media at Coderhouse. He’s also recently been building tools for mobile marketers, including an ad monetization hub that offers templates and scripts for remote controlling your ad monetization setup.

(Moscon credits that with 2 to 3Xing his ad revenue in specific apps. Check out the whole episode above to get all the details.)

Prepping for SKAN 4 can be hard when you’re also managing partners, building campaigns, commissioning creative, crunching numbers, and worrying about where your next pocket of growth will come from. It is definitely not easy managing everything.

But AI can help.

A custom GPT for building your SKAN 4 conversion schema

Everyone knows about GPT-4.

Not everyone knows that if you’re an OpenAI subscriber, you can customize GPT-4 for your own needs and even release that version to the public. These specially-trained versions are called GPTs, and Moscon trained one for building out SKAN 4 conversion schema.

Check it out here.

The SKAN 4.0 Builder is super simple:

Tell it to build your SKAN 4 conversion schema
Give it some key information:
1. App category
2. Free trial (yes or no)
3. Daily ad spend
4. Business objective (revenue, sign-ups, etc)
And that’s it …

Pretty much instantly, the SKAN 4.0 Builder comes back with a starting point for your SKAN 4 conversion schema. Here’s what it gave me for a health app with a free 7-day trial that I’m “spending” $4,500/day on with a primary goal of driving sign-ups.

Is it perfect? Absolutely not.

I might have some different events going on in my app because it’s structured a bit differently. And I might want to spend my fine postback bits on more events because I’m pretty sure that I’ll achieve 64 possible values most times in postback 1 due to my reasonably high volume of ad spend and dedication to not spreading it amongst too many separate campaigns.

But …

It’s a good starting point. And that’s what most people need: a starting point to kick off their SKAN 4 journey and help them build out a SKAN 4 conversion schema that makes sense.

“I realized that people go to different webinars or podcasts … but they don’t visualize the schema in some way,” Moscon says. “They need it in their face to understand the starting point from where they can build different models.”

It also shows how to align the initial fine postback and subsequent coarse postbacks so that your measurement stays focused on your core goal and you get valuable information from which you can extrapolate cohort value for evaluating ad partners and individual campaigns.

Next levels would involve working with your ad partners to ensure you hit tier 3 levels of data as often as possible for all your SKAN 4 campaigns:

4 digits of Source Identifier
Source app info
Maximum data in your fine conversion value for postback 1
And data for postbacks 2 and 3

No more excuses to not get started

Since you can now outsource at least the starting point, there’s no more excuse to not get started. Check out the SKAN 4 Builder, see what it returns for you, and ping Singular if you have questions or concerns.

The very good news right now is that Singular’s built SKAN 4 support so that it’s completely backward compatible with SKAN 3, because you’re going to have both versions of SKAN for at least 2024, and possibly into 2025. That’s partially due to partner adoption, but the SKAN version also depends on the user’s iPhone model and software update level.

You want to maximize signal where possible with SKAN 4, while not missing out on SKAN 3 when that’s all that is available. And now with a GPT to help you build out your SKAN 4 conversion schema, it’s easy to start.

Much more in the full podcast

We also chat about ad monetization for subscription apps and how to double or triple ad revenue with smart ad management. We discuss what admon teaches you about your users, and why hybrid monetization is so critical in subscription apps.

And, of course, much more.

Subscribe in all the usual places including YouTube: find them all at our Growth Masterminds home page.

Crush mobile measurement on iOS and get CPIs 40% under benchmark: How to win on SKAN

How do you crush mobile measurement on iOS under SKAdNetwork? And how do you get 40% cheaper app installs on TikTok? There’s probably a lot of answers to that question, but one of them is having the right partner for mobile measurement. And another just might be having the right attitude.

“You just need to be brave,” says Carry1st’s senior manager for ad monetization and user acquisition Claire Rozain.

(First step: check out everything she said by signing up for SKANATHON and watching the third episode first. The insights here are extracted from a recent webinar in the SKANATHON series.)

Being brave on iOS … and using every data point possible

Even now, coming up on 2 years since Apple upended the mobile measurement space with SKAdNetwork, there’s a lot of fear, anxiety, and stress about mobile app install attribution without the IDFA.

Is making everything work again as simple as just being brave?

Let’s put it this way: it’s the first step.

It’s the first step because the initial step of faith starts a new journey for marketing optimization, measurement, and attribution. There are some challenges and minefields on the path. But without the first step, you’ll never arrive at the destination. And the destination, says Claire and others who have arrived, is very much worth the trip.

Crush mobile measurement on iOS …

Step 1 is taking the first step and trying. Step 2 is grabbing every privacy-safe datapoint you possibly can.

Singular VP Victor Savath explains how to achieve “full-fledged iOS reporting:”

“One of the key premises is that SKAdNetwork data cannot operate in a silo. It’s not operating in a vacuum. We still need to rely and lean on all the other adjacent data types to make the best use of the SKAdNetwork framework.”

What data is he talking about?

SKAN data
Network-reported data, including impressions and delivery
Cost data
First-party device-level data
IDFV data

SKAN is critically important, but especially in SKAN 3 with very strict privacy thresholds, you’re going to be missing key insights. That’s where first-party data comes in: if half of the IDFVs who complete task A turn out to be high-value customers/players/users, you can apply that assumption to your SKAN data as well. The same applies for any other data you can capture.

“From our SKAN reporting layer, we have some of the key campaigns, sub-campaign publisher-level data sets,” says Singular customer success expert Nabiha Jiwani. “But at the same time, we are pulling in your network-reported clicks, impressions, cost alongside your postback and conversion value counts to really show you a full-fledged iOS summary report.”

Add in the IDFV data and identify which events are truly meaningful to help segment users and estimate the value of individual cohorts and campaigns.

Making your app work for SKAN

Measurement methodology matters, but making SKAN work for you rather than against you could also require some changes in how you design your app and the funnels you create for users.

There are so many events and such a limited set of data SKAN can return that some get a little flustered, says Jiwani.

“There’s so many different options that I think sometimes folks can get a little bit overwhelmed. So, going back to the drawing board with your marketers, with your UA team, and figuring out what is the user journey and what model makes the most sense is something that can really influence and help enrich your SKAN reporting from the get-go.”

E-commerce apps she’s worked with often want to track big events like registration or add to cart or checkout completed. But there may not be enough of those events relative to the 50 or 75 or 230 users you acquired in Campaign 892 to optimize around them. So you need to find trigger events: antecedents to the big wins that offer predictive insight into those most-desired actions.

