How does SKAdNetwork 4.0 work? Q&A with Tenjin’s product manager

hey everyone my name is jaspreet I'm a product manager here at tension I've been in the ad tech industry for about six years now I started my career as a data scientist machine learning engineer building a lot of data pipelines machine learning pipelines to optimize campaigns for advertisers and I think I'm on the other side of advertising now working for a mobile measurement partner attributing collecting and organizing data from various Partners hey everybody my name is nafu I'm a software developer here at tenjin I've been in the ad tech industry for quite a few years now and I've worked as a full stack developer for about seven or eight years and yeah I built a lot of the dashboards and work on some of the Integrations here so Jazz what surprises you the most in this SK ad Network update honestly a big update like this one was released on time and without a beta testing I think that was my biggest surprise typically Apple has always added something valuable in each update like Fidelity type in scan 2.2 ad

networks getting a copy of a non-winning postbacks in scan 3.0 which was the did win parameter and finally in iOS 15 developers were able to get a copy of the winning postbacks but none of these previous updates came with a lot of new features so it was surprising to learn that a scan 4.0 has lots of new big features and B that Apple released 4.0 with iOS 16.1 on time and without a beta for testing if I'm an Advertiser what should I do now what should I be paying attention to I think it might be a little too early for advertisers to start paying attention to SK ad Network 4.0 advertisers can continue focusing on ski Network 3.0 or scan let's call it scan for the time being when mmps and AD networks will scan 4.0 out but when the industry starts adopting scan 4.0 features I think as an Advertiser I

would be excited about getting additional information about my installs but apprehensive at the same time apprehensive because the industry was just catching up with scan 3.0 and how to use it to optimize campaigns but now we'd have to learn new things to be able to optimize campaigns with scan 4.0 data so can you give an overview of what has changed there are lots of new features in scan 4.0 and the main goal of this update is to send advertisers and AD networks more information about their installs while preserving privacy now let's look at these images about the overview of scan 4.0 and the crowd anonymity tiers let me first explain what the crowd anonymity tiers are and then we can dive into the scan 4.0 features after that so Apple has defined four different tiers under crowd anonymity tier zero to tier three and the concept is that an app is considered to be in tier zero when it has like a

few number of installs which is the lowest number of installs and an app is considered to be in tier three if it has a lot of installs so this is how Apple defines these tiers so tier zero view installs here one more installs tier two would have more installs in tier one and tier three would have the highest number of installs and based on what tier an app falls under Apple would send different kinds of data so why don't we start with the conversion values that you get back so we have two conversion values now fine-grained conversion value and coarse grain conversion value buying grain conversion value is the same as before the 64-bit conversion value and they remain unchanged when it comes to the crowd anonymity concept and the random delay that is used to send that conversion value is also the same which is 24 to 48 hours we can now decrease the conversion value whereas before we

were only able to increase it and the 24 hour timer is gone where advertisers get 24 hours to update the CV so in that way apple is trying to make this flow a lot more simplified that's true now let's talk about coarse grain CDs advertisers can get this new CD with the possible values of low medium and high let's look at the scan 4.0 image and let's talk about the coarse grain CV and the fine green CV and when do we receive it at what tiers do we receive it so if you look at that image we can receive a core screen CV when we are in tier one and we can receive A fine grain CV when the app is in tiers two or three so before this we were not able to receive any conversion value into your one so this is the new addition by Apple where now we can get a coarse grain conversion value in tier one when we have a low number of installs while preserving privacy so how are course grained CVS even useful that's a good question so before scan 4.0 apps had to wait to get

into tier two to receive any kind of information about their install so now with coarse green CDs apps can get some information about their installs much faster so if you go back to the image you can see that they can get this information in tier one um much faster than waiting for the app to get into tier two I see so how about Source IDs how are Source IDs different than campaign IDs uh this one is interesting as Source IDs are also hierarchical nature so let's look at this image of source identifier like we've seen this image in WWDC let's just recap it so the hierarchy of source IDs is represented as the last two digits the last three digits and the last four digits so let's look at this image here which is just an example advertisers and AD networks can encode these hierarchies however they want the last two digits might be the same as the campaign ID in

the previous versions the last third digit could represent location and the last fourth digit or the first digit represents placement for example but remember again um it's up to the ad Network or The Advertiser to encode this however they want um and we think that mostly it would be ad networks who's gonna encode this value now let's go back to the scan 4.0 image again and let's see how and when we receive Source IDs so when the app is in tier zero we receive only the two digits the last two digits of the source ID um and the same thing with tier one we receive only the last two digits but as the app goes into tier two and three that is when the number of installs increase increase the app can now receive like Source IDs um but as we as the app advances to tiers two and three the app can receive the last two digits or all the digits of the source ID however it is defined by

