SKAN 4 inflection point: thanks to Meta we’re now entering the SKAN 4 era

Thanks to Meta’s recent move to SKAN 4 postbacks we are seeing a significant jump in SKAN 4 industry-wide adoption. At the risk of being just a tad early, I’m calling it the SKAN 4 inflection point we’ve been waiting (and waiting, and waiting) for.

Since May 9, SKAN 4 adoption has been hovering around the 10% mark. It’s been a phase of testing, analyzing, refactoring, and optimizing for pretty much all the major ad networks and platforms.

But on July 18th, we saw significant movement that has turned into an emerging trend line: the SKAN 4 inflection point. The most recent data indicates we hit 23% SKAN 4 postbacks industry-wide, with no signs of slowing down.

The reason for the new trend?

Meta.

While Unity, AppLovin, and a raft of smaller ad networks have been leading the charge with SKAN 4 postback rates approaching the 70% level, the big players have been slower to enter the fray.

Not anymore.

Meta started its rollout of SKAN 4 support on July 17, and the result are pretty obvious. In a matter of just 5 days, Meta has gone from 5% SKAN 4 postbacks to 52%:

That is literally huge.

This quick transition is a confident move by one of the largest advertising platforms in the world. Such a massive and rapid adoption shows that Meta is pretty certain that they know how to optimize iOS campaigns and are comfortable releasing a flood of SKAN 4 postbacks. (Of course, it helps that the company’s Aggregated Event Measurement technology has evolved through at least 2 major milestones this year, giving Meta multiple ways to measure, optimize, and improve iOS campaigns.)

This is also a huge step for the industry.

It’s no secret that SKAN 4 has been in the birth process for a very long time. Apple announced it literally last June in WWDC 2022, after all. Now it is starting to feel like SKAN 4 is finally out of dev and into production.

“We’re excited to see SKAN 4 adoption start to take off,” says Singular CEO Gadi Eliashiv. “It’s been a long time since Apple introduced SKAN 4 last year, and the industry has had a lot of work to do to support this. Now that hard work is starting to come to fruition. The beneficiaries, of course, will be marketers: more signal, more data, more insight to make their campaigns smarter and better.”

More room to grow, of course

Being at 23% SKAN 4 means we’re still at 77% SKAN 3 and older. (Yeah, there’s still a few SKAN 2 postbacks floating around.)

And that means that there’s plenty of room to grow.

However, I expect TikTok, Google, and other ad networks to jump on the bandwagon fairly soon, which should boost the SKAN 4 percentage of postbacks well north of 50%. What we’ll also see is networks like Smadex, who are doing some fairly hard-core yo-yoing between SKAN 3 and SKAN 4, start to lock in their SKAN 4 systems, gain confidence in their SKAN 4 solution, and smooth out to a more consistent 70-100% SKAN 4 postback mix.

Check the SKAN 4 inflection point data yourself

All of this data, by the way, is from the public SKAN 4 Adoption Dashboard that Singular publishes. It is updated daily.

Check it anytime to see which ad networks are driving the SKAN 4 adoption, and where your favorite ad partners currently sit.

And, get the SKAN 4 transition guide

Hopefully you’re already set up your SKAN 4 postbacks in the Singular dashboard. They’re completely backwards compatible with SKAN 3, so you won’t lose any data from ad partners who aren’t on SKAN 4 yet.

Singular can help: schedule some time.

Also: get the SKAN 4 transition guide as you plan your migration.