Sometimes that may require reconfiguring flows or rearchitecting apps.

“You need a product that is aligned with your model,” says Rozain. “And to have a product aligned with your model, you also need to know your audience and what kind of people you want to target at first from the start.”

Carry1st uses Singular for marketing measurement, of course, but also additional in-app analytics programs to deeply understand user behavior, segment users, and score them.

“I feel like it’s something that is overlooked, especially on SKAN,” she adds. “And when a lot of people gave up on getting whales … some didn’t.”

The implication is that Carry1st is able to use its multiple datasets and smart data science team to still find whales — extreme high-value users — even under SKAN, when theoretically (according to many) that ability died when IDFA became scarce.

Making it all make sense with hybrid measurement

Data science is great, but how do you trust modeled data? There are so many different sets of modeled data now:

Network modeling to try to recapture conversions obscured by SKAdNetwork
MMP modeling to reconstitute censored data
MMP modeling to make predictive insights into cohort value beyond D1 or D2

Number 2 is fairly easy: if you’re getting the event that you’ve titled conversion value 20 about 50% of the time in your actual user base, Savath says, you can assume that the same is true in your SKAN data, even if 25% of the values are censored. Number 3 is getting easier under SKAN 4 and additional postbacks from longer timeframes.

(And the good news is that Singular reports confidence intervals, so you always know the range of possible values.)

To make the data you’re working on better and better, Singular’s building hybrid measurement.

“It’s this idea of how we collect all the different signals,” Savath said.

“We’re going to get Privacy Sandbox data sets coming … more modeled metrics from the various partners … the iOS SKAN 4 data … iOS SKAN 5 data … App Store information.”

And more, of course:

Network KPIs
Cost data
Optimization KPIs
MMM for broader insights
First-party data
And much more …

The magic is in both collecting all the data, using each data type at the right time and for the right purpose, and also using each dataset to in essence sanity check other datasets. The goal is that mobile marketers who understand they don’t have complete deterministic data and never will have that … can still have confidence in their overall performance and metrics.

The goals is also to crush mobile measurement on iOS.

So much more the full webinar

Check out the full webinar for all the insights, including more details into how Carry1st is achieving best-in-class results.

Get instant access here.

Unveiling Singular’s first ever Quarterly Trends Report: Q4 2023

I am super-excited to unveil Singular’s first ever Quarterly Trends Report. If you follow mobile marketing at all, you know that Singular is well-known for its annual ROI Index. Now we’re unveiling a new industry insights report that we’re going to update much more frequently.

And this inaugural edition is chock-full of insights.

The Singular Quarterly Trends Report is based on a huge amount of data across essentially every country on the planet and every vertical on Google Play and the App Store:

Trillions of impressions
Billions of dollars of spend
Tens of billions of clicks
Billions of installs

Massive change needs massive insight

Everyone knows that marketing and advertising is in the middle of a massive shift right now.

We’re moving from deterministic last-click tracking using cookies and mobile ad identifiers like the IDFA and GAID to a broad mix of marketing measurement techniques we call hybrid measurement. As we go through this massive shift and turn to SKAN 4 and Privacy Sandbox and MMM and first-party data and modeling and more, you need easy access to up-to-date insights on the mobile ecosystem.

Accompanying this massive change is the continual growth and expansion of mobile globally.

So we’ve packed our first Quarterly Trends Report with insights sliced by operating system, geo, and verticals on:

The growth of mobile
ATT opt-in rates
CPI: cost per install
CTR: click-through rate
IPM: installs per thousand ad impressions
The hottest verticals for installs
Ad networks: top gainers for ad spend
Ad networks: top gainers for advertisers
Ad networks: top non-traditional user acquisition platforms for growth
Share of spend:
- iOS
- Android
- Web
Paid versus organic installs

ATT opt-in rates quarterly trends report

Quarterly Trends Report: partner contributions

Plus, we’ve added contributions from partners that round out the Quarterly Trends Report with insight from different angles of the complex mobile marketing landscape:

Appvertiser shares growth hacks for 2024 in 5 areas:
- Paid user acquisition
- Creatives
- SKAN and attribution
- ASO and organic growth
- Bonus insights
AppSamurai shares global gaming and monetization trends with insights on:
- Gaming spend
- Gaming spend forecasts
- Monetization strategies
- Rewarded ads and real-world rewards
Bidease shares targeting insights:
- Share of device language by country
- Expanding into new markets without spending huge sums
- Growing the fastest-growing region on the planet
Craftsman+ shares insights on the most popular ad types by platform:
- Google
- YouTube
- Meta
- TikTok
- Other ad networks

Our goal with the Singular Quarterly Trends Report

We want to share what Singular’s seeing in the mobile marketing space as a resource for user acquisition and brand marketing professionals.

Our intention is that this Quarterly Trends Report dataset will continue to grow and that the insights we share from it will expand from quarter to quarter. We’re also hoping to increasingly share insights from partners as well to provide the best possible dataset and insight.

We have huge plans for the future of this platform.

Check out the full report now.

And, keep checking back as we update it regularly.

Planting trees versus picking fruit: CTV and user acquisition

Where does CTV fit in your user acquisition strategy?

Performance marketing is picking apples off a tree, says Upwave CEO Chris Kelly in a recent Growth Masterminds podcast. They’re there, they’re ripe, they’re ready to go: they just need a little nudge and BOOM … you have a new user or customer. Brand marketing, however, is about planting baby apple trees that you can nourish and tend and eventually be able to harvest at some point in the future. While some businesses can survive off pure performance marketing because they reap existing demand fueled by basic human needs, long-lasting trends, or markets built by other companies, many also need to nurture seeds before they can pluck the produce.

So where does CTV fit? Hit play and keep reading …

CTV and user acquisition: AVOD growth

It’s pretty obvious that connected TV is growing fast.

Streaming hit record highs this summer with almost 40% of all TV watching in July while broadcast and cable were both down. CTV is clearly on a path to 50% plus and eventual dominance, and AVOD (ad-supported video on demand) is a growing chunk of connected TV as Disney, Netflix, Max (former HBO), and Amazon Prime are all joining YouTube, Hulu, Peacock, Roku, Pluto, and others in offering discounted product tiers with ads.

But CTV is still only getting a fraction of the ad spend that traditional linear TV is getting. In 2023, Insider says CTV captured less than half the TV spend of linear TV.

