SKAN vs AAK: similarities and differences

SKAN vs AAK: what are the differences and what are the similarities? And, do they even matter right now?

We all know that SKAdNetwork is kind of old news and AdAttributionKit is the new kid in class. Does that mean all your hard-won knowledge about Apple’s privacy framework for mobile attribution is obsolete?

The good news: absolutely not. Every network that has implemented SKAN is still running SKAdNetwork, while AAK implementation is probably not even on any adtech company development timeframes yet.

The other good news: there is some new stuff in AAK, which is pretty minor. But, it’s all good: extra functionality that makes SKAN better. (Or AAK better … you know what I mean.) 

Ultimately, however, the SKAN vs AAK question probably won’t matter for a very long while anyways. More on that later …

1. SKAN vs AAK: what’s the same?

Let’s start here: Apple says that AAK is 100% fully interoperable with SKAdNetwork. That means that if you know SKAN, you know AAK.

What are the key points of similarity? Well, at a very high level, both are privacy-preserving methods of attribution that live largely on-device and that send notifications to marketers and ad networks about the effectiveness of their advertising.

Getting a bit more into the weeds, both have at least 7 major points of commonality when we look at SKAN vs AAK:

• 3 separate postbacks 
  • 3 opportunities to give you insight into ad effectiveness
• Both coarse and fine conversion values
  • Postbacks with 2 types of conversion values
    • Fine conversion values with up to 64 values
    • Coarse conversion values with 1 of 3 possible values
  • The first postback can be fine, giving you more granular data, if you have enough install volume per campaign
  • The 2nd and 3rd postbacks can only be coarse conversion values
• Crowd Anonymity governs how much data marketers get
  • More volume per campaign gets you more granular data
  • In SKAN 3, this is called Privacy Thresholds, in SKAN 4, it’s called Crowd Anonymity
• Random delays before postbacks get fired
  • There are 3 conversion windows from which you can get data
    • Postback 1: 0-2 days
    • Postback 2: 3-7 days
    • Postback 3: 8-35 days
  • Plus, there are added random delays: 0 to 24 hours after the conversion window
  • So that you can’t reverse engineer SKAN or AAK and break privacy
• Conversion value locking
  • If you think you’ve got all the data you need before a conversion period is complete, you can lock your conversion value and get it earlier
  • Note, there will still be a random delay to enhance privacy … 
• Source identifiers
  • Campaign information about the ad that you’re getting data on
• App ID, which is now called Advertised item ID
  • Information about what app you’re advertising

If you’re paying attention to those points of similarity, then you’ve also picked up on something else important. AAK might be 100% compatible with SKAdNetwork, but it’s an upgrade to the most recent version of SKAdNetwork.

Which, of course, is SKAN 4.

Not SKAN 3.

AAK is still compatible with SKAN 3 in the sense that SKAN 4 is compatible with SKAN 3, but it’s built on SKAN 4. In fact, AAK is essentially SKAN 5 … the SKAN 5 we kind of expected for a year or so.

What that means is that if you’re still kinda just functioning on SKAN 3, there actually will be a bit of an upgrade curve, just because there’s all the new SKAN 4 features. 

And if that’s the case, Singular has a ton of on-demand webinars you can check out, a SKAN 3 to SKAN 4 guide you can read, and way too many blog posts you can skim through to get it all figured out.

2. SKAN vs AAK: what’s different?

There are 5 major differences between SKAdNetwork … even version 4 … and AdAttributionKit. Actually as many as 6 if you understand the full scope of AAK.

In fact, SKAN vs AAK is a little bit apple vs oranges, in a sense. Because unlike SkAdNetwork, which is only about mobile app install attribution, AAK is actually 2 things:

• App AdAttributionKit
• Web AdAttributionKit

App AAK is the new SKAdNetwork, and it’s for mobile app install attribution, just as we’ve always known. Web AAK is the new Private Click Measurement, which is an attribution framework for the Safari browser. 

It works fairly similarly to SKAN and AAK on the mobile side, but it really hasn’t been significantly updated in 3 years. So we can probably expect more from Apple on that at some point.

(And interestingly, Web AdAttributionKit actually does matter. Safari has about a 30% global market share for mobile browsing … and that hits 54% in iOS-heavy countries like the U.S. So it’s not something marketers can completely ignore.)

But if we focus primarily on mobile app install attribution, there are at least 5 key differences between AdAttributionKit and SKAdNetwork:

1. Built for multiple app stores
The biggest and most significant change is that AdAttributionKit is built for a world of multiple app stores, thanks to the EU and its Digital Markets Act. 