the ad Network so you've gone over the different types of conversion values and sort of given us the distinguishing factors between Source IDs and campaign IDs can you kind of cover the the different postbacks that are available here that are shown in the table what do these three postbacks really mean oh yeah that's a great question I've been talking about Source IDs and two conversion values but let's let's talk more about post facts two and three so this is another big addition to scan 4.0 we can now receive three post facts instead of one um and these three post facts are meant to measure different periods of time post install so if you look at that scan 4.0 image again you can see that postback 2 ends at day 7 after install and post Pack 3 ends at day 35 after install and we can lock these two postbacks um and as soon as they're

locked or that time window ends Apple would send this post back with a one to six days of like random delay there's postback one ends at day two after install and we can receive post pack one with a random um delay of one to two days so what are the advantages of post back two and three apps should be able to measure re-engagement now and who is going to receive postbacks two and three only the developer and the winning ad Network finally Apple has added web to app attribution in scan 4.0 let's look at the scan 4.0 image again and I I miss one detail when the app is at tier three apple apple will send and you Source app ID or the source domain like um if you're using web to app attribution how does tangent feel about the changes that are coming in SK ad Network 4.0 I think we have mixed feelings about it while scan 4.0 looks way more promising than

scan 3.0 for advertisers it is hard to tell if the industry can build a complete solution which accurately estimates Roi or row as that would increase cancer adoption but looking at how scan has evolved over time I think we're going towards a complete solution and since preserving privacy is very important to us I feel optimistic about it given the complexity of scan 4.0 features I think we will play a pivotal role in conveying these features in the most appropriate way that helps our customers make the right decisions not just us but all mmps so the role of mmps is only getting more crucial what should tangent customers expect now in terms of ski ad Network 4 related features we're working towards bringing scan 4.0 features in a reporting Suite we've been communicating with our partners to synchronize implementation and launch we will continue to support older versions so backwards compatibility is going to be important when we launch scan 4.0 web to app attribution is out of scope right

now but this is something that we've been brainstorming for some time um some more details on it they're TBD and I think our customers can expect something in the first quarter of 2023 but it's a loose estimate so no promises there sounds good knowing I'm I'm the I'm on the software developer side could you dive a little deeper about what your scan solution is and maybe talk a little bit more about idfa and scan so scan state which which often so we have always provided a separate reporting for scan in our dashboard with keeping transparency in Mind by transparency what does that exactly mean so by transparency I mean providing very detailed reporting using many different metrics we've always prioritized providing transparency to our customers by providing them as much information as possible for them to be able to take the most optimal decisions right we have

different install metrics we have reported installs um we have tracked installs we have Scan installs we have installs from ad networks and so on that's what I mean by um transparency I see but sometimes this transparency can look like noise to sum off are not so mature customers who are just looking for a more guided setup anyways coming back to this topic while today we offer a scan dashboard we do see it need to offer a complete solution for iOS recording in the near future that may scan more readable in a sense and something that helps with correctly estimating Roi by keeping transparency in mind but at the same time presenting transparency as actionable information rather than confusion or noise we also want to make the conversion value setup process more intuitive for our customers as we've had many customers who still don't understand how to set conversion

values and are looking to make this process more seamless between them and the ad networks could you talk a bit more about how your partners are planning to adopt scan 4.0 we've been communicating with some of the major Partners regarding scan 4.0 and they're still in a planning phase trying to get their ducks in a row I think all of us are but given our past experiences we're expecting our partners to react differently to scan 4.0 and we'd have to build something different to accommodate like all the nuances but we'll do our best to build something that is standardized for our customers when should we see the changes take full effect oh good question let's try to answer this while examining the conditions that must be met to get a scan 4.0 post by so the first one is the ad Network needs to generate and add signature for 4.0 um the app needs to be built with iOS 16.1 SDK or later um and the advertised app is App Store signed and is running on a device with iOS 16.1 or later I think conditions two

and three most likely will get adopted first and condition one will take the longest time but full effect is a bit hard to Define does it also mean that ad networks learn to use scan 4.0 data to optimize campaigns if yes then that could take up to a year or more again given our past experience it's it's a loose estimate but given that we get more signal now which also means more signal to optimize campaigns I think ad networks have an incentive to roll this out sooner rather than later I see so before we wrap up do you have any sort of closing thoughts on what you think about SK ad Network 4.0 or maybe how you feel the industry is going to react to it is adopting or reacting to it right now Etc so personally I am passionate about privacy way of advertising I think SK ad Network could be the standardized way of doing ad attribution and Reporting but at the same time we've

seen that the market has not fully adopted to Stanford scan yet so we still have a long way to go but I I am excited that the industry is taking privacy more seriously and Building Solutions towards a more privacy Safe Way of advertising so that's always very exciting to me um and it it just you know doing something that helps our customers are doing something that helps people right we're preserving their privacy um that's always great and I think excites a lot of us gotcha okay thank you so much Jazz thank you for all your Insight thank you