CTV ad spend: $25 billion
Linear TV ad spend: $61 billion

When will the two converge? Possibly not until 2028 or later. That said, there’s an increasing amount of inventory in ad-supported CTV, and that means opportunity today. And, since AVOD is growing as a percentage of streaming while streaming is itself growing as a percentage of TV, the opportunity is growing fast.

CTV-based mobile user acquisition: opportunity?

That said, is there opportunity in CTV for mobile user acquisition? Clearly to some degree yes: we’re seeing it being used that way already. But it’s not a slam dunk for everyone, because by nature, CTV is less of a direct-response ad medium than a brand-building ad medium.

“The lazy reputation that most people would have about mobile is … it’s great for lower funnel, it’s great for direct response: get someone to click here and download, click here and make the purchase,” says Kelly. “Whereas CTV is being used more now … for upper funnel because of that storytelling ability, that immersive full screen storytelling ability … it’s very powerful for upper funnel.”

Of course, no-one is arguing that CTV can’t also be used for lower funnel as well.

In fact, Amazon’s betting on it.

The company announced in September that “starting in early 2024, Prime Video shows and movies will include limited advertisements,” which subscribers can opt out of by paying an additional $3/month.

But Amazon is already showing ads today on Amazon Prime.

Just a week ago, Amazon Prime showed me this when I logged in to catch the new season of Reacher: a QR code direct-response ad for Christmas gift shopping on Amazon. So you can bet that Amazon wants Prime Video to be a down-funnel step for its own customers, regardless of whether it’s the very last purchase point or not, and probably a point of instant purchase.

Roku thinks this is the future too, having just rolled out a buy now button (ok, “place order”) in Roku Action Ads, a collaboration with Shopify. The experience will be reminiscent of Amazon: see an ad, click OK on your remote to learn more, and check out using Roku Pay. It’s an impressive integration, though Shopify is not nearly as powerful a partner as Amazon.

Of course, not all direct response is mobile user acquisition or app install: most of the above examples are retail. But we are seeing apps grow on CTV campaigns in Singular as well. Not all of those are looking for an immediate install, which makes sense.

“We think about the funnel like a football field actually, where we think it’s silly if marketers think that the success of every campaign is getting a sale,” Kelly says. “That would be like in an NFL context saying every play needs to get in the end zone and I’m just gonna look at my list of plays and see which one’s got me the end zone and only run those plays.”

In other words, not every ad should be a quarterback sneak.

Or a tush push/brotherly shove.

Targeting is a challenge, but not as much as it used to be

Targeting has been a challenge on CTV, with one study suggesting almost half the data used for CTV ad targeting is wrong. It’s getting better, however, Kelly says. And there are options in CTV targeting that old-school linear TV marketers, who basically operated off of age and demo, would kill to have.

“CTV brings what you’d expect from a digital first platform,” says Kelly. “So you do see advertisers using third party audiences … just like you would for a web campaign … you see people bringing their first party audiences.”

That means you can target people who are like those that you already have in specific ways, you can target people who have engaged in specific behaviors, you can do look-alike audiences, and that you can — if your first-party audience is big enough — retarget or remarket.

Plus, of course, all the demographic age and context data that comes along with specific audiences for specific shows.

But there is one key difference specifically in targeting on CTV versus mobile: person-to-household.

“Two [things that] are really interesting if you juxtapose mobile versus CTV as channels: one is reaching people versus households and the other is what part of the funnel you’re trying to move the consumer down, right?” says Kelly. “Mobile’s the most intimate device we have that’s right there to one person, one screen, and one person’s face. Television is not that case … you have a big CTV screen hanging in your living room and there could be 2, 3, 4, 5 plus people watching.”

Which means, of course, measurement has the same challenge.

Brand impact: higher than mobile ads?

There’s some research that suggests 1 CTV ad has similar brand impact to 6+ mobile ads, Kelly says.

That makes sense in some ways. When you’re watching AVOD, you get 3-4 sets of ads in an hour, and typically each set has just 1 or 2 ads in it. (This will probably change over time and become closer to linear TV’s current ad-fest!) That ad takes 15 to 30 seconds to watch, and you’re back to your content. Many mobile ads, on the other hand, might just whizz by in seconds or milliseconds, if they are banners or videos.

(Of course, rewarded ads and interstitials would be the exceptions to this rule, since they require your attention for at least a few seconds.)

That investment in brand marketing is a good idea, Kelly says.

“People don’t wake up in the morning and just know what your brand is,” he says. “CTV may not get you to click on the ad and download the app as fast as mobile … but that increased awareness is going to pay off.”

Which means, if you’re going to try CTV ad campaigns for mobile user acquisition, you better do them in concert with lower-funnel campaigns. The idea is to both generate and satisfy demand in a surround-sound marketing campaign that makes it feel like your brand is everywhere … while also making it easy for people to take action.

CTV ad campaigns: affordable to start

TV advertising makes me think of Super Bowl ads and millions of dollars per second. Of course, not all linear TV ad space is that expensive, but it’s generally significantly more expensive than CTV ads.

Which is good: brands can try them without breaking the bank.

“The barriers to entry to CTV are lower,” Kelly says. “So if you’re an advertiser coming from buying Facebook ads or buying Google ads, you’re gonna start CTV before you’re starting linear in most cases.”

Think 5-figure entry fees, not 6 or 7 figures.

The upshot: CTV ads for UA

So is CTV good for user acquisition? Sure, but there’s some nuance here.

From a branding perspective, bigger apps with larger campaigns who need multiple brand touches to generate high-LTV users/players/customers will find it easier to fit CTV into their marketing strategy. Smaller apps that are spending less: it’ll be harder to justify even taking a look at CTV as you haven’t even come close to maximizing your existing channels yet.

But even small apps could find utility and profitability here. Smaller apps that are in a very specific vertical and meet a very specific need that they can target on CTV could probably go very low-funnel on a CTV ad and generate near-immediate conversions.

Plus, there are certain apps that need to appeal to a number of different audiences to be effective. Kids’ apps for instance, need kids to be interested but also need adults to be aware before they can convert. CTV could provide an interesting opportunity to target households here that mobile ads can’t easily replicate.

So much more in the full podcast

Check out the full chat with Upwave CEO Chris Kelly on YouTube, or get our audio podcast on whatever podcasting platform you prefer.

We chat about:

CTV ads
CTV targeting
CTV measurement
Limitations of CTV
Accessibility and affordability
Optimization on CTV
Performance vs brand marketing

10 top tips for ASA and ASO in the era of SKAN

ASA and ASO are deeply connected. Good ASO boosts ASO, and using ASA intelligently makes your ASO better. It’s easy to start on ASA, and improving your ASO has positive impacts on all your organic and paid marketing campaigns on or off the App Store. And both ASA and ASO are more important in the era of SKAN than they ever were before.

