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Apple shocked the app advertising market when they announced the new update of iOS 14 and its change in the IDFA (The Identifier for Advertisers) which is used to track user’s interactions and behavior across various apps and deliver specific ads based on that behavior and interest., now Apple decided to postpone this feature of the IDFA opt-in module until early next year.

The IDFA change will be in a permission “as a notification” that will appear for the user from a specific app to track his or her activity and interactions with other companies, websites and apps then target them with ads related to their actions as we mentioned.

Therefore, Facebook filed a public complaint that the privacy policy could negatively impact the ad market in Apple’s ecosystem, Facebook has published a public note warning that Apple’s new policy will not only threaten the prospects of marketers and advertisers on the iPhone (including Facebook itself).

But it will raise the question of whether Facebook will continue to support its Audience Network program (which uses IDFAs. Facebook’s main services for app developers and advertisers) on the platform.

So Apple now responds to that, by saying that as long as developers can implement this notification and request for permission, doing so is not a must in the new update. to give developers time to make necessary changes, apps will be required to obtain permission to track users starting early next year.

Taking into consideration that it’s just a temporary delay as Apple intends to establish the requirement in the future, and as long as it’s mandatory, so Apple will grant apps and marketers enough time to adapt to the upcoming change.

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• Measure the ROI of each running campaign.
• Re-target users who didn’t convert from your campaigns.
• Deliver campaigns across many channels such as Push, Web Push, Email, SMS.

Google’s New Privacy Attempt for Children

Google’s latest announcement was focused on children’s digital security.

They are planning to make an update that will increase age-sensitive ads’ control.
According to the announcement, the update will restrict some ad targeting based on children under 18. In a blog post

Google said the update will allow all under-18s and their parents or guardians to request that photos of teenagersbe deleted from Google Image search results to decrease child abuse.

Furthermore, the new features, including “take a break” and bedtime reminders, were on the way.
For users who are 13 to 17, the autoplay can be automatically turned off. Also, more features will aim to allow the users to monetize their settings for their best well-being.

In the upcoming weeks, Google will restrict excessively commercial ads on YouTube Kids.

Those materials will include videos that focus on product promotion that encourages children and youth to spend unconditioned money

You can see the video below for a detailed analysis and explanation of YouTube’s latest updates:

ATT: Apple’s Privacy Changes Don’t Seem To Affect Gaming Apps’ Revenue

Apple’s iOS privacy modifications, which mainly introduced the App Tracking Transparency framework, shook the mobile industry. As we mentioned in our previous blogs, the feature gave the users the ability to control and see which app was tracking which data.

At the same time, Apple asked the users’ permission when entering the app if they allowed the app to track their data.

Marketers, and especially gaming apps, have been concerned about fewer imported applications being installed in Facebook ads.

Some businesses have delayed upgrading their apps to avoid the ATT message until they discover
a method to collect the needed data again.
Apple was, and still is, the primary target for the majority of mobile firms. They argue that Apple excludes rivals by blocking economically important information from being disclosed.

But when time passes, the data shows that ATT didn’t affect the mobile industries’ revenues and downloads. More than 3 of 4 Apple users have updated their iPhones to at least 14.5. Meanwhile, there was no decrease in the gaming app’s download rate. When we see the revenue of the apps, we don’t see a decrease either.

We know that Apple specifically prohibits fingerprinting to identify a device or a user individually. Still, some companies think that probabilistic attribution is a solution that can assist marketers in predicting if the ad reached a download or not. We need to say that probabilistic attribution is also controversial.

You can read the discussion and explanation in our previous blogs.

Can it Be the Next Big Thing?: Supply Path Optimization

There is a strong expectation from marketers to have a bigger ROI for every dollar spent. Meanwhile, the complexity and privacy issues in the digital area and the marketing that’s been thought of are being challenged. The urge and race to gain more revenue from ads sometimes result in unwanted consequences. Lately, a technology that’s giving promising signals is gaining attention: supply path optimization (SPO).

SPO refers to strategies developed by advertisers and/or demand-side platforms (DSPs) to provide the most direct, trustworthy, verifiable, and efficient pathways to publisher inventory.

According to Anupam Dikhit, Microsoft’s APAC director of digital, social, and experiential marketing, untransparent media always necessitates more investment. This perspective lacks a piece of specific information about the audience, causing uncertainty about where that dollar goes. In other words, untransparent ads cannot aim at a solely specific audience. That’s why tracking and measuring the money invested in that specific campaign is getting more difficult.

You can watch a webinar with Anupam Dinkhit explaining data-informed strategies:

To get more into the reasoning, we can say auditing, measuring, analyzing, and optimizing around a more transparent approach has traditionally been very laborious, which means marketers frequently rely on agency and tech partners for assistance.
Technology is improving in the future, with solutions such as supply-chain optimization and markets coming into play.

