An IDFA Retrospective: What really happened? What’s next?

By Grit Daily Staff Grit Daily Staff has been verified by Muck Rack's editorial team
Published on July 7, 2022

Apple’s decision to eliminate IDFA with the launch of iOS 14 has certainly forced the industry to do some serious soul searching and naturally led to a scramble for new solutions. But, it certainly didn’t mean the end of effective advertising on mobile. It just meant that advertisers and tech companies had to rethink what it means to provide relevant ads to users and how they do it. The IDFA for Apple was one tool – albeit a highly effective one – but their decision ultimately spurred the industry forward to develop new and varied solutions and ways to imagine the advertising landscape.

When Apple announced their plan to remove a key mobile identifier for advertising (the IDFA), the initial reaction from mobile advertisers, app developers and tech providers ran the gamut – from concern and panic to resignation and cautious optimism. Some were embracing it. Some clearly were not. Nonetheles, the turmoil eventually gave way to resignation, excitement and some truly unexpected findings as life without IDFA set in and the mobile world adjusted to the new realities Apple’s decision brought.

We spoke with a selection of experts from different points on the mobile advertising spectrum to gauge how this tectonic shift in the mobile landscape met or exceeded expectations, and what unusual secondary effects they found in the wake of its implementation.

Grit Daily: It’s been over a year since Apple’s initial announcement. What has changed for you since then in terms of your original perception of this coming change and its impact on the mobile advertising landscape since then?

Yulia Kournik (Product Manager, YouAppi): When Apple announced its new privacy policy we knew that we had to deal with the opt-out users and find a new strategy. But how can you offer personalized ads if you can’t access the IDFA? Besides that, we were not completely sure which opt-in rates to expect. It took a few months before we started seeing the full effect of Apple’s change as Apple device owners update their iOS software.

At this point, we are confident that we have managed to adjust our product to the new reality. We created a new solution that uses a blend of probabilistic and contextual, privacy-safe data to undertake an alternative targeting type without IDFA. We continue working on improving our methods of collecting contextual user data, targeting the right audience, finetuning our capabilities for detecting users without the IDFA, and serving personalized ads.

With the actions we’ve taken and the high opt-in rates, we are optimistic, as we see that mobile advertising is able to work efficiently in a new privacy era.

Mike Brooks (SVP Marketing, Weather Bug): WeatherBug was worried about iOS 14 and the impacts it would have on growth and monetization, and we were right to be. We’ve realized CPM loss, as tracking hasn’t been applicable to most iOS users. Our life in the iOS acquisition world was made more difficult along with everyone else’s.

Grit Daily: There was a fair amount of confusion and worry around many elements of the rollout. How much did the confusion and worry match the reality of the rollout?

Yulia Kournik (Product Manager, YouAppi): It’s no secret that SKAdNetwork provides limited opportunities for making targeting decisions. Our goal is to make the most of the data provided by SKAdNetwork data. Here, of course, cooperation with the application developer and the MMP is very important in order to use this framework as efficiently as possible.

Kochava Product Marketing: In theory, SKAdNetwork is an intelligent, privacy safe mechanism to provide deterministic marketing feedback. Like all SaaS products, iteration and product development is an important part of that product’s lifecycle.

Grit Daily: Apple tried to toe a narrow line by allowing users the option to opt into IDFA tracking. We’ve actually seen opt-in rates increase significantly (AppsFlyer shows 46% across all categories) over time. What’s your take on this and what do you think the implications are?

Kevin Mullen, Chief Product Officer, Roq.ad: It’s actually a wider opening than most people think. Since Apple is (likely purposefully) silent on the using of publisher IDs and allowing them to be mapped directly to other IDs, they left a wide berth for publishers and others in AdTech to manage the ecosystem using publisher IDs and identity graphs instead of – or in parallel to – IDFA…Apple’s not helping them do it, but their silence on Publisher IDs speaks volumes.

In part, the increase in acceptance rates is to be expected, and certainly sectors like dating and weather apps are going to do well on getting positive ATT responses because using location is a natural and user-accepted part of those apps…others, like casual games, for example, are still getting very poor performance on ATT acceptance. We’ve seen a similar shift toward acceptance in the web world with GDPR consent banners over time that mirrors the shift mentioned above. When consent banners were first updated for GDPR compliance (cookie consent predates GDPR in Europe by several years) the acceptance rates were extremely low…they have been steadily rising since about 2017.

