Live SKAdNetwork adoption dashboard: Singular launches SKAN 4 penetration tracker

SKAN 4 launched in October with iOS 16.1, but it’s taken literally the better part of a year for the adtech ecosystem to start adopting and using Apple’s latest attribution measurement solution. To show the industry’s progress and help marketers understand when they want to transition to SKAN 4, Singular has launched a live SKAdNetwork adoption dashboard.

Check it out right here.

As we can see, Unity and ApplLovin are at or over halfway there on SKAN 4 penetration already, while Smadex, Persona.ly, Appier, and other ad partners are well advanced in their testing and adoption.

The current adoption trendline, however, tells the story: for most ad networks, SKAN 4 adoption is still squarely in the testing phase

SKAN 4 postbacks are just starting to crack the 10% mark across the industry. And that makes a lot of sense: SKAN 4 is a significant shift in not just measurement methodology for marketers but also optimization management for ad networks. Getting it right takes time, and that’s ultimately much better for the industry at large and marketers specifically than a hasty adoption that results in bad campaigns and lower ROAS.

Note: if you filter per network, you’ll often see fluctuations in the percentage of SKAN 3 versus SKAN 4 postbacks. That’s simply indicative of larger-scale testing. Generally those testing phases are followed by reevaluation and changes, and then another round of testing, sometimes at higher volume. The end result will be better results for app publishers and marketers.

SKAN 4 adoption dashboard: details

Singular’s SKAN 4 adoption dashboard analyzes billions of SKAdNetwork postbacks for SKAN version details. At this point we’re not looking at impressions, or the number of devices that are SKAN 4 compatible.

There is a floor beneath which the dashboard doesn’t report data, just to not clutter up the charts. In addition, if an ad network is generating 0-5% SKAN 4 postbacks, the dashboard reports 5% SKAN 4 postbacks. Not seeing a network appear does NOT mean that the network isn’t currently testing SKAN 4, implementing SKAN 4, or running at least some SKAN 4 postbacks .. it just means the network is not running them at scale yet.

As more networks and platforms start running SKAN 4 at scale, we’ll issue periodic alerts and notices about significant changes.

Good news on SKAN 4 adoption

It’s no secret that moving to SKAdNetwork from IDFA-based attribution has been hard for many in the industry, and that one of the key challenges was SKAN 3’s privacy thresholds. The very good news in SKAN 4’s crowd anonymity and coarse conversion values is that you’ll get more data from fewer installs per campaign.

That reduces marketers’ (and networks) testing tax and opens your ability to run more campaigns with greater numbers of variations in creative, targeting, and offers. It also forms the foundation for better analytics on CPI, ROAS, and eventually LTV.

The giants are coming: bookmark and keep checking

It’s great to see that the industry as a whole is progressing, and that virtually everyone (including all those not on the chart yet) is testing SKAN 4.

It’s pretty challenging to look into the crystal ball but we see a clear industry-wide trend from about 5% on April 20 to 9% on June 24. An overly simplistic linear regression on that trendline indicates that global SKAN 4 penetration won’t hit 20% before the end of the year.

However, the good news is that SKAN 4 adoption progress is not linear.

We see significant jumps between May 6 and May 10, for example, where SKAN 4 adoption more than doubled, only to sink back down as the ad networks evaluated the results of their testing and started tweaking their implementations. What we’ll most likely see over the next few months is a number of significant jumps as various ad networks and platforms decide their testing proves out the quality of their SKAN 4 solutions and turn it on for increasingly larger proportions of their traffic.

Keep checking the dashboard for updates!