Finally, verifiable and direct campaigns might be the future of digital marketing. Automation is still required In addition, the most efficient ways need to be embraced.

In this newsletter, we mentioned Google’s latest privacy updates for youth, ATT’s effect on most mobile apps, and supply-chain optimization,

which is considered the new way of doing digital marketing. We will be following up on those topics and bringing you the latest updates. To be informed about what’s up, scroll down to subscribe to our newsletter.

Appgain Mobile Marketing Weekly News Digest
– Issue 7 –

Hello! This week we will mention Apple’s latest updates from WWDC and Google’s phaseout of the third-party cookie. 

The previous week, we put the ATT discussion on the table and mentioned the pain points of the Apps. Some of them came up with different data collecting ways, and some saw those solutions as temporary solutions to be restricted soon. Finally, we believe Apple will bring more clarity to the restrictions for the Apps to be prepared faster. 

Meanwhile, Google was working on privacy too: They announced that users would learn about the data share such as location, camera, or even outside the app activation. 

If you haven’t read it, you can visit the blog page here.

Google Postponed The Third Party Cookie Restriction 

Based on the company’s announcement, phasing out the support will start in mid-2023 and finish in late 2023. 

Vinay Goel (Privacy Engineering Director, Chrome) pointed that Sandbox Privacy, which includes removing Chrome’s third-party cookie support, made a significant process. But at the same time, he spoke for all of us and accepted that the ecosystem needs some time to understand and apply those changes. That’s why they decided to slow down the initiative. 

There are two stages for the third part cookie support removal: 

Stage 1 (Starting late- 2022) After Google completes the testings and launches the APIs in Google, they will announce the start of stage 1. During stage 1, marketers & apps will be required to adapt their services for 9 months. Goel mentioned that they would be sure if every app’s questions would be answered. Before passing to stage 2, the feedback process will be carefully held, he points. 

Stage 2 (Starting mid-2023): After 3 months of stage 2, third-party cookie support will be removed. 

A detailed schedule is expected to be announced soon. We will inform you about the news with our weekly blogs. (You can now scroll down & subscribe to our newsletter 🙂 ) 

Even this news can be seen as a great relief in these major changing times of digital marketing. If alternative methods are not in effect, it could cause a big choke for the ad tracking. Google has ramped up its Privacy Sandbox ideas, but the ad sector has mostly seen them as inefficient substitutes and didn’t find them enough. Google kept its silence against those reactions. 

Google also repeated its commitment to ensuring that third-party cookies are not substituted with other types of individual monitoring or “covert techniques” such as fingerprinting. It’s unclear how this recent move will affect third-party cookie solutions that have gained traction last year, such as The Trade Desk’s Unified ID 2.0 and Lotame’s Panorama ID. Anyway, the lengthier timetable for Google to build its own replacements may weaken these efforts.

To give a conclusion,  Google’s delay assures that issues about how to manage privacy and monitoring in digital marketing will linger for the foreseeable future. Getting it right is critical as the importance of digital marketing grows, but the lengthier timetable is likely to complicate matters for marketers. 

Apple’s Privacy Cautions from WWDF

Apple keeps leading the privacy protections among other tech companies after bringing live the ATT.

 The latest announcement includes some protections at Siri, iCloud, copy-paste, photos, and location features. Let’s see what are the news one by one: 

Process Audio of Siri Requests on Device:

The audio of users’ demands will be activated faster on their iPhone or iPad by default with on-device speech recognition. For apple, this solves one of the most serious privacy problems for voice assistants: uninvited audio recording. It’s also mentioned in the announcement and the conference that Siri demands will also be handled on-device, allowing them to be completed without an internet connection, such as starting applications, setting timers and alarms, altering settings, or controlling music.

iCloud+

Private Relay is embedded directly into iCloud, allowing users to connect to the web more securely and privately. While using Safari, Private Relay will keep the user’s device encrypted (preventing even Apple or the user’s network provider from seeing the data). All of the user’s requests are then routed through two different internet relays. The first assigns the user an anonymous IP address, while the second decrypt the site URL. As a result, determining who a person is and which websites they visit will be prevented.

Furthermore, Hide My Email allows users to use random email addresses that forward to their personal inbox whenever they want to keep their personal email address hidden. Hide My Email, which is built directly into Safari, iCloud settings, and Mail, also allows users to create and remove as many addresses as they need at any moment, giving users control over who may contact them.

Secure Paste

Developers may utilize the secure paste to allow users to paste from another app without knowing what was copied until the user takes action to paste it into their app. Users will paste without being notified by the pasteboard transparency notification when developers utilize secure paste.

