Privacy thresholds

Privacy thresholds are a privacy-protecting feature that Apple introduced in SKAdNetwork. Until the volume of app install postbacks passes this threshold, marketers won’t get a significant amount of data along with their postbacks.

In SKAN 4, which aims to continue protecting users’ privacy while providing marketers with a bit more information about the attribution of app installs and other conversion events, privacy thresholds have been replaced with what Apple calls crowd anonymity. In any version of SKAdNetwork, only conversion events that meet a certain threshold of privacy are reported back to advertisers.

Privacy thresholds in SKAN3 and crowd anonymity in SKAN 4 determine how much data you get from SKAdNetwork. As discussed in our SKAN 4 strategy guide:

The simple part: more installs per campaign equals higher crowd anonymity which will return more data. If you get only a few installs per campaign, you’ll only get minimal data. A large number of installs per campaign — only Apple knows how many, and the parameters could change over time — gets you the most data.

With the updated privacy thresholds, marketers should be aware of how much data they’ll receive based on the size of their app in terms of installs. As discussed in our SKAN 4 release blog, crowd anonymity:

… will take 3 factors into account when determining the crowd size for its privacy-ensuring crowd anonymity calculation, which happens at the point of actual install:

• • Crowd size for the app or domain displaying the ad

• • The advertised app
  • The hierarchical source identifier from the ad network

In short, with previous versions of SKAdNetwork marketers were able to receive a postback with conversion values if their campaign met a privacy threshold. With SKAdNetwork 4.0, marketers now receive different levels of data based on which tier of crowd anonymity the campaign falls into.

As a leader in marketing analytics and mobile attribution, Singular supports SKAN 4 privacy thresholds by providing marketers the tools they need to measure and analyze their iOS campaigns on SKAdNetwork better than any other MMP.

Singular will maximize the data you receive and model missing data to give marketers the best possible picture of app marketing performance.

As stated in our blog post on privacy thresholds:

While privacy thresholds on conversion values are essential to making Apple’s SKAdNetwork mobile attribution framework actually privacy-safe, at the same time they are also one of the biggest challenges that prevent marketers from learning what’s working. Or, in other words, actually performing meaningful attribution that guides future decisions.

Which, clearly, makes the mobile growth job harder.

That said, the good news is that with the right data science and modeling tools, you can recapture much of the missing insight you need to optimize campaigns.

While transitioning to SKAN 4 may seem daunting at first, by using Singular’s suite of analytics and attribution tools, marketers can optimize their campaigns to increase their ROI while still maintaining user privacy.