Opinion: Why AppLovin acquired Adjust last February
Last summer, it became known about Apple‘s plans to restrict developers’ access to IDFA. But the answer to the question of what will happen to the mobile marketing market after that has not appeared. In your column for App2Top.ru Maxim Samorukov, founder of AppMagic, reveals why, in light of the IDFA story, the deal between AppLovin and Adjust is so important.
Maxim Samorukov
In the summer of 2020, Apple announced a new ATT (App Tracking Transparency) policy.
It seriously restricts the access of mobile applications to IDFA — unique identifiers of iOS users, if they purposefully do not provide the application with access to IDFA.
Experts expect that less than 20% of users will agree to tracking. As a result, performance marketing will no longer be possible.
Why?
Now the maximum that an advertising network can learn about a user before displaying an ad is the context. In other words, which application are you currently using. There is no information about your solvency or preferences, which ultimately does not allow you to launch ROAS-optimized, and in general, at least somehow optimized campaigns.
The industry was shocked. She was completely unprepared for such an initiative. The latter forced Apple to postpone the implementation of the change for at least six months. During this time, hundreds of seminars, round tables and articles on “How to live in the world after IDFA” have appeared.
Also, this time was enough for the industry to figure out how to use custom mapping for SKAdNetwork conversion values, as well as how to make an approximate estimate of ROI campaigns based on them. But at the same time, it became even more obvious that in the new conditions, performance marketing has become a virtually impossible task.
And against the background of such a bleak picture AppLovin does something remarkable. On February 3, the company announces the acquisition of Adjust, one of the leading Mobile Measurement Partners (MMP).
MMP is an attribution tool designed primarily to link two events:
- the user views and clicks on the ad;
- the user installs and launches the promoted application.
Additional MMP functions allow you to track the behavior and payment activity in the application, as well as use this data to evaluate the ROI of advertising. We remember. It is important.
Let’s get back to the deal. More precisely, to the main question: why did AppLovin buy Adjust this winter?
In addition to IDFA, iOS has another identifier — IDFV (ID For Vendor). No one has restricted access to it and does not plan to.
IDFV was created so that each developer could see which users are using several of his applications at once. IDFV is especially useful when conducting a cross-campaign. The identifier is unique for each developer, but does not differ between his applications.
In the post-IDFA world, any advertising network or MMR will technically be able to match the IDFV of users in several applications in order to collect a real user profile, and partially circumvent Apple’s policy. To do this, the interested party needs to make an assumption that IDFV1 and IDFV2 belong to the same user. For example, by detecting the activity of several IDFVS from the same IP address in a narrow time interval.
Undoubtedly, the same IP addresses do not guarantee that IDFV1 and IDVF2 belong to the same user. But if we record a similar match for the same IDFV pairs at different IP addresses, then the degree of our confidence that these IDFVS belong to the same real user is growing. Considering that user IDFVS are the same in all applications of the same publisher, the task of mapping IDFVS and tracking real users seems quite feasible.
From this point of view, the deal between AppLovin and Adjust becomes very important. As an advertising network, AppLovin cannot track users’ payment activity until the AppLovin SDK is installed in the mobile application being used, and purchase tracking is not enabled in the settings of this application. But AppLovin as a conglomerate of companies can do much more in this area with the help of MMP, which is Adjust.
In other words, the acquisition of Adjust in theory allows AppLovin to track user payment activity, which makes it virtually the only force that will retain its ability to launch ROAS-optimized campaigns in the post-IDFA world.
I emphasize that the above is just an option. AppLovin may not use it. On the other hand, if a business can get the so-called “unfair advantage” that it can get away with, then why not take advantage of this opportunity? And why else would AppLovin spend a billion dollars on Adjust right now?
It is important to note: those 20% of users who provide access to their IDFA will give advertising networks a limited opportunity to launch user-level-optimized campaigns.
In general, AppLovin will hardly dare to use this newly acquired superpower as a product for general use. But AppLovin is also a conglomerate of mobile game studios. Both their own and those in which AppLovin invested. From this point of view, even if you use this superpower only for the benefit of affiliated studios, then AppLovin will pay off its investments in full.