That means there is now a “marketplace identifier” which will indicate which app marketplace an app install came from.

Does this really matter right now? 

Of course not.

But after the EU and Apple fight a bit more about the terms around third-party app stores, and it becomes not totally financially insane to run a third-party app store, then it will likely start to matter.

2. Re-engagement support is here at last
One of the most requested features for SKAdNetwork was re-engagement support, which has now arrived. 

Note: this doesn’t mean anything around audiences for retargeting or anything like that. It’s simply about measurement support.

The “conversion-type” field in AdAttributionKit can have 1 of 3 different values: download, redownload, and re-engagement.

3. Support for multiple creative types
In SKAdNetwork, an ad is an ad is an ad. AdAttributionKit, however, has explicit differentiation in both displaying ads and attributing conversion by creative type: 

• Clickable custom creative
  • Think banner ad, or image ad
  • This is an ad anywhere that leads to any app marketplace
  • There’s a maximum of 15 minutes between when the app impression instance is initialized and when a tap (or click) can be registered
  • Note that for a custom click ad, viewing it does not create an impression
  •  … meaning that the only measurement modality is a click
• View-through ads
  • These are typically videos and possibly also playable ads
  • They can be anywhere and lead to any marketplace
  • They must be displayed for a minimum of 2 seconds in order to generate potential view-through attribution
  • The same ad network cannot have multiple open view-through ad presentations for the same advertised app at the same time
  • In terms of measurement modalities, view-through ads only can result in views … not clicks
• Recommendations
  • Recommendations are in-app app listing features like SKOverlay (a small view into an app listing page)
  • There’s also SKStoreProductViewController (a larger, full-screen version of the app listing page)
  • While Apple doesn’t explicitly say so, these likely only work with the original App Store
  • Recommendations are unique under AAK, because while the other 2 creative types have only 1 measurement modality each, recommendations have 2:
    • Recommendations register a view when they pop up
    • And they register a click when they are tapped
  • Clearly, using SKOverlay and SKStoreProductViewController is going to be very powerful under AAK … perhaps even more so that it currently is under SKAN

As you can see, AAK only supports 2 types of ad interaction: click and view. It would have been interesting to see another, like “play” for playables. My assumption is that ad networks that support AAK will build multi-component ad units, just like today, that have video components, playable components, and maybe also banner components as well as recommendation components.

Which will be … interesting in terms of views, clicks, and ultimately attribution postbacks.

4. Support for deeplinks (universal links)
If advertisers want to opt into re-engagement measurement, they can add the “eligible-for-re-engagement” flag to the code that displays an ad. 

(Frankly, I don’t see why you wouldn’t: there’s no downside, and it just adds an extra element of measurement that could provide valuable information.)

If the re-engagement flag is present and AdAttributionKit detects that the app being advertised is already installed, it can open the app to a specific screen using universal links. 

5. Developer mode
It’s generally hard to test SKAdNetwork today because the postback delays and long conversion windows make developers wait a long time to find out if what they did worked. 

Now Apple will allow you to set a developer mode for AdAttributionKit, which will remove the time randomization, shorten conversion windows, and send postbacks much quicker.

Other than this, AAK and SKAN 4 are basically the same.

3. But does it really matter?

When looking at SKAN vs AAK, we started off with what’s the same, and then we talked about what’s different. There’s another very important question, though, that I promised to address right at the top of this post

Does it really matter?

Does AAK really matter?

And I’m not sure that it does, or that it will in the near future.

AdAttributionKit, like SKAdNetwork, is a framework. It’s not an app, and it’s not a standalone product. It’s a bunch of software and a bunch of rules. To be effective, AAK needs to be implemented not only by Apple on iOS devices, but also by ad networks, MMPs, and advertisers.

In other words, it’s a complex beast. There’s a reason that 2 years later, SKAN 4 is still not widely adopted.

If you look at which adtech companies are adopting SKAN 4, and therefore are most likely to adopt AdAttributionKit, it’s the independents. The big ad platforms, the walled gardens, they’ve adapted to the post-IDFA era with their own modeling-based measurement, with their own first-party data, and tools and data that is inside their walls and under their control. 

In other words, they’ve limited their exposure to Apple’s guidelines, requirements, and frameworks. And they have limited incentive to come back and play in Apple’s backyard by Apple’s rules.

So yeah, I guess AAK is the future. Just don’t hold your breath.

The future could be a very long way away.