‘Your App May Soon Be Blocked, and five other things no one is telling you about iOS 14.5.’ That was the name of the presentation I gave last week during WN Winter. Since iOS 14.5 is likely to be released in the upcoming weeks, I would like to share those six reasons with everyone today:

Summary:

1) It will be much harder to convince users to ‘Allow Tracking’ than many think

2) More apps will get rejected due to violations of Apple’s new privacy and data policies

3) A lot of things will break in your BI, both externally and internally

4) ConversionValues, aka SKAdNetwork events, are the key to your UA future

5)  Apple is in charge of attribution now

6) Advertising Reporting gets divided into two dashboards

Slides are also available here.

1) It will be much harder to convince users to ‘Allow Tracking’ than many think

You can show a pre-ATT pop-up, but you are very limited with what you can show/say. Bellow I provide an example of an app that was rejected because of incorrect usage of the pre-ATT pop-up.

Source

2) More apps will get rejected due to violations of Apple’s new privacy and data policies

Thankfully, everyone now understands that fingerprinting is not allowed if a user has not opted-in for tracking. However, there are instances when fingerprinting is labeled differently, and publishers might not even know that they are doing it. There’s a new trend of so-called  generating ‘ad network IDs’ using the same methods as fingerprinting. Apple will reject apps & SDKs that are using both instances above in the early spring.

3) A lot of things will break in your BI, both externally and internally

Your data analysts and engineers use the IDFA as a key to join different data sets. iOS 14.5 means that your reporting for iOS will break and many metrics you learned to rely on will become unavailable. More info can be found here. While IDFV is a legit replacement for many use-cases such as user/impression-level ad revenue, your data team will likely need to spend a considerable amount this spring rebuilding your BI.

Make sure to give your data and BI team a heads up about upcoming changes, so they can plan accordingly.

In the background, we have been working on a project called FullStack, which aims to connect scattered data from various datasets. FullStack is currently an Internal Launch and addresses some of these challenges.  Tenjin clients on the Developer/Enterprise plans can reach out to their account managers to receive help in such cases and learn more about FullStack.

4) ConversionValues, aka SKAdNetwork events, are the key to your UA future

Even though SKAdNetwork is one of the most discussed topics, the main question remains unanswered, “What events should I send as ConversionValues?”  There’s no one right answer here, yet there are many wrong ones. If you are a Tenjin customer, you have probably gone through our iOS 14 training materials with your Success Manager. For non-Tenjin customers, there is a shortened version in our docs

5) Apple is in charge of attribution now

You don’t need an MMP to collect SKAdNetwork data, and you mostly surely should not be paying extra for it. It’s your data in the first place. If an ad network supports the SKAdNetwork framework, you can measure its effectiveness. Moreover, you will not be paying for Installs that MMP or SAN credited your campaign. SKAdNetwork will be one source of truth. Aggregated ConversionValues will become available for all Tenjin customers for free via Reporting Metrics API.

There are more positive moments, outside privacy, of Apple’s centralised approach. I will talk about it next time.

6) Advertising Reporting gets divided into two dashboards

The first dashboard will include SKAdNetwork data without cohort LTV and ROI (due to SKAdNetwork limitations).

The second dashboard will include ‘old’ attribution via IDFA with 80-90% fewer advertising users (due to low ATT opt-in rates) comparing to what you had in the past.

I don’t want to be in the UA managers’ shoes who reconcile the data from both dashboards to make decisions.

That’s why at Tenjin, we are working on the new way to measure performance of ads on mobile –  Attribution Modeling. Using it Tenjin customers will have one dashboard that preserve cohort ROI and LTV metrics in the App Store compliant way. Only limited amount of customers were enrolled into the beta initially, but we expect to provide more spots soon.

Write  to support@tenjin.com if you are not Tenjin customer to learn more.