iOS 14+ Resource Center

IDFA is the abbreviation for identifier for advertisers on Apple mobile devices (iPhones). You can think of an IDFA as somewhat analogous to an advertising cookie on the web, in that it enables an advertiser to get notified when a user of a phone has taken an action like clicking on their ad or installing their app.

• iOS 14 introduced a host of new privacy-centric features. Notably, it introduced two things:
  • App Tracking Transparency (ATT) – a new framework that prevents app developers from being able to access the iOS advertising ID (IDFA) without an explicitly opt-in by end-users
  • SKAdNetwork – Apple-supported and privacy-compliant attribution framework that app developers can use to measure app marketing efforts without the need to ask for ATT consent
• App Tracking Transparency was excluded from the initial release of iOS 14.0 after Apple granted a period allowing advertisers additional time to consider the changes.
• However, on January 27th, 2020, Apple announced that starting iOS 14.5, Apple will be requiring app developers to implement App Tracking Transparency to continue to access the IDFA. Advertisers will also need to comply with the updated User Privacy and Data Use policies.

The flow for testing SKAdNetwork differs for Advertisers and Publishers. Advertisers, Singular has got you covered. Once you update your Singular SDK with SKAdNetwork support, you can choose your first ad network to test the end-to-end solution with. Singular will manage every step of the process, from conversion values to collecting and enriching SKAdNetwork postbacks.

In order to make sure that we give you a complete picture of how to test SKAdNetwork and offer our support, we’ve published this blog post with a step-by-step  testing guide.

SKAdNetwork currently supports campaign and publisher level granularity (the SKAdNetwork postback contains both the campaign ID and the source app ID). Partners are building innovative ways to encode more information and granularity into the SKAdNetwork campaign IDs (1-100)

For example, networks can encapsulate their outward-facing campaign and creative IDs into one value of SKAdNetwork campaign ID. We are working closely with ad partners on building an integration to get a mapping between their SKAdNetwork campaign IDs to their outward-facing marketing params. This information can be used to build various performance reporting for our customers.

The SKAdNetwork framework introduces a deterministic way to validate installs but also some new risks. To validate installs MMPs as an unbiased facilitators should collect all the SKAdNetwork postbacks on behalf of the advertisers, validate their signed signatures, and dedup by their transaction IDs to avoid double counting.

Currently, a limitation of the SKAdNetwork framework is that the conversion value and the geo information are not signed and can therefore be tampered with. To solve that, we published our secure SKAdnetwork solution which collects the SKAdNetwork postbacks directly from the device before any fraudulent activity can happen.