In March 2021, the Financial Times reported that Apple warned Tencent and ByteDance not to try to bypass the upcoming application tracking transparency privacy function, or the application will be taken off the shelves.

This is Apple's first "head-on confrontation" with Chinese mobile advertising companies after launching the new IDFA (Advertising Identifier) policy. And this' battle 'confirms Apple's emphasis on user privacy, and accordingly, its products can better control the transparency of app access. It should be noted that this feature has always been enabled by default and allows for the inclusion of personal user privacy information. For example, if the advertiser is "Yin Yang Shi" and the platform it is on is Taobao, then Taobao can collect browsing information from Apple users to confirm whether they have downloaded and used it. Advertisers and advertisers can use the benchmark at the time of settlement to confirm whether the traffic is fake, and plan for more accurate and wide-ranging advertising in the future.

However, after iOS 14.5, Apple Postmaster began to require all apps to ask users whether to open IDFA, while what Tencent and ByteDance did was to bypass the request to collect user information by putting the technology into the app. The final result is that Apple insists on its own requirements for privacy protection. Tencent and ByteDance also have to comply with Apple's rules, but in this way, the revenue of its advertisers and the placement of advertisers will increase. Because users will default to refusing to share IDFA, this has led to an increasingly apparent conflict between mobile advertising companies and Apple.

The impact of IDFA: Recently, AppsFlyer and Facebook Gaming released the "Global Mobile Game Industry Benchmark Report", which is a report on the performance of the gaming market in 2020. The report shows that the download volume of gaming applications in the Indian market has increased by 25%; The CPI (Consumer Price Index) of RPG (Role Playing) games exceeded $10 in the second half of the year, a sharp increase of 34% compared to the first half of the year; Overall, Q4 saw a three fold increase in revenue from in app purchases (IAP) compared to Q1.

Although the gaming market has shown a thriving trend, it cannot be ignored that industry trends in certain regions have actually experienced fluctuations in installation volume due to the dual impact of user privacy policies and aggressive marketing strategies. In the report, AppsFlyer stated that compared to the total installation percentage change in 2019, the proportion of gaming applications in developed countries in the global mobile game market in 2020 has decreased, while emerging markets such as India, Brazil, Mexico, and Middle Eastern countries have increased their proportion in the global mobile game market.

2020 is a year worth remembering. This year, the COVID-19 epidemic has changed the world in many ways: multi platforms pay more attention to users' privacy, and multi regional policies have also strengthened the supervision of applications. With the strengthening of privacy and changes in policies, many companies that engage in mobile business overseas are facing dual platform and policy issues.

However, during the epidemic period, the mobile terminal market experienced significant short-term fluctuations, with some cases of rapid popularity of mobile app applications. This phenomenon was reported in the "Comprehensive Performance Report of Advertising Platforms, 11th Edition" by AppsFlyer. According to the report, five of the top seven APP applications come from China. For example, TikTok's TikTok For Business, which experienced rapid growth last year, successfully ranked among the top ten global advertising platforms; SHAREit (SHAREit) and Transsion achieved rapid growth in installation share, which also laid the foundation for the growth of China Mobile's customer cluster of overseas manufacturers.

Looking at the field of gaming apps, compared to tool apps, the global mobile game market reached a new height during the pandemic, with downloads and revenue increasing compared to 2019. Among them, under the global home quarantine policy in the first half of 2020, user demand surged, and the peak download volume remained stable in March and April. Due to the mobility of mobile game marketing personnel, while the natural installation volume has increased, the non natural installation volume has also increased during the same period. However, during the period after the peak, iOS implemented the IDFA policy, which led to an increase in installation costs on the iOS end and a significant decrease in its non natural installation volume, with a magnitude of approximately 35%.

Faced with the implementation of the IDFA policy, it means damage to several areas, such as advertisers' preference for advertising platforms and expected results, traffic side preference acquisition and personalized advertising display, mobile attribution or anti cheating behavior detection by technical service providers, and so on. For Mobile marketing personnel, this is tantamount to interrupting the relevant exchanges between advertisers and platforms, traffic parties and end-users. According to AppsFlyer's data, prior to the mandatory implementation of the IDFA new policy, some users had voluntarily chosen to close information collection. In the second half of 2020, 32% of iOS users engaged in this operation, an increase of 9 percentage points from 23% in the first half of the year.

Wang Wei, General Manager of AppsFlyer Greater China, said in an interview with TopMarketing earlier, "One of the most direct differences is that all the mobile optimization framework systems built around IDFA are useless and need to be greatly modified." He believes that the lack of Granularity and integrity of data poses a fundamental challenge to attribution technology.

How to resolve conflicts has become a top priority. No one can accuse Apple of being reasonable or accurate, because facing users, this is the beginning of building a basic awareness of privacy protection. Lv Jing, senior marketing manager of Beijing Digital Alliance Network Technology Co., Ltd., said in an interview with Personal media Fuel Finance that he could not give a reasonable judgment on the role of IDFA, but he believed that since the rules should be followed, the rules should also have corresponding value. This cannot be evaluated. As a third party, we follow the rules of whoever we play with, without judging the rules. Since we want to play the game in the next game, we must follow the ecological rules

Faced with the continuous increase in media costs and the heavy impact on various indicators on iOS, what should advertisers do next? In the Global Mobile Game Industry Benchmark Report, AppsFlyer said: "Advertisers need to explore new Marketing channel to reduce high costs, evaluate existing channels, and then further adjust marketing strategies."

AppsFlyer believes in the report that investing in re marketing resources through paid media has lower costs than acquiring new customers, and has proven to bring good results to game applications. In addition, the recommender sends remarketing advertisements to users through its own Marketing channel in the form of push or in app information. In addition to acquiring customers in mainstream markets, we can also try to expand our business in sinking markets, such as closely monitoring emerging regions such as India, Pakistan, the Middle East, and Latin America. The cost of acquiring customers in these Android dominated markets has not been significantly affected compared to iOS dominated markets. Although the average income level of each user is low, the cost is also low. It only needs to be realized at the appropriate time by combining various technologies such as in app purchasing (IAP) and in app advertising (IAA).

The viewpoint conveyed by AppsFlyer is simply to avoid the "heavy disaster areas" of IDFA as much as possible, and to avoid developed countries and regions with high costs as much as possible, in order to smoothly transition to low-cost regional markets. When ensuring a certain investment cost, various monetization modes related to technology should be appropriately combined to achieve maximum monetization.

Write at the end:

The issue of privacy protection can be said to be a "protracted battle". Regarding this "battle", mobile phone manufacturers, app manufacturers, advertisers, and regulators have been playing games, and their interests will never stop competing. When launching corresponding privacy protection services on Apple's platform, it is important to applaud them and pay attention to potential issues, as well as the business world.

Source: DigitalTimes