VILNIUS, LITHUANIA-- May 11, 2021 -- Affise launched a new type of attribution chain technology to measure mobile advertising attribution without the previously required user device identifier for advertisers (IDFA). The removal of the IDFA results from Apple’s App Tracking Transparency (ATT) roll-out.

Initially expected in summer 2020 and later moved to 2021, the iOS14.5 release introduced the ATT policy, which from the moment of roll-out requires every app to get explicit permission from users to access their IDFA. In practical terms, requiring user opt-in eliminates the large part of data vital for end-user identification. Attribution platforms can no longer store and pass user information to an advertiser and back.

These terms leave advertisers with an insufficient amount of data to measure campaign performance and evaluate the efficiency of mobile ads. This could likely affect the efficiency of targeted ads and further decrease the revenue of app publishers.

To alleviate the impact and allow attribution and ad measurement, Apple introduced SKAdNetwork, a privacy-friendly method to measure mobile campaigns’ attribution on iOS apps. The other alternative supported by most MMPs is probabilistic attribution, which relies on the statistics and probability distribution of all the campaigns likely to have generated an install.

Affise announces privacy-enabled attribution chain to support redirects data transfer

Dmitrii Zotov, CTO of Affise, said: “The future of mobile attribution on iOS became the most debated issue and we got actively involved in implementing timely solutions that would allow advertisers and ad networks to attribute app installs. So far, we support both probabilistic attribution from all the MMPs and SKAdNetwork integration. Further, we want to ensure that conversion data will not be lost in a chain of attribution between publishers. Thus we release the privacy-enabled attribution chain, which helps determine conversion along the chain of publishers.”

Apple’s ATT policy may have severe implications on the whole industry, but user privacy is everything nowadays and we should expect major changes around this trend. Meanwhile, advertisers still need to measure conversions, work with traffic suppliers and correctly assign payouts, especially when working with multiple publishers in the chain. By losing the ability to correlate click and conversion, we also lose the ability to relay any past performance data to the publisher.

With MMPs’ restrictions to transfer data only at the source and sub-source level, Affise developed a solution that will support all redirect data transfer. The Affise attribution chain solution uses a particular format of integration macros to pass all the publisher’s data in a simple format.

The attribution chain method protects users’ privacy while ensuring a fair and accurate attribution process for advertising market players.

The macros include all the information needed by the network to determine campaign and traffic source. This means that multiple publishers in the attribution chain will have access to conversion data and will be able to successfully optimize their traffic, where advertisers can ensure the effectiveness of their performance campaigns.