(If you understood none of that, ASA is Apple Search Ads. ASO is App Store Optimization, which applies to both the App Store and Google Play. And SKAN is SKAdNetwork, Apple’s privacy-safe measurement framework. Mobile marketing loves its acronyms, no?)

Clearly, Apple Search Ads has grown in importance over the past few years:

“Before SKAN, ASA was considered more as an additional or secondary channel,” says Applica’s Lev Strutski. “After SKAN it became one of the major players alongside Meta Ads, Google Ads, TikTok, and others.”

We recently held a webinar on ASA and ASO in the era of SKAN. It’s available on-demand right now as part of our massive SKANTHON event, and you can watch the entire show immediately. We asked 4 experts to join the panel:

Lev Strutskyi
Head of User Acquisition @ Applica
Darya Radchykava
Senior Account Executive @ Splitmetrics
Emre Bilgic
Senior Customer Success Manager @ MobileAction
Salah Khamis
Principal Performance Marketing Consultant @ Phiture

Here are 10 of their insights. Sign up and watch the full webinar for more detail and more insight.

1. We don’t need SKAN for ASA and ASO

SKAN is important for iOS marketing measurement and attribution for campaigns from every organic and paid marketing channel except for Apple Search Ads. That’s because ASA uses Apple Ads Attribution API.

(Note the name is Apple Ads, not Apple Search Ads. Hint, hint.)

“In a time when SKAN campaigns have become a real nightmare for many marketers, ASA uses different attribution methods and it lets us see all the events on the campaign, at group and keyword levels,” says Applica’s Lev Strutskyi. “ASA and ASO have a deep connection and it’s really hard to succeed with ASA campaigns if you don’t have a well optimized App Store page.”

While SKAN returns some postbacks and conversion data (more with SKAN 4 than 3) Apple Search Ads provides more, including tap-through rate, conversion rate, and redownloads. Apple Ads also offers better targeting technology.

2. You can start ASA and ASO with a small budget

Apple Search Ads is simple to start with a tiny budget. While this won’t move the needle on your user acquisition goals, it will provide a lot of data on keywords, conversion rates, and performance of your app list and custom product pages (CPPs).

Once you see success you can boost spending, but you get interesting and valuable data even at low spend levels.

3. Download velocity improves your App Store ranking

How do you improve your App Store ranking?

One sure-fire way is to improve your daily download velocity. Getting more installs means you’re more interesting to more people, which means Apple wants to feature you higher. But there is a caveat: don’t be a one-hit wonder.

We’ve all seen it: some app puts together a big but brief ad campaign. Installs skyrocket, but only for a couple of days. This is risky.

“You see many new apps that would come out and you would say, I have no idea what this app is,” says MobileAction’s Emre Bilgic. “And they suddenly become rank 1. And then the next day you go into the list, you don’t see them ever again right? So there is a magic button, but it’s really risky to do it … you can get banned if you do that particular magical button and it will cost you a lot more money.”

Trying to game Apple’s algorithm has a potential downside.

The safest method: increasing quality app installs that translate to engaged users. Do that, and the App Store will notice.

4. ASA creates a big organic multiplier for ASO

According to our experts, the algorithms that drive ranking and optimization on the App Store don’t differentiate between fully organic app installs and app downloads stimulated via Apple Search Ads: they look identical. On the flip side, however, download velocity that you initiate from third-party ad networks doesn’t influence the Apple algorithm.

What’s the difference?

Apple Search Ads app installs are connected to keywords. ASA is largely an intent-based ad network, similar in that way to Google search. That means Apple can apply insights from ASA-derived users to organic users.

And Apple does exactly that.

“We see the synergy of App Store Optimization and Apple Search Ads give significant results,” says Splitmetrics’ Darya Radchykava. “The latest case we launched with Reface by synergizing ASO and Apple Search Ads, they basically managed to boost the TTR by 40% and increase the conversion rate by 6%. When we evaluate these numbers into the revenue, you could definitely understand that the impact of synergy is significant.”

Boosting tap-through rate by 40% is massive.

5. What to do first for App Store Optimization

Kicking off App Store optimization for the first time? Start your ASA and ASO journey with these 5 steps:

Keywords
Choose your primary keywords
Competitors
Conduct competitor research
Visual
Optimize your visual elements
Reviews
Boost the number and quality of your reviews
Expansion
Expand your list of keywords. One way: look at recommendations in ASA

There’s more to do, of course, and infinite complexity as you dive into each. But that’s a quick start.

6. Use your mascot

If you have a mascot, consider using it in your App Store ads.

Perhaps you have your own equivalent of the Energizer Bunny or the Barbarian King in Clash of Clans. If that mascot develops a certain level of notoriety and becomes a known part of your brand experience, use it. (Remember the cat in Talking Tom? Or the train station security dude in Subway Surfers?)

One customer achieved 90% higher conversion rates by using their mascot, says Radchykava. Perhaps it looks more organic, or more interesting, or more fun for potential players/users/customers.

Whatever the reason, that’s impressive!

7. Update your icon and/or app listing for seasonal changes

What can a new icon do? Probably nothing, right, besides maybe some brand confusion?

Well … actually, it can have a huge impact on your ASA and ASO.

“We even have a case with a customer who changed the icon and increased their installs by 40% with just a minor change on an icon … adding snowflakes,” says Radchykava.

Umm: wow.

Obviously you don’t want to go nuts with this plan and be switching your app icon every week, but adding a little Christmas cheer to it with a scarf or maybe a new moon for a new lunar year, or perhaps a little leprechaun cuteness around St. Paddy’s day can’t hurt.

One thing: be aware of geos and what they’ll think of your changes. I play one game that is always promoting Thanksgiving in Canada when it’s Thanksgiving in the U.S. (Spoiler alert, they’re at very different points in the calendar.)

Getting it wrong is uncool, and you risk looking a little foolish.

8. Use ASA and ASO together for best results

Ensure you transparently share your ASA results with the ASO team. (This is probably not hard if you have a team of 1 for both.) For example, if you try some generic keywords while working on keyword expansion on ASA and they perform well, adopt them in ASO as well.

