So far, that’s about as certain as things are. In fact, many marketers are none the wiser as to the real impact of ATT.

Questions remain over how it will be enforced, whether it benefits consumers and what marketers should do. Even numbers on how many people have opted-in to the safeguard and what that means for the future have thrown up confusion. One thing’s for sure, though — due to the gradual rollout of ATT to Apple devices, it’s too early to tell whether the changes over the last six weeks indicate any trends.

Finding a way in the dark

For some reason, Apple seems to be slow-rolling ATT.

As it stands, around eight in 10 iOS users still haven’t upgraded to a version of the software that supports ATT, according to recent data. Less than a fifth (18%) of the ad requests — a proxy for the number of users — received by ad tech vendor Fyber were on iOS versions (14.5.1, 14.6, 14.7, and 15) that featured ATT as of May. 29. Let’s call these users early adopters. Similarly, mobile measurement firm Branch puts that number at 20.62% as of June. 1.

From conversations with marketers there are a few factors driving the slow spread of ATT.

“Apple might view the delay as offering a ‘grace period’ to give everyone a chance to adapt, but in reality, nobody is using this grace period to actually do anything,” said Alex Bauer, head of product marketing and market strategy at Branch. “And a lot of industry players seem to think there’s still wiggle-room and ambiguity in Apple’s guidance, so they’re exploiting that as a rationale to continue with business as usual via technical workarounds like fingerprinting,” he added.

Consider what this means: A lack of enforcement of ATT combined with its limited reach creates a situation where the only people who have even seen one of the new ATT prompts so far are early adopters — and even then, their requests to opt-out of tracking aren’t always being respected anyway.

No wonder so many marketers are taking a wait-and-see approach.

A procrastinator’s dream

If there are so many people still using older versions of iOS then they can be tracked and targeted with ads bereft of the limitations of ATT and Apple’s blunt-by-design SKADNetwork measurement tool.

It’s an en excuse to kick the preverbal ATT can down the road — especially given that marketers need to get the same person to opt-in not once (for the publisher-owned app on which the ad is running), but twice (for the app or site the ad is linking toward) to do attribution. Yes, they could become increasingly blind to a section of their activity as a result of …read more

Source:: Digiday

Author: Aaron