Kochava Product Marketing: It is only that high because that is only 46% of the apps prompting (that number decreases when you factor in the number of apps not prompting). We expect that Apple will continue to support the third-party (3P) ecosystem that Apple relies upon.

Grit Daily: Many companies used IDFA as an opportunity to completely rethink their advertising strategies and come up with new methods to aggregate users that eliminated those unique identifiers that troubled privacy advocates but still allowed for the exploitation of useful ad data. Any particular solutions or workarounds you’re most impressed with? Or anything that’s been notably bad?

Yulia Kournik (Product Manager, YouAppi): The secret to success here is in making the maximum from the same limited ad data we all now have. When the contextual data brings good results, it’s impressive.

Kevin Mullen,Chief Product Officer, Roq.ad: Honestly, we could never know if any of those solutions really worked because we don’t have a way to effectively attribute conversions…those FLOC-esque aggregation techniques could work, but without real attribution tied to it, no targeting data is verifiable.

Grit Daily: As was noted, Apple is clearly not the only game in town. We’ve seen significant budget shifts to Android already but demand for Apple still remains high. How do you see this all playing out going forward?

Mike Brooks, SVP Marketing, Weather Bug: As an omnichannel publisher, the rules of engagement for each of the three major domains (Android, iOS, Chrome) are starting to diverge significantly. As Apple pushes towards a consented world, Google believes you can build privacy-forward technology that doesn’t require consent to do right by consumers. I see us treating each of these three as separate businesses starting in the not-too-distant future.

Kevin Mullen, Chief Product Officer, Roq.ad: For the foreseeable future, the mobile OS world is going to be a duopoly. Yes, it’s true that budgets have shifted to Android for now, but they will eventually come back as much as possible to Apple because Apple users tend to have higher household incomes and more disposable cash. The limiting factor is target-ability, and that can generally be solved using Publisher IDs in conjunction with IDFAs to build a profile of a device. As mobile performance DSPs in particular start using identity graphs more heavily, I expect these budgets to shift back toward iOS, though at slightly lower CPMs.

Grit Daily: At the time of the announcement Re-Engagement and Retargeting were two of the areas that seemed likely to be impacted? How much impact did it ultimately have? Were you surprised? Why or why not?

Yulia Kournik, Product Manager, YouAppi: Indeed, when the new privacy policy was introduced, we had some concerns about its effect on the retargeting and re-engagement activities. Along the way we’ve seen that the opt-in rates are much higher than the initial projections. We can target opt-in users as we always did. For retargeting opt-out users, we developed our probabilistic and contextual solution which allows us to detect users without IDFA. With l all this, the impact of the new privacy policies on the retargeting activities is less significant than it was initially expected. We have worked hard to achieve this, so we are not surprised that our efforts brought some good results.

Kevin Mullen, Chief Product Officer, Roq.ad: Sometimes the storyline doesn’t completely match the data. Yes, there was definitely a narrative in 2020 & early 2021 that retargeting would be “dead” in mobile, and that’s true to an extent, I guess, but what no one really focused on was this – there just was not that much mobile in-app retargeting to begin with outside of the mobile gaming “call-backs” to try to get people to re-engage with apps they had installed, but stopped playing.

Retargeting is fundamentally about trying to reach people that have seen or engaged with your product and convincing them to finish their purchase, or purchase again.

If I’m engaged enough to have a brand’s application installed, then I likely have an account, and that brand has my email. In that case, the cheaper and more efficient way to get me to purchase or purchase again is via that email address. In my world, that’s Hertz, United, Marriott, and Disney+.

None of the other apps on my phone would make sense as generating retargeting demand. Strava, Venmo, and SpenDesk don’t really have anything that they want to generate demand for, so they can’t really justify retargeting.

Industry soul searching

Apple’s decision to eliminate IDFA with the launch of iOS 14 has certainly forced the industry to do some serious soul searching and naturally led to a scramble for new solutions. But, it certainly didn’t mean the end of effective advertising on mobile. It just meant that advertisers and tech companies had to rethink what it means to provide relevant ads to users and how they do it. The IDFA for Apple was one tool – albeit a highly effective one – but their decision ultimately spurred the industry forward to develop new and varied solutions and ways to imagine the advertising landscape.

By Grit Daily Staff Grit Daily Staff has been verified by Muck Rack's editorial team

Journalist verified by Muck Rack verified

Grit Daily News is the premier startup news hub. It is the top news source on Millennial and Gen Z startups — from fashion, tech, influencers, entrepreneurship, and funding. Based in New York, our team is global and brings with it over 400 years of combined reporting experience.

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