Photos Limited Library Access

With expanded Images limit library access, developers will provide smart functionality even when a user has only allowed limited access. 

Sharing the Current Location

Users can easily share their current location with an app once with share the current location, without offering the developer additional access after that action. Developers will be able to personalize and incorporate the share current location button straight into their apps.

We will be checking the latest news and developments in the mobile marketing area and bringing them to you with our weekly blogs. To be updated, scroll down to subscribe to our newsletter! 

Hello!  In our new newsletter, we mentioned Apple’s latest announcements for developers from WWDC. 

• The highlight was on XCode Cloud, which enables developers to improve and work on their apps faster. 

• Built-in concurrency support for Swift will be available to anyone, but now only in the beta version. 

• They’re planning to revolutionize 3D writing with the Object Capture feature. 

• Google announced to remove Android Ads Tracking from the users who restrict app tracking, and lastly, the iOS 14.5.1 update has arrived to fix some bugs related to the Apple ATT. To read more, you can visit our previous newsletter. 

Today, we will bring you the latest discussions and news on Apple’s privacy issues. 

After Apple’s enforcement regarding users’ data privacy, apps started to generate new ways to understand their users for a better user experience and more to-the-point marketing. The strongest solution now focuses on fingerprinting. Some apps found the solutions as “bugs of the enforcement,” while others found them promising.

After that, we will go over the latest situation with the opt-in rates for ATT. 

Are Apple’s privacy restrictions unclear? 

We already know that using fingerprints to identify the users or the device is now specifically allowed. Some apps came up with a solution: “probabilistic attribution.” It is used to measure engagement with mainly these metrics:

• Anonymous user behavior in the app, 
• Install Time, 
• Click Time, 
• SDKAdnetwork Data

Those restricted data help apps measure engagement rates

With probabilistic attribution, apps can directly download and use the information for a specific campaign without using personal information about a user. This means the data will not be matched with an IP address. 

While apps that use fingerprinting for the ATT update are being rejected for using “algorithmically converting devices and usage data to create a unique identifier to track the user,”

In the rejection mail from Apple, the apps can see which commands caused the problem. Some examples: 

• local collation identifier
• local country code
• Local Grouping Separator

When the enforcements are not explained extensively, it creates time and effort waste and confusion for the apps. At this point, app developers and marketers expect more clarity from Apple. Most of the company believes fingerprinting will not fade as quickly, but it still cannot reach a consensus about what to do. Companies are trying to find out what the limitations and the borderlines are. Probabilistic attribution is one of the solutions for some measurement companies. 

The debate starts here: some say those solutions are short-sided. In other words, they are valid until they are warned to change the data collection. From another perspective, apps are only trying to test the cases to understand the limitations. 

Nicole Perrin, the eMarketer analyst, is underscoring the importance of Apple following the apps and informing them when the updates are out of line, so as not to create more confusion. To her, this is the only way to make the enforcements meaningful and useful. Other companies will follow an equal competition environment if this happens, and the mobile marketing field will be more balanced. 

Google Is Moving Forward With Privacy Policies

After Apple, Google is moving forward with a more privacy-oriented experience for its users. 

We wrote that Google’s privacy policies would be valid in a year. There is Android Ads ID removal for the users who disabled app tracking.

Now, Google is accelerating its work. The previous week, the firm launched its second beta for Android 12, a privacy dashboard that allows users to learn about which data the app is reaching, such as the user’s camera, location, or outside app activation of the user’s Android.

Mobile marketers are searching for alternatives, including consolidation with other apps to increase internal marketing capacity. 

While it’s too early to say how many users will restrict app tracking, Apple’s ATT can give us some probable insights. (check below) 

For further information, you can check out the video below:

What’s the Latest ATT Opt-In Situation?

After the day that Apple’s ATT restrictions arrived, on April 26, Flurry reported the statistics weekly. When iOS 14.5 first launched, the percentage of active mobile users who allowed apps to track was 31%. Even after it sharply declines, it keeps increasing. We interpret the situation as more apps get used to the new regulation and learn how to create better prompts to explain how the data will be used; the users’ opt-in rate increases. 

When it comes to the active mobile users who restrict app tracking, there has been a slight decrease in the rates since the first day, but it started to increase in the last two weeks. 

Apps are taking their time to prepare the best prompt to ask users more properly to track their behavior and why. You can check out some tips from our previous newsletter mentioning how to make a good ATT prompt.

Have You Verified Your Company Through Facebook and Google Ads? 

To launch your campaign with paid marketing on Facebook and use Google Ads, you must verify your company. Since it’s still pandemic, the process is taking almost 48 hours. To run your campaigns successfully, don’t delay it! 

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