Hello Reddit: don’t look now, but SKAN 4 postbacks are trending up

It has been personally depressing to me that the transition to SKAN 4 has been taking so long. One little bug that totally borks conversion values and the whole ecosystem got cold feet, and stayed chilly for months. However, I’m happy to finally be able to report some positive news: as a percentage of all postbacks, SKAN 4 postbacks are definitely increasing in a months-long positive trend.

One big player that’s joined the SKAN 4 party?

Reddit.

SKAN 4 postbacks trending up

First off, here’s the trendline. Don’t pop the champagne yet, and hold off on the celebratory SKAN 4 IS HERE parties, but there’s a definite trend from August through to November of gradually increasing SKAN 4 postback share. (The big bulge in late July is Meta going SKAN 4 just before the SKAN 4 bug bit.)

So what changed?

Well hi there, Reddit

In the last 30 days and especially the last week, Reddit has ramped up its delivery of SKAN 4 postbacks to almost the 90% level. Reddit announced the update in — of course — a subreddit, saying that they “launched support for SKAN 4.0, and is excited to uplevel our product solutions and provide our partners with a slew of improvements and new features.”

A few notes the Reddit for Business team added:

1. SKAN reporting for Reddit will be at the ad group level AND the ad level, which Reddit says will help achieve crowd anonymity quicker
2. Each app ID in Reddit can have up to 200 active ads (up from 100 under SKAN 3)
   1. You can have up to 20 ad groups active
   2. Each ad group can have up to 10 ads active
3. Reddit has streamlined SKAN ID management, improving visibility into how many IDs are available for new ad groups.

The result of Reddit’s moves is that Reddit is now the leading platform/ad network for SKAN 4 adoption on Singular’s SKAN 4 adoption dashboard.

Who else is joining the SKAN 4 trend?

Other leading ad partners include:

• Jammp
• Unity
• Smadex
• Dataseat
• Unicorn
• Mintegral
• AppLovin
• Moloco
• Appier
• Liftoff
• Google Ads
• Kaden
• Remerge

What we haven’t seen yet is Meta reverting back to issuing SKAN 4 postbacks en masse. Google is still in a testing/holding phase as well, as are platforms like TikTok and Snap.

In a recent webinar, most experts on the panel predicted SKAN 4 would only hit majority postback share in Q1 2024. 

My guess is that the ecosystem is basically ready right now, most iOS devices have been updated with a SKAN 4 CV reset bug fix, and the sticking point is that platforms are investing in and supporting their own modeled results preferentially over SKAN 4. They’ll get there, and they’ll eventually flip the switch on SKAN 4, but only when they’re good and ready … and hopefully their customers are primarily relying on internally modeled numbers rather than SKAdNetwork.

Maybe I’m just cynical like that.

In any case: we are now seeing an uptick, and as additional small, medium, and large ad networks begin tipping over into SKAN 4, we’ll likely see that continue.

BTW … have you signed up for SKANATHON yet?

We’re doing a thing. And it’s a pretty awesome thing: SKANATHON. As SKAN 4 postbacks trend up, it’s a smart thing for you to considering joining.

SKANATHON is a live webinar series spread over 2 days and 4 sessions with 17 speakers to get you ready for SKAN 4 in 2023.

• Session 1: SKAN review
  SKAN 3, how it works, what to do
• Session 2: ASA and ASO
  Running Apple Search Ads and boosting app store optimization to mitigate impacts of SKAN.
• Session 3: Singular’s SKAN solution
  There’s a reason the industry sees Singular’s SKAN solution as the leading measurement product for iOS. Get a deep-dive into how it works and why it gives you better results than the competition.
• Session 4: SKAN 4 deep dive
  SKAN 4 is (almost) here. Get ahead of the curve and find out how to take advantage of all its goodies, while not losing backward compatibility with SKAN 3.

Join us here!