SKAdNetwork 4.0: Everything mobile advertisers need to know

hey everybody uh my name is nefu i am a software developer at tengen i'm chris i'm the ceo of tengen been in the industry for over 10 years worked with a lot of mobile advertisers various different applications and helping them grow profitably from two people in a garage to maybe 100 person companies or more and in this video we're going to be talking about sk ad network 4.0 so this year at apple's worldwide developers conference they announced sk network 4.0 these changes provide advertisers and marketers more data to improve the performance of their apps while maintaining the privacy of their users chris can you tell us a bit more about these changes yeah sure there's actually a lot of different changes out there the biggest ones in my opinion are the fact that ski network 4.0 will now have the ability to track multiple conversions possibly uh do some web attributions later in the future i think in terms of multiple conversions this is one of the bigger ones because it will start to provide advertisers more capability to look at things on a cohorted basis there are

some things within the multiple convergence framework that generally are not as fine-grained as before in fact they call it fine-grained versus coarse grain so um they will fall into like three buckets of multiple conversions on a cohorted basis so within the first zero to two days you might get a fine-grained conversion value and that's gonna be a specific conversion value like you know zero to 63 but in the the second two cohorted buckets um where you can see uh more of a lifetime value type of perspective it'll be more of a coarse grained version of this so it'll be either high medium or low but it does give you a little bit more information as an advertiser as to kind of the lifetime performance of a a specific type of cohort whereas that didn't really exist before you would only get like one conversion value from apple and i guess long term this is going to be better for the advertisers because now the ad networks who are receiving you know these sk ad network values whether

it's a coarse grain or fine grain cohorted value they can use that information to help do optimizations as well when can we expect to see sk ad network 4.0 changes in action the answer were given by app call was later this year i also do think that they'll roll it out each of these pieces in different time frames like i do think multiple conversions for example will be rolled out earlier than uh as an example like web attributions but it should be rolled out later this year over a specific time frame for each kind of like incremental development what do these changes mean for advertisers yeah this is a this is a harder question to answer because we don't know how ad networks specifically will use this new information we also don't know to what extent apple will enforce the use of this information there are still a lot of networks who use probabilistic attribution who don't necessarily need this type of information to continue doing what they're doing as apple enforces and we don't know when this is going to be but as apple starts to enforce more ad networks to to fall

within this framework they'll probably end up using it in a lot of different ways uh within their own kind of capabilities so facebook obviously has a lot of different capabilities that's different than something like google or or snapchat in terms of targeting on their audiences and so the relative nature in which they use some of these multiple conversions will all be different ultimately for advertisers they're going to just have to figure out you know which channels provide them the best conversion value to spend ratios depending on whatever channel they're working with and however that channel decides to optimize those values um so there will be a pretty large integral part that i think mmps will play where they will have to figure out and recommend to customers in some ways like what are the best ways to set up your conversion values and what are the best ways to get them to be performant on the different channels that exist yeah i think um it's still very early stages in you know the scan ski network life cycle

for for a number of reasons i think the primary one that everyone is just itching to learn more about from apple is just like how and when are all of these changes going to be enforced i think apple's kind of in a in a tough spot to decide how to enforce this given all of the environment we're in around privacy as well as how they're looked at you know from controlling the app store they're kind of in a tricky spot they're trying to solve the solution from both ends while also helping app developers like do what they need to do i think there's a lot of people and advertisers just waiting to see what happens in terms of enforcement for one but i think also there's i see and talked to a lot of developers out there who quite frankly are just trying to figure out what works best for them and they start off on mostly on channels that are being enforced to try to figure out for themselves like how conversion values work i would say like there's some you know maybe like 10 to 20 of budgets just trying to like figure out and get get a sense for how sk network would work with a specific channel and how it could be optimized and i think this this share is

increasing over time but it'll definitely increase much faster once or if apple ever decides how they want the ecosystem to play out here so like do you feel like it's kind of been almost like a sandbox for advertisers and developers still trying to figure out how to use sk at work and do you think that 4.0 is something that's trying to make that a little bit more defined like do you think the new api changes make it more clearly defined how you can even use skid network to get the value you're looking for yeah definitely still a sandbox uh i would say you know everything pre-scan 4.0 is was even like let's say a smaller sandbox and apple kind of crimped down on a few ad networks to kind of enforce this capability for scan and i think apple is just iterating with scan 4.0 to you know to accommodate a lot more adoption by these ad networks and like help them out i do think that the the real tipping point here is going to be something to do with when advertisers start to see

parity between the old way of doing things let's say with advertising id and deterministic matching as well as you know probabilistic optimization methodologies once scan 4.0 has enough to get an advertiser to parity in terms of like their performance and roi there will be like no question as to why an advertiser shouldn't switch to something like scan with like equal parity of roi i think apple is in a position where they're trying to get to some level of parity with the current channels that exist and once they get to a high enough state where they feel there's parity i think advertisers will naturally prefer the more privacy-centric solutions how does tengen feel about skid network 4.0 changes i think it's definitely you know progressing well progress for ad networks and advertisers who rely on those network optimizations but i think again like there's still a lot more uh enforcement that's needed in order for an attribution provider or someone like tengen to provide a lot of value i

mean again like i do think there is some value in the fact that we can help recommend certain types of conversion value schemas that work better than others on specific networks and i think that's one area that we're actually investing a lot of effort in i think we're also in this sandbox phase with a lot of our customers trying to figure out how to like configure their applications with skid network to the point where they can get to parity with their returns the whole position that we're taking here is can we build a product that gets a customer to roi to parity on a privacy centric platform and if so that's going to be the the de facto way to advertise i think that's the real the the real crux of what we're trying to do here awesome thank you so much chris