India, Bangalore, August 3, 2022: AppsFlyer’s ATT – One Year On report is a detailed examination of the impact that Apple’s App Tracking Transparency (ATT) framework had on mobile marketing measurement, budget, and consumer spend revenue one year after its enforcement.

The Gaming category shows the highest ATT app implementation rate of 91% whereas the average implementation rate across all categories is 80%. Due to heavy reliance on user-level data signals, it has been challenging for gaming app marketers to optimize their marketing campaigns in this scenario. Despite the challenges, the ability to measure non-organic installs on iOS has majorly improved in the past six months owing to steady gains in SKAdNetwork adoption growing at about 20% every month on average since May. Innovation in measurement to develop alternative and privacy-compliant solutions along with increased confidence among marketers in their ability to measure iOS campaigns have also helped improve NOIs.

With almost one-fourth of India’s population being mobile game users, marketers in this category need to devise innovative ways to market, measure, and optimize their activities as consumer privacy continues to evolve. India shows a 50% consent rate for Apple’s App Tracking Transparency, in the gaming category. This reflects the trend of developing countries which are less sensitive and aware of data privacy and security than their developed counterparts.

A year into ATT enforcement and its adoption is widespread, with 80% of apps implementing the ATT prompt (showing it to their users). In addition, opt-in rates also grew in the past year, where month after month AppsFlyer data has shown that nearly 1 in every 2 instances resulted in a user tapping on the ‘Allow’ button among those who had been shown the prompt. While mobile marketers initially worried over the user experience risk of the prompt, after a year it is clear that the benefits of showing the prompt far outweigh the benefits of not showing it due to a user experience concern.

Ritu Sharma, Country Manager, AppsFlyer India, commented, “With over 154.1 million active app users, the Indian market presents a huge growth opportunity for app marketers. Apple’s ATT update one year ago has significantly impacted the ecosystem on iOS devices. While ATT provides users greater privacy and control, it also provides marketers an opportunity to utilize data-driven collaboration and insights that are privacy-centric.”

With new data privacy standards largely in place thanks to ATT, the key going forward is to help businesses grow with data-driven collaboration and insights that are privacy-compliant.

Key Takeaways: 

Show ATT prompt on the app’s 1st launch: Data clearly shows that consent is highest when users launch an app for the 1st time — likely among other in-app notifications shown to users upon launch. This is true for the vast majority of categories.
Message non-consenting engaged users to increase IDFA rates: Testing a post-ATT notification that includes the user benefits of opting in can improve your IDFA rates, especially if you’re in non-gaming. As we can see, 30% of apps in these categories had a higher day 7 rate than day 0.

Have confidence in iOS measurement: Between SKAdNetwork, user-level deterministic attribution, and aggregated probabilistic modeling, the ability to measure iOS campaigns has been retained. When combined with innovative solutions such as predictive analytics and other privacy-preserving measurement frameworks (e.g., incrementally, media mix modeling, data clean rooms), overcoming limited data constraints is much easier.

Combine data sources to reduce eCPI: Deduping and consolidating data between SKAdNetwork and MMP will improve attribution measurability and enable the recording of more installs coming from the same budget — which will lower the effective cost.

Methodology: The study represents an analysis of 4.9 billion non-organic iOS app installs, 4.6 thousand iOS apps that have implemented ATT with at least 100 day 7 sessions, and 2.6 thousand iOS apps with at least 5 thousand installs attributed by SKAdNetwork per quarter.