‘An early red flag’: Mobile ad industry grapples with early uncertainties from Apple’s tracking crackdown

The closer you get to a point of change, the more uncertainty there is.

Just ask mobile ad execs scrambling to make sense of Apple’s monumental privacy update.

It’s been a week since iOS users started receiving notifications that they could turn off cross-app tracking and, unsurprisingly, it’s difficult to draw any meaningful conclusions so far. What is clear is that ad execs will need to get creative to solve user consent challenges within the walls of the Apple App Store. People aren’t fans of sharing the data in the Identifier for Advertisers (IDFA) with their favorite apps it seems.

“We see a trend of more non-IDFA users across our portfolio of games and the ratio goes up to 20% of users with an IDFA and around 80% of those without it depending on the ATT screen implementation and user acquisition strategy,” said Jean-Sebastien Laverge, SVP of Growth at mobile game publisher Tilting Point. “The speed at which those users increase varies by game — specifically the policy they’ve taken for the ATT screen notification.”

It’s a similar story elsewhere in the market.

Less than a third of the bid requests tracked by Blis, a mobile ad tech vendor, over the first three days of ATT’s rollout had an IDFA attached compared to 70% that didn’t have the mobile identifier.

The numbers were backed by Bigabid, a mobile DSP that works with app developers, over a similar period.

“The consent rate of users who are allowing tracking is around 33% based on the limited view I have on apps,” said Ido Raz, president and founder of ad tech vendor Bigabid who spoke to Digiday, six days after the rollout.

Now, these stats must be taken with a pinch of salt. Not least because not every app developer has been proactive at adopting support for ATT. Indeed, many apps don’t appear to have been updated yet and therefore are not allowed to access IDFA on the device under iOS 14.5, Blis concluded. It goes some way to explaining why opt-in rates will differ by market.

In the U.S., for example, nearly half (46%) of the traffic on those devices that could receive the prompts opted in to sharing their data whereas in the U.K. and Australia those rates dropped to 19% and 13% respectively, Blis observed.

“But even the best-case scenario we’re seeing in the U.S. still means advertisers are losing around half of your ability to identify iOS users,” said Aaron McKee, chief technology officer at ad tech vendor Blis. “Losing half your reach on such a value audience is not a great situation to be in.”

And there’s the kicker. For all the caveats around the numbers, they don’t make for good reading — even at this early stage.

In fact, it’s worth noting that Blis was only seeing around 1.3% of its total traffic coming through on iOS 14.5, which introduced the ATT update, at the time. For context: that rate is growing at around 50% per day.

“This will be an …read more

Source:: Digiday