The massive benefit of ASA is that you can target more keywords, you can test quicker, and you can target keywords that cannot be used for ASO … such as competitor keywords

“Competitor keywords … are very important because in certain industries … up to 80% or 90% of the search volumes can be coming from brand keywords,” says Phiture’s Salah Khamis.

As you work ASA and ASO together, beware of paid cannibalizing organic. Also, pay attention to organic spillover: how much “free” ASO upside are you getting when you start using new keywords on ASA?

9. Protect your brand

This one hurts, I know. You should own your brand: it feels wrong that a competitor can bid on your brand keywords. But … that’s the world we live in.

You have to protect your domain from competitors.

“You should focus on protecting brand keywords from competitors,” says Strutskyi. “You don’t give your competitors a chance to convert your potential users by controlling your branded keywords and their impression share. So I think you definitely should bid on your keywords, on your brand keywords. and protect them from competitors.”

Yes, this adds cost to what should be coming through as pure organic.

Yes, this also prevents competitors from snatching victory from the jaws of defeat by stealing your users who searched for your app at the very last second with a conquest ad.

10. ASO isn’t only on-store

App Store Optimization isn’t only about what you do on the App Store or Google Play, despite the name.

Everything is overdetermined, which means that there are multiple causes for each effect. And that’s true in marketing and advertising as well. Brand touch #1 seldom leads to a full conversion of a deeply engaged user/customer/player who has super-long retention. You probably need brand touch #2 and #3 and maybe #7 to develop that.

“You do not expose your own brand or your app through only one channel,” says Emre Bilgic.

Exactly.

Even heavily ad-driven growth orgs need to think about a well-rounded marketing strategy that incorporates more than ad campaigns and ASO.

So. Much. More. (in the full webinar)

This was some good stuff, right?

There’s much more in the full webinar, plus further explanation and detail. Sign up for SKANATHON and you can watch this webinar on-demand whenever you want.

Plus, you’ll also have access to all 4 segments of SKANATHON:

SKAN 3 review
ASO and ASA in the era of SKAN
Singular’s SKAN solution (customers say it’s pretty frickin’ good … see for yourself)
SKAN 4 deep dive

It’s a good year-end wrap up for 2023, or a great jump into the new year for 2024.

SKAN 3 in review: 16 insights we learned

Only 5.4% of marketers using SKAN 3 say things are going great. So when we kicked off SKANATHON recently, we spent 1 out of the 4 sessions on exactly that: SKAN 3 in review.

The focus:

What have we learned?
What mistakes did we make?
What do we need to know today, given SKAN 3 is still the main game in town?

You can now watch that webinar on-demand (and I highly recommend it). The panelists sharing their insights and tips were:

Edouard Favier from A Thinking Ape
Vanessa Simmons from Feedmob
Santiago Casais from Smadex
Noah Gerard-Grossman from Unity
Shamanth Rao from Rocketship

SKAN 3 in review: bye-bye granularity, and the stages of grief

As we all know, the big change with SKAN is the loss of granularity.

“Anything that’s user level reporting or targeting, all of that is now kicked up to be campaign level aggregate,” said Vanessa Simmons, ad operations senior team lead at Feedmob. “It really changes how you’re visualizing your data, how you’re doing your optimizations, all of your performance.”

This changed everything and, as Shamanth Rao says, everyone in the industry had to move through all the stages of grief when SKAN 3 came:

Denial
Anger
Depression
Acceptance

Once the industry moved through to acceptance, however, we all learned some key lessons. Here are 16 mentioned in the webinar …

What we learned this past year

We all learned much more than we ever thought we’d have to about privacy-safe marketing measurement.

Some of the key learnings from our experts in the SKAN 3 in review webinar include:

Adapt your KPIs to what SKAN can provide
“We had a client who turned off all of iOS and spent a really long time working with their internal teams to build out their internal first party data, making sure that their mapping was going to be something that their system would recognize … their main event was something that happened at day 45, way outside of the postback window. But because they had spent the time working with all the necessary parties, they were able to get that one postback and compare it to that first party data,” Simmons says.
Focus on immediate post-install events
“Capture an event that’s going to track as closely as possible to user LTV and convert within the first 24 to 48 hours,” says Gerard-Grossman.
Study your users to learn which events are predictive of future value
“It really depends on the type of apps you have but for us we focus most on in-app purchases,” says Favier. “We quickly realized that it was by far the most important signal for us and the model has to be basically 100% focused on that.”
Lean on your first-party user data, which hasn’t changed
“Other signals, of course, are your own first party data,” I added at one point. “What am I seeing? What can I sort of create cohorts out of? What performance am I seeing from there? How can I add that or layer that over top of my SKAN results?”
Test on low impact apps in your portfolio
“If you have the chance to have a backend portfolio of apps where you can test things, do it,” says Favier. “That’s probably the best way.”
Use ATT-yes users to help inform SKAN users
“Look at different signals you can get for your campaign,” Favier says. “It doesn’t necessarily have to be the SKAN signals. It can also be a deterministic approach: try to improve ATT approval, the number of IDFAs you’re getting.”
Build volume within campaigns
“Start with a high level of installs per day,” says Casais. “This will enable you to cross all thresholds and all campaign IDs and get as much granular data as possible.”
Be patient
“Day one, there’s going to be a new campaign launched, a lot of new impressions, but installs won’t even be coming in yet,” says Gerard-Grossman.
Minimize non-essential changes to avoid data delays
“Minimize changes within campaign IDs, or know how that’s going to affect,” says Casais. “The data will be more precise and you won’t have to deal with install delays when changing these campaign IDs.”
Understand that some apps are perfect for SKAN
“Their main KPI was a registration, a sign up, something that happened almost immediately after installing,” says Simmons. “And it was a really great indicator that this person was going to complete X, Y, and Z afterwards … so running on SKAN, it was really nice.”
Lean on partners to help understand and use SKAN
“Discuss with some of your other ad partners,” Favier says. “I’m sure they will be willing to help and that will make your life a lot easier and it will allow you to test as much as you can.”
Tailor your conversion model to your app
“You’re going to lose data,” says Favier. “It’s going to happen, but you have to look more at the gains over the loss of that. And a better conversion model can significantly change the performance of your campaign, especially with networks that rely a lot on SKAN.”
Use multiple data sources to validate and enrich SKAN data
“Use multiple data sources because there’s no one single deterministic source now,” says Rao.
Don’t be afraid to learn
What’s important? “Learning all the details, understanding all the terms, understanding kind of the nitty gritty of SKAN and how it’s changing as well as how network support for it is changing,” says Gerard-Grossman. “And then taking the next step to apply it to your specific app and making sure that your conversion model is set up right, that you’re making use of it as best as possible.”
Use your conversion scheme to segment users
“The goal of the schema should be to separate out high value users versus low value users,” says Rao. “And from that perspective, just a revenue schema is the best. You could use non-revenue events preceding revenue, like sign up, complete onboarding, etc., but really the bulk of it should be revenue.”
Try different types of testing
“It’s mostly testing different SKAN models, different conversion models and different types of conversion models,” Favier says. “So you can switch the timers between the conversion models, you can vary the events, you can vary the value of the events.”

