In June 2023, Apple held its WWDC event and shared some updates on its latest plans to increase user privacy. Naturally, these announcements will significantly impact mobile advertising and the entire ad-tech ecosystem.
At Bigabid we follow these updates and constantly analyze their impact on our customers and the service we provide.
The majority of the changes announced will have a major impact on exchanges and MMPs. The way these parties will address these changes will impact all the programmatic DSPs and advertisers. We are in constant communication with different exchanges and MMPs to discuss our approach to these changes.
SKAN 5.0 was mentioned very briefly at the event. It seems that Apple plans to release another major version of SKAN, but the details are not finalized yet. The timeline that was mentioned was “later this year”.
The positive aspect of this announcement is that Apple keeps adding capabilities that will help app developers and advertisers run their campaigns. However, at this time the usage of SKAN is low, and the vast majority of SKAN postbacks are still not even on SKAN 4.0.
Our approach at Bigabid is investing a lot of effort in the latest versions of SKAN. Our current focus is SKAN 4.0, and we will examine SKAN 5.0 when it is available.
We believe that by the time SKAN attribution will outperform the MMPs’ solutions for iOS attribution, SKAN 3.0 will no longer be relevant.
The main capabilities we can understand from the announcement are:
● Re-engagement – at this stage, this seems only relevant for users who have the app installed, not for the retargeting of users who uninstalled the app already.
● Better measurement of ad performance and events that followed an interaction with an ad.
● The ability to measure incidental re-exposures (using the re-engagement capability) to users that have the app.
Apple announced several updates to their 3rd party SDK policies. The main changes are related to forcing app developers to be very concise and accurate about their use of personal information and the information they use to track users.
This is done by standardizing the way all 3rd party SDKs communicate their privacy manifest. Some SDKs will be blacklisted.
On top of that, there are changes to the way an app explains the information it uses for tracking. With these changes, if the user did not provide explicit consent, tracking will be blocked.
We can anticipate the impact of these updates will be in these areas:
As mentioned above, Bigabid is discussing these changes with the exchanges and MMPs we work with. We believe that with this release, we will still have enough information to deliver positive ad performance in iOS.
Safari will get a privacy-related update as well. This update will make it harder for advertisers to target their audiences on mobile web.
We believe that in the long-term, this will cause the shifting of user acquisition funds from mobile web to in-app.
