iOS 14 seems to be one of Apple’s most significant iOS updates so far, introducing iPhone home screen redesign, new features and updates for existing apps, Siri improvement, and many other tweaks. The change that affects the online advertising industry the most is the privacy-related matter of the IDFA (Identifier for Advertisers) opt-in for all apps that Apple is implementing in iOS14.

To alleviate the impact and allow attribution and ad-measurement Apple introduced two new frameworks: the ATT (AppTrackingTransparency) and SKAdNetwork. MMPs and other tracking platforms have come up with a variety of solutions to this new attribution challenge. In this article, you can learn how to navigate this new landscape using Swaarm features.

Attribution has always been a central part of mobile performance marketing. Connecting actions that the user performs in relation to the ad (impressions, clicks, etc) with actions that the user performs inside the advertiser’s app allowed players in the market to operate more efficiently.

For each successful attribution is done by the MMP, a chain of attributions is being performed in the ad network world. Each ad network is able to attribute the original click and therefore the user data of it with the postback being received by leveraging the click id. This simple token ensured that all participating ad-tech players could attribute their user and campaign data to the conversions values and use it to optimize their traffic. The process was simple and democratic, ad networks could participate without having to register to any central authority and they were free to use as little or as much user data as they saw fit in their processes.

The increased privacy solutions developed by Apple in iOS 14 break this model and make attribution on the user-level impossible. Without attribution, optimizations cannot occur in the ad chain. This leads to both decreased ROI and increased risk for advertisers as well as lower revenues for publishers who cannot monetize their traffic effectively.

We at Swaarm believe that the power and beauty of the internet consist of its distributed and varied nature, where small publishers and large media conglomerates can thrive and provide valuable content to internet users.

This is why we created the Privacy Enabled Attribution chain method. The main goal of the PEA chain attribution method is to enable attribution throughout the whole chain without collecting any personal information.

We achieve this by generating a special token called “PEA Chain” that is passed in the click and can be retrieved in the postback. The token contains all the information needed for the network to determine the campaign and traffic source. Furthermore, the token also contains all the data for the rest of the networks in the chain to identify their traffic sources, given that this information was provided for the impression/click. This allows networks that use Swaarm to work with publishers of varied sizes by giving them access to the attribution data that they need to successfully optimize their traffic.

Please follow the following articles to implement your privacy enabled tracking with your partners:

With the Privacy Enabled Chain attribution method, we ensure that correct non-probabilistic attribution can be made throughout the whole network chain. The method successfully protects the user’s privacy and guarantees fairness and exactness in the attribution process.

Swaarm’s mission is to provide premium tracking services to mobile affiliate networks of any size and we believe that the current network ecosystem can continue to flourish despite the limiting changes Apple is introducing.