Much more in the full SKAN 3 in review webinar

There’s so much more in the full webinar, and it’s available now, for free, on demand. Go get it right here:

SKANATHON webinars on-demand

Apple’s SDK requirements: What each of the 86 privacy manifest requiring SDKs does

Apple just unveiled a list of 86 SDKs that will require privacy manifests starting in the spring of 2024. The SDKs cover a wide range of functionality, including networking, authentication, database management, UI development, and more. There’s a lot of Facebook and Google SDKs here, including at least 12 for Firebase alone and many for Flutter, Google’s open source cross-platform development package. The list includes a significant number of Meta SDKs as well, including one for AEM, Meta’s Aggregated Event Management that limits privacy-sensitive data transmission while enabling conversion and engagement measurement.

Organizations or maintainers with the most SDKs on the list:

Google: 24
Flutter community: 19
Meta: 7
OneSignal: 4

Some of the common capabilities of the SDKs on the privacy manifest list:

Video and image tasks: 10
Data management, storage, parsing: 9
Network and networking tasks: 5
Notifications: 5
User login/authentication: 4
Web views in apps: 3
Sharing library: 3
Encryption: 2

Here’s a list with all 86 iOS app development SDKs and libraries, along with brief overviews of what they do, and the companies, organizations, or maintainers behind each. More on what’s NOT on the list below …

All 86 privacy manifest requiring SDKs

SDK/Library	Overview	Company/Organization/Maintainer
Abseil	C++ libraries for data types and algorithms	Google
AFNetworking	Networking library for HTTP requests	Alamofire Software
Alamofire	Swift-based networking library	Alamofire Software
AppAuth	OAuth 2.0 and OpenID Connect library	OpenID Foundation and contributors
BoringSSL / openssl_grpc	Cryptographic libraries	Google (BoringSSL), gRPC Project (openssl_grpc)
Capacitor	Cross-platform app development framework	Ionic Framework
Charts	Swift library for interactive charts	Apple
connectivity_plus	Flutter plugin for network connectivity	Flutter community
Cordova	Cross-platform app development framework	Apache Software Foundation
device_info_plus	Flutter plugin for device information	Flutter community
DKImagePickerController	Image picker library	Dang-Khoa Nguyen
DKPhotoGallery	Photo gallery library	Dang-Khoa Nguyen
FBAEMKit	Facebook Analytics Event Manager Kit	Facebook
FBLPromises	Promises library for Objective-C/Swift	Facebook
FBSDKCoreKit	Facebook SDK core functionality	Facebook
FBSDKCoreKit_Basics	Facebook SDK core functionality	Facebook
FBSDKLoginKit	Facebook SDK for user authentication	Facebook
FBSDKShareKit	Facebook SDK for content sharing	Facebook
file_picker	Flutter plugin for picking files	Flutter community
FirebaseABTesting	Firebase service for A/B testing	Google
FirebaseAuth	Firebase service for user authentication	Google
FirebaseCore	Firebase service for app configuration	Google
FirebaseCoreDiagnostics	Firebase service for app diagnostics	Google
FirebaseCoreExtension	FirebaseCore extension	Google
FirebaseCoreInternal	FirebaseCore internal configurations	Google
FirebaseCrashlytics	Firebase service for crash reporting	Google
FirebaseDynamicLinks	Firebase service for deep linking	Google
FirebaseFirestore	Firebase NoSQL database	Google
FirebaseInstallations	Firebase service for installations tracking	Google
FirebaseMessaging	Firebase service for push notifications	Google
FirebaseRemoteConfig	Firebase service for remote config	Google
Flutter	Google’s UI toolkit for cross-platform	Google
flutter_inappwebview	Flutter plugin for in-app webviews	Flutter community
flutter_local_notifications	Flutter plugin for local notifications	Flutter community
fluttertoast	Flutter plugin for toast notifications	Flutter community
FMDB	SQLite database management in iOS apps	Flying Meat Inc.
geolocator_apple	Flutter plugin for geolocation on iOS	Baseflow
GoogleDataTransport	Framework for data transport	Google
GoogleSignIn	Library for Google Sign-In	Google
GoogleToolboxForMac	Utilities for Google services on macOS/iOS	Google
GoogleUtilities	Utilities and helper functions for Google	Google
grpcpp	C++ implementation of gRPC	gRPC Project
GTMAppAuth	Library for integrating AppAuth with Google	Google
GTMSessionFetcher	Google library for network request management	Google
hermes	JavaScript engine for React Native apps	Facebook
image_picker_ios	Flutter plugin for picking images (iOS)	Flutter community
IQKeyboardManager	Library for managing the iOS keyboard	Michael Tyson
IQKeyboardManagerSwift	Swift version of IQKeyboardManager	Michael Tyson
Kingfisher	Swift library for image downloading/caching	Wei Wang
leveldb	Google’s LevelDB database library	Google
Lottie	Library for adding animations to iOS apps	Airbnb
MBProgressHUD	Library for displaying loading indicators	Matej Bukovinski
nanopb	Protocol Buffers implementation in C	Dave Garton and contributors
OneSignal	Push notification service	OneSignal Inc.
OneSignalCore	Core functionality for OneSignal	OneSignal Inc.
OneSignalExtension	Extension for OneSignal notifications	OneSignal Inc.
OneSignalOutcomes	OneSignal analytics and outcomes tracking	OneSignal Inc.
OpenSSL	Cryptographic library for secure comm.	OpenSSL community
OrderedSet	Data structure for ordered collections	Apple
package_info	Flutter plugin for retrieving package info	Flutter community
package_info_plus	Extension of package_info with additional	Flutter community
path_provider	Flutter plugin for directory paths	Flutter community
path_provider_ios	iOS-specific directory path plugin (Flutter)	Flutter community
Promises	Swift library for handling asynchronous tasks	Google
Protobuf	Protocol Buffers serialization format	Google
Reachability	Library for monitoring network reachability	Tony Million
RealmSwift	Mobile database for data storage/retrieval	MongoDB
RxCocoa	RxSwift extensions for Cocoa/UIKit	ReactiveX and contributors
RxRelay	RxSwift extension for providing relay behavior	ReactiveX and contributors
RxSwift	Reactive programming library for Swift	ReactiveX and contributors
SDWebImage	Library for async image loading/caching	Olivier Poitrey and contributors
share_plus	Flutter plugin for sharing content	Flutter community
shared_preferences_ios	iOS-specific SharedPreferences plugin (Flutter)	Flutter community
SnapKit	Swift library for Auto Layout constraints	SnapKit community
sqflite	SQLite database plugin for Flutter	Flutter community
Starscream	WebSocket library for Swift	Dalton Cherry and contributors
SVProgressHUD	Library for displaying HUDs (Head-Up Displays)	Sam Vermette
SwiftyGif	Swift library for displaying GIFs	Daniel Martín
SwiftyJSON	Swift library for parsing JSON data	Ruoyu Fu
Toast	Flutter plugin for displaying toast messages	Hajime Nakamura
UnityFramework	Framework for building Unity-based apps	Unity Technologies
url_launcher	Flutter plugin for launching URLs	Flutter community
url_launcher_ios	iOS-specific URL launcher plugin (Flutter)	Flutter community
video_player_avfoundation	Flutter video player plugin for AVFoundation	Flutter community
wakelock	Flutter plugin for preventing device sleep	Flutter community
webview_flutter_wkwebview	Flutter plugin for WebView with WKWebView support	Flutter community

