While many have praised Apple’s new, user-driven stance to data gathering, for others the reason for its introduction was slightly more sinister. Apple had made themselves a ‘walled garden’ with unbridled access to their own user-data which they could bargain out piecemeal to developers and publishers. This put developers wanting to utilise it for user acquisition in an awkward spot, where that most vital part of making an app or game a success was suddenly ten-times more costly and less effective.
However, there's always an answer and services are now appearing to capitalise on the ‘post-IDFA world’ and help restore some of the insights that Apple have removed.
One of these is Swaarm, recently featured on Gamesbeat. Swaarm utilises what they dub a PEA (Privacy Enabled Attribution) Chain which allows clients to identify which advertisers are attracting the most users, and by that, identify which campaigns and thus which audiences are successful. They also point out that with Google already trialling a ‘privacy sandbox’, it’s not a matter of if, but when Google makes similar changes to Android.
A throwback to the old days
In many ways, what this shows, and what digital marketing is doing in a post-IDFA world, is utilising methods that are centuries old. Identifying your audience and appealing to them is one thing, but knowing how successful said campaigns are is even more important. When margins are so slim in the digital world, you want to ensure you aren’t wasting money on a UA campaign which goes nowhere.
As Gamesbeat state, with Google now considering its own IDFA-style arrangement for user data, and an increasing push from governments around the world to prioritise protecting user data, learning how to deal with the iOS ecosystem is important. That can be by utilising systems like SkAd, or by working with new and emerging companies that are working around these restrictions.
We previously covered the new SKAdNetwork 4.0 release and how its changes might affect developers. As Apple moves to sharing more data, but in an anonymised sense it may be that we see a return to demographic-based advertising in a broader sense, rather than personalised advertising.
