With all the drama swirling around Chrome’s now-scrapped plans to deprecate third-party cookies, it’s easy to forget that the fate of Google’s mobile advertising ID (GAID) still hangs in the balance.
But Google hasn’t shared a concrete timeline for GAID deprecation, and so mobile marketers are under pressure to get acclimated to the Android Privacy Sandbox.
On Thursday, mobile measurement platform (MMP) AppsFlyer announced its integration with the Attribution Reporting API in the Android Privacy Sandbox and released a related dashboard, available now, that surfaces insights for campaign optimization.
AppsFlyer claims to be the first MMP to support the Android Attribution Reporting API with a generally available in-market product. Unity, one of the most widely used mobile app development platforms, helped AppsFlyer design the integration, and its ad network, Unity Ads, will be the first to take advantage.
Avoiding another ATT
AppsFlyer isn’t releasing this solution because it has insider knowledge about an impending GAID phaseout, said Roy Yanai, VP of product management at AppsFlyer.
But AppsFlyer has been collaborating with Google on development of the Android Privacy Sandbox for the past two years.
And now it’s being proactive to prevent the mobile ad industry from being caught flatfooted like it was when Apple effectively killed off its mobile ad ID in 2021 through the AppTrackingTransparency initiative, Yanai said.
“One of our key lessons from iOS [was that] we didn’t prepare in time,” he said.
Oren Hod, Unity’s senior director of product management, echoed that sentiment. “We wanted to move quickly to make sure we could continue to support [our clients] in a changing data privacy landscape,” Hod said. “Our industry moves fast, and it pays to be prepared ahead of time.”
So, although AppsFlyer doesn’t know when GAIDs will go kaput on Android, it wants its clients to be ready for when they inevitably do, Yanai said. And rolling out this integration alongside Unity will hopefully spur other ad networks to follow suit.
Signal strength in numbers
One reason adoption by other ad networks is key is because of the way attribution reporting works in the Android Privacy Sandbox.
“Each ad network [gets] their own attribution reporting according to their own clicks,” Yanai said.
As any advertiser familiar with the shortcomings of last-click attribution can attest, letting each ad network report on its own clicks can create headaches when multiple networks claim credit for the same app install or conversion.
However, through an Android Privacy Sandbox integration, MMPs can access a kind of “quasi-click” reporting that allows them to decide which click from which platform was actually the last click, and therefore which click deserves credit for the install.
“Advertisers want to see a consolidated picture” that makes it clear who the last-click winner was, Yanai said, rather than isolated attribution reports from many different ad networks. The new dashboard is geared toward helping advertisers have accurate invoicing, not just measurement, he added.
This “consolidated picture” of attribution is enabled via a trusted execution environment (TEE), where various attribution signals are aggregated from different platforms and anonymized so they can’t be traced back to an individual user. As part of laying the groundwork for Android Privacy Sandbox compatibility, AppsFlyer built its own cloud-based TEE.
But, in order for an MMP to tell which platform had the last click, the various ad networks each need to have their own Attribution Reporting API integrations – hence the need for more adoption, Yanai said.
Unity made sense as a launch partner not just because of its scale in the mobile market, but because it’s one of the only ad networks currently supporting the Android Privacy Sandbox, he added.
What’s next?
At release, AppsFlyer’s Android Attribution Reporting API dashboard will surface insights that are useful for user acquisition and driving app installs, Yanai said. The dashboard does not offer recommendations for optimizations, but instead gives marketers the data they need to make their own decisions.
Next up, AppsFlyer is working on using historical data to help advertisers optimize toward audiences with high lifetime value or those that are most likely to make in-app purchases or pay for subscriptions, Yanai added.
To that end, measuring and benchmarking against post-app-install activity is a major priority, as well as implementing features for comparing Android Privacy Sandbox campaigns to other types of campaigns. “We’re waiting for data to be more abundant for us to actually start developing these tools,” Yanai said.
The goal is to mimic what AppsFlyer has built for post-ATT iOS attribution, which served as a template for other MMPs to follow, Yanai said, adding that AppsFlyer welcomes imitators in this case, too.
“We see ourselves,” he said “[as] enablers [not just] of our customers, but the industry.”