(Note: this was partially created by ChatGPT. I’ve double-checked it and updated some data where there have been recent changes or there is confusion, but can’t guarantee it’s 100% accurate in all cases.)

Important note about Apple’s privacy manifest requiring SDKs

Apple says app developers will need to start including privacy manifests for any SDK listed. But there are some conditions on that requirement:

When you submit a new app
When you submit an app update that “adds one of the listed SDKs as part of the update”

I’ve added the emphasis on the “adds” above, because based on the plain language of Apple’s notification, you will not need to declare privacy manifests for these SDKs if you’re updating an old app that already includes one of these SDKs. In other words, there’s some grandfathering going on.

Of course, I’m not a lawyer: check with yours to be certain of your obligations.

Why these SDKs and not others?

Of course, we don’t know Apple’s motivation here, but we can speculate why Apple chose these SDKs and not others.

One reason might simply be scale. Any SDK with hundreds of thousands or millions of installs or inclusions in apps represents a broad risk if misused, so simple scale might be a factor here.

Another is a focus on what they do. Any SDKs that offer remote configuration could change app behavior after its App Store submission and Apple’s review, which obviously adds risk. Any SDKs that are used for networking or user ID/authentication have potential for misuse as well, as does any SDK that gets and provides data on device-level hardware, software, or identifier information. We’ve just learned how governments have been using push notifications to surveil end users, so presumably companies or organizations could do the same, and that’s likely why we see some push notification SDKs on the list.

We don’t see MMP SDKs here, suggesting that Apple sees its own SKAdNetwork as a privacy-safe form of marketing measurement and marketing measurement companies that use it as allies in privacy. Given that all the significant players in the mobile measurement space have detailed obligations with the big self-attributing networks, this seems a safe call. Also, depending on what data each individual MMP’s SDK access, if an MMP wants any data from Apple’s other privacy list of required reason APIs, that will force the MMP’s reason to be declared in privacy manifests anyways.

Big picture: it’s a tough job to find all the potentially infringing SDKs, since pretty much any SDK that can run networking and collect data is a potential risk. Ultimately, we might see Apple adopt something like Google’s SDK Sandbox in Privacy Sandbox on Android, which will place SDKs in a specific environment that limits their access to extracurricular data.

More to come?

There is of course the possibility that there are more SDKs to come. Nothing is static in technology, especially in mobile, and as additional SDKs are created, Apple will want to monitor them. It’s worth noting that Apple is guarding against people simply renaming or repackaging SDKs to sidestep the requirements:

“Any version of a listed SDK, as well as any SDKs that repackage those on the list, are included in the requirement,” Apple states.

In other words, you can’t weasel around the requirement.

66% of iOS marketers now working on SKAN 4; 5.4% say SKAN 3 is ‘going great’

SKANATHON is over but it’s not done. We recently hosted a 2-day, 4-session, 17-speaker event we called SKANATHON. Almost 2,000 iOS mobile marketers signed up, and they gave us a ton of data on what the ecosystem is doing right now. Among the insights: 66% of iOS marketers are working on or testing SKAN 4 right now.

Over a third are actively testing SKAdNetwork 4, while the plurality is working on it, thinking about it, or planning on it. Almost a quarter are not even considering it yet.

That said, getting ready for SKAN 4 makes a lot of sense.

The percentage of SKAdNetwork postbacks that is SKAN 4 is trending up again, it’s easy to configure SKAN 4 conversion models in Singular, and it’s completely backwards compatible. But it’s also understandable that some are reluctant. After all, only 1 in 20 mobile marketers says that measurement, attribution, and growth under SKAN 3 is “going great.”

A solid 60.5% are doing OK, of course, but 10% tried SKAN and gave up, while almost a full quarter of iOS marketers are still looking to get started on SKAdNetwork.

The only positive for that 24% is that while SKAN 3 prepares you in many ways for SKAN 4, many of the experts speaking at SKANATHON said that SKAN 4 is a whole new ball game, with some going as far as to say it’s a complete re-start. That’s probably vertical-specific: if you reinvented your app for getting D1 conversion data in SKAN 3 and now you can get 3 postbacks over the course of a month or less, it’s a big change. But if you were already getting D1 data because you had a hybrid ad mon and iAP monetization strategy, plus you were using Singular’s SKAN Advanced Analytics to get modeled cohort and D7 data, maybe not so much.

Speaking of cohorts: that’s another big problem in SKAN 3, which SKAN 4 will solve to a certain extent.

Most mobile marketers can’t do cohort reporting under SKAN today: almost 80%.

That makes sense: out of the box SKAdNetwork doesn’t provide any functionality for cohorts, and if app installs happen without IDFA permission under ATT, there’s zero built-in capability for cohorts. That said: modeling can rebuild them, thanks to first-party data and insight into what is actually happening in your app, and Singular clients have that capability.

Losing that ability was one of the things that panicked the mobile marketing ecosystem 2 years ago when ATT started to be enforced.

