In case you missed it, Apple changed the mobile advertising market by introducing the AppTrackingTransparency framework in iOS 14. They say “Use the AppTrackingTransparency framework if your app collects data about end-users and shares it with other companies for purposes of tracking across apps and web sites. The AppTrackingTransparency framework presents an app-tracking authorization request to the user and provides the tracking authorization status.”
Why is this a revolution? I’ll tell you now.
What is IDFA?
Advertising IDFA or Identifier For Advertisers (introduced in iOS 6) is a unique device identifier that tracks your behavior in apps and websites so that the advertiser can then identify you and show you targeted ads.
Prior to iOS 14, the advertiser had access to this ID by default. Those, if you showed Google or Facebook ads in your application, then they knew this identifier and through it they showed the user a personalized advertisement.
Tracking Authorization Request в iOS 14.
With iOS 14, the situation has changed, and now if you want to show ads to a user in a mobile application, you must ask their permission to use this ad ID. In my monobudget for monobank application it looks like this.
Here I would like to say that the default texts from Apple are absolutely not correct, because in fact, your app is not tracking your activity in the context that Apple is referring to, but simply using an advertising ID. Those, the correct title for this dialog should be something like “Allow monobudget to use advertising ID?” But the article is not about that.
Revolution in the mobile advertising market.
Why are we talking about a revolution in the mobile advertising market?
The mobile advertising market is estimated at $ 80-100 billion per year. Then everything is very simple. If the user does not give permission in the application to use the advertising ID, then the ad aggregator will not be able to serve personalized ads, and the advertiser will not want to pay to display ads idle. The whole concept of targeted advertising stops working and goes down the drain.
According to the most dramatic forecasts, only 10% of users will give permission to use an advertising ID.
But I hasten to reassure you. Not everything is so dramatic yet. I recently added a Tracking Authorization Request to my new monobudget for monobank app and want to share user reaction on the Tracking Authorization Request. The data is not yet based on a very large number of reactions, but it still allows you to get at least some picture.
As you can see from this analytics, 343 out of 608 users have given permission to use the ad ID to serve personalized ads. This is 56%. This is certainly not 10%, but still, if we take these numbers very roughly, then it can be argued that advertising aggregators’ revenue from mobile advertising on iOS will fall by 44%.
Keep watching the situation.
In the meantime, have you already read about monobudget?