SKAN 4 readiness checklist: how to prepare for SKAdNetwork v4

Are you ready for SKAN 4?

At WWDC Apple promised the next major iteration in SKAdNetwork would arrive this year. As we’re drawing closer and closer to the end of the year, we’re seeing documentation being updated in just a few places (so far) and a few hints here and there that delivery is getting closer.

That might have some marketers worried.

After all, SKAN 4 is much more complex than SKAN 3, with 3 postbacks (but only 1 guaranteed), multiple measurement windows, multiple postback types, conversion values that can go both up and down, and a redefined method of ensuring privacy via crowd anonymity. We’re also faced with the virtual certainty that the ecosystem will be at multiple levels of SKAN compliance and SKAN version implementation for at least several months.

So what can you do?

First, some good news: backwards compatibility

Fortunately, at this moment, it’s pretty simple. Especially given this one piece of really, really good news for Singular customers:

Singular’s SKAN 4 implementation will be backwards-compatible with your existing SKAN v3 set-up. So, worst case scenario, you don’t get around to figuring out which events you want to track in SKAN 4, deciding which conversion model(s) you’re going to use, or updating your SKAN 4 related code, it’s all good. You’ll have time.

However, there are some very good reasons to update. More on that after the checklist.

Your SKAN 4 readiness checklist

If you’re mentally preparing yourself for a 29-item list, breathe. It’s not going to be that difficult.

That said, each of the steps below does involve multiple steps and multiple parties, so there is some real work to be done here.

1. Prepare to update the Singular SDK. Prepare to update the Singular SDK in your app when SKAN 4 ships. Ensure product and engineering are set up to be able to add this to a sprint.
2. Talk to your mobile partners. Talk to your acquisition and monetization partners. Find out what their SKAN 4 plans are, and what kinds of timetables they have for supporting SKAN 4, and anything else they’re planning.
3. Talk to your web partners. SKAdNetwork isn’t just about app-to-app measurement anymore. With SKAN 4, web clicks into your App Store listing can be measured with SKAdNetwork now too. Check with those partners as well to see if they’re getting ready for SKAN 4. Bear in mind that this is a bigger ask for them than your mobile partners.
4. Share your hierarchies. Share your important source hierarchies with all media partners. They can only help optimize what they understand, so if you’re encoding something that matters to you in your hierarchical source identifiers, let them know. That will provide the greatest opportunity to optimize creative, ad sets, offers, or whatever else you choose to encode into your source identifiers.
5. Plan your coarse value strategy. Plan how to leverage the coarse values carefully. Remember, you’re only guaranteed to get 1 coarse postback. It could be fine with sufficient volume, and postbacks 2 and 3 are only available with — again — sufficient volume for effective crowd anonymity. So plan how you’ll use the 3 values each coarse postback can contain.
6. Plan how to evaluate users. Assuming all things go well, you’ll get 3 postbacks for most of your iOS app installs under SKAN 4. Make a plan for what KPIs matter most in each scenario, how you’ll encode their value in both coarse and fine SKAN postbacks, and what you’re going to do to evaluate users based on that.

More good news (and reasons to update)

Work that you have to do for ecosystem and measurement reasons that doesn’t actually improve your product can be painful. But there are additional good reasons to update.

More details on all of this (and additional very exciting features) soon. But briefly, when Singular customers implement SKAN 4 in their apps, they’ll get:

1. More accurate long cohorts
2. Visual reporting on D2 revenue, modeled D7 revenue
3. Additional data via coarse postbacks
4. Confidence intervals on modeled revenue
5. D30 revenue

There’s much more, but we’ll be able to share that shortly in a number of ways:

• A private customer-only webinar that dives deep into technical details
• A public SKAN 4 webinar
• Additional blog posts
• A SKAN 4 explainer page

More questions? You know what to do: talk to Singular.