While 20% ignored it and 55% started learning about it or otherwise decided ATT and SKAdNetwork was something the industry could handle, more than a quarter self-describe as panicking. Which makes some sense: the entire architecture of mobile growth was built on IDFA, and in a few short months the IDFA largely disappeared as an effective mode of measurement.

Those who are working with SKAdNetwork, however, whether SKAN 3 or SKAN 4, are fairly diverse in terms of the conversion models they’re using.

31% are using a revenue model in SKAN
30% aren’t sure, which indicates that they’re either not front-line UA managers, or they’re extremely non-technical
22% are using mixed models (largely revenue and events)
17.6% are using engagement models (events)

SKAN 4 is growing in adoption right now, but it probably won’t hit a majority of SKAdNetwork postbacks until some time in Q1 2024. At that point, it will interesting to see if SKAN 4 changes the conversion models people use, given that SKAN 4 has some significant benefits:

More postbacks
More data in the first postback
Crowd anonymity is easier to achieve than Privacy Thresholds
Web to app support (minimal, but some)
Conversion value changes

If you’re working on that transition, check out our SKAN 4 transition guide. It’s also a very good idea to get the on-demand videos from SKANATHON so that you can use the insights from 17 experts to fine-tune your thinking and stimulate your creativity in terms of how you’ll set up SKAN 4 for your specific app and users/customers.

All 4 sessions are available now. Sign up here for all of them:

SKAN 3 adoption and best practices
ASA and ASO in the era of SKAdNetwork
Singular’s SKAN solution
SKAN 4 deep dive

If I could put in a personal recommendation: all are good, but Session 3 is particularly practical for the how and the why and the what of SKAdNetwork. Session 1 is a good recap or starting place if you’re not really using SKAdNetwork right now. Session 4 is great if you need to know about SKAN 4, and Session 2 is most useful for those who are using Apple Search Ads.

Product marketing vs user acquisition: Rovio VP on the difference, and why it matters

What’s the difference between a product marketing manager and a user acquisition manager?

When I was prepping for a recent podcast episode on this question, I had to think of Office Space: the 2 consultants who come in and ask a product manager the dreaded question: “what would you say you do here?”

Fortunately, Rovio VP of marketing Luis de la Camara had the answers. Press play on this video and keep scrolling …

https://youtu.be/4BwwBIbdPHg

Product marketing managers have been around a long time in traditional companies, while user acquisition managers are a relatively new phenomenon in mobile specifically. The difference is a matter of focus, not a matter of different teams, Camara says. UA managers are front-line direct response operatives, critical for tactical growth, while product marketing managers are embedded with product teams and analyze higher-level market dynamics, critical for strategic growth.

User acquisition managers are growth commandos

User acquisition managers are growth commandos, essentially. They’re creative, but they’re also very analytical.

“User acquisition manager or performance marketing manager are sort of two ways to brand the same thing,” Camara says. “Basically, it’s really about performance, it’s mostly about direct response marketing. It’s really about trying to maximize your return on marketing investment in the most measurable way possible.”

Critical to this role: resilience.

One day you’re up. Next day you’re down. One day you’re a hero. Next you’re a zero. Being able to navigate the volatility of the demand-gen user acquisition jungle with a certain degree of calm is important: never too high, never too low, and always looking to the future.

“If you’ve worked with any UA manager, they’ll tell you that your campaigns can look amazing,” Camara says. “And the next day they’re really down in the pits, and then like the next day they’re back up. And there’s sort of this rollercoaster every day as you come in.”

Also critical: curiosity. Will this work? What if I change this parameter? What about this creative, or that call to action? Will this channel or partner unlock untapped potential users?

Product marketing managers are growth generals

Product marketing managers are a little different.

They tend to come in earlier than user acquisition managers, at least in the Rovio universe of “crafting joy.”

“We tend to have a product marketer embedded in the product team from basically day zero,” Camara says. “So from the moment of concept, they’re here helping the product team game team … thinking about looking at the market, analyzing the market, understanding sort of what opportunities there are, trying to understand once there’s a concept or a bunch of concepts that the team have, and then testing what we call marketability or product market fit.”

That’s higher-level and longer-term: deeply understanding both the product — in this case a game — and the market, including what people might want or need as well as current and potential competition, to see if there’s space for the new app.

A big part of that: crafting a unique value proposition to differentiate the game in a universe of millions. And then building a go-to-market strategy including channels, tentpole marketing partnerships or events or endorsements … and — of course — performance marketing from user acquisition pros.

Both are critical

Both are critical, and both work hand-in-glove, Camara says. Failure to properly define the market and understand the product is likely to result in wasted UA spend. Failure to efficiently drive user acquisition will result in a failed product.

“Both crafts are very important, and the way we look at it is that they need to be partners basically. So they’re kind of supporting each other.”

Ensuring that teams work together and not in silos is critical for Rovio, Camara says, to avoid the typical I’ll do my part, throw it over the cubicle wall, and now it’s your problem in traditional, deeply differentiated organizations. But it’s also critical to deeply understand the game or app or product. Which means, in the gaming world, work is play, and play is work.

“We have a philosophy that the closer you are to what the players are experiencing, the more impact you’re going to be able to have,” Camara says. “So if you think about a game — like a mobile free-to-play game — players of those games don’t differentiate [between] what’s marketing, what’s product, what’s the engineering side of things, what’s the game design side of things: they just see the game and the game experience.”

Organizational structure is critical for growth

That means you can’t set up a gaming studio organizational structure that allows marketing to complain the game is not good enough and engineering or product to complain that the marketing is not good enough.

Everyone is on the same team, even if they have slightly different responsibilities.

Product needs to care about marketing’s needs. Marketing needs to care about product’s needs.

“If you have this shared joint system, obviously the product team needs to care a lot about the marketing and they understand that one of the key ways for them to grow is for the marketing to perform better,” Camara says. “And so they’re going to be that much more motivated to proactively support marketing.”

And vice versa, of course: marketing thinking about the product and ways to improve user experience and therefore, ultimately, LTV.

Everyone needs to play

And: everyone needs to play the game.

“You need to care about the games that you work with, and you need to experience the product from the eyes of the player,” Camara says. “I think for me an absolutely fundamental piece of marketing of any marketer, and I would say the same goes with product folks is that you really have empathy for your customer.”

We regularly chat with smart people who do interesting things in mobile growth: UA managers, product managers, adtech executives, frontline experts, consultants, and more.
Find the best way for you to get connected to this resource here.