Probabilistic attribution is just a “stopgap,” says Simon “Bobby” Dussart, newly appointed CEO of AppLovin-owned mobile measurement and attribution company Adjust.
Depending on who you ask, “probabilistic” could simply be a synonym for “fingerprinting,” but there is a distinction between them, Dussart says on this week’s episode of AdExchanger Talks.
Fingerprinting is explicitly verboten under Apple’s AppTrackingTransparency policy, but probabilistic attribution is a grayer area, because the goal isn’t to kludge together a persistent ID but rather to track people across sites by looking at a handful of parameters (clicks, time of install and basic device info) in order to estimate where an install came from. The data is obsolete after a few hours.
Even so, Apple could easily crack down on the practice.
Which is why, although Adjust does offer probabilistic attribution to developers who are interested, it’s “a temporary solution,” Dussart says. Eventually, SKAdNetwork, Apple’s homegrown attribution solution, will be the only viable option for measurement on iOS.
“We know where the industry is going and we know it’s with SKAdNetwork,” he says. “And that’s how we’re building all of our solutions, to allow advertisers to make the best decisions they can with SKAdNetwork.”
But it’s not just Apple that’s making moves. Google is working its way toward the eradication of its mobile ad ID.
“We know where the industry is going and it’s just a matter of, okay, well, let’s go there, let’s adapt,” Dussart says. “We can make [probabilistic attribution] work during the transition, but if we rely on it … that is just a mistake at this point.”
Also in this episode: Staying independent, why ATT wasn’t the end of days for MMPs, that weird morning last April when Apple suddenly started rejecting apps integrated with Adjust’s SDK (and then just as suddenly stopped) and why almost everyone other than his mom calls Simon by his nickname, “Bobby.”
