Mobile advertising firm Amobee launched Wednesday a platform update, Amobee LTV (an acronym for “Lifetime Value”), designed to provide app publishers and advertisers insights into who their users are and how they’re using the apps.
The release follows Apple’s rejection of apps that derive data from the Identifier For Advertisers (IDFA) without serving ads, a development that could take a wrench to the use of Amobee LTV.
Amobee LTV was built to track total revenue, the number of unique users and registered users and to segment audiences by country, device type and operating system. Amobee CTO Gil Sheinfeld acknowledged that while Amobee LTV uses the IDFA to measure some of these points, he is skeptical Apple will enforce limited use of the IDFA.
“We’re watching the situation closely, but so far we don’t see any traction to the notion that Apple will continue to reject applications that use the IDFA while not serving ads,” Sheinfeld said. “Since the news was first reported, we’ve seen apps pass through the App Store that do use the IDFA and don’t show ads.”
Sheinfeld declined to name those apps, but added that the company has alternative solutions in the event that Apple continues to rein in the various uses of the IDFA. These solutions include a vendor or app developer’s own unique identifiers that can track the same user from an impression to a conversion across an app.
Unlike the IDFA, which is used by third parties as a common identifier, other IDs are specific to each vendor, making the comparison process more complicated.
Regardless of what Apple decides, the mobile industry will find other strategies to measure conversion rates and track app activities, Sheinfeld said.
“There is an entire ecosystem of apps and games that use the IDFA for tracking and measurements,” he explained, “But it is not the only ID out there. ”
