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Intro to SKAdNetwork (SKAN) reporting on Clarisights

The introduction of iOS 14.5 had a significant impact on the marketing world. With these updates, Apple prioritised user privacy by requiring explicit user consent for app tracking and limiting the amount of data third-party advertisers can collect.

SKAdNetwork (SKAN) is a privacy-centric mobile attribution framework developed by Apple. It allows mobile app advertisers to track and measure the success of their ad campaigns while protecting user privacy. SKAN works by providing advertisers with aggregated data about, e.g., app installs, rather than individual user data, which reduces the risk of exposing personal information. Advertisers can use the data provided by SKAN to optimise their campaigns and understand the performance of different advertising channels without relying on third-party cookies or user-level data.

This shift towards aggregated measurement has significant implications for the mobile advertising industry, and in this article we will cover how this affects reporting on Clarisights.

How SKAN tracks Conversion Events

To understand the performance of your marketing efforts, you will want to compare revenue generated from customer purchases versus the ad spend required to get the user to make that purchase, better known as Return On Ad Spend (ROAS). Linking back marketing activities to user behaviour is thus key.

To help you understand your buyer's behaviour post engaging with your ad, ad networks report a wide array of conversion events. To track these conversions, ad networks are relying on third-party cookies and app tracking links – and this is where Apple’s App Tracking Transparency (ATT) swoops in and breaks the process of tracking.

Users of iOS14.5 are prompted to explicitly consent to ad tracking when signing into a new app. Users declining consent will thus be off the radar for ad networks like Facebook and Snapchat, or Mobile Measurement Partners (MMPs) like Adjust and Branch.

With more than 95% of Apple devices running on iOS 15 and above, marketers effectively don't have any reliable visibility into any conversions for the spends they make on campaigns targeting iOS devices, which leads to worse results and unexpectedly high acquisition cost.

SKAdNetwork is Apple's proposed remedy to this problem. The tracking solutions reports conversions happening on iOS devices back to the ad networks, without revealing the underlying user data to them. As a consequence of this, ...

  • ...ad networks report conversions reported by SKAN separately from their self-tracked conversions.

  • ... conversion events reported through SKAN offer less granular insights into the timing of the conversion.

Simply put, where ad networks can identify who converted and report WHEN a self-tracked conversion happened, SKAN limits them to reporting THAT a conversion happened.

How Clarisights reports conversion events

Clarisights ambition is to for you to have all relevant marketing metrics at your fingertips - we thus surface conversion events and try to support the highest granularity possible. As established in the previous section, the granularity we can provide for conversion events depends on whether they were tracked through SKAN or the ad network itself.

Some of the most typical conversion events include:

  • Mobile App Installs

  • Add to Cart

  • Purchases

Let's use 'Mobile App Installs' as a case study for how Facebook and other ad networks report conversions. Facebook's self-tracked app installs will show in the following metric:

  • FB: Mobile App Installs

Note that the installs reported in this metric are tied to the attribution settings you have configured in your report on Clarisights.

On top of that, you can find the attributed conversions for three different attribution windows and two modes of attribution (click + view) in Clarisights. Each of these are reported as separate metrics:

  • FB: Mobile App Installs - 1 day (view)

  • FB: Mobile App Installs - 1 day (click)

  • FB: Mobile App Installs - 7 days (view)

  • FB: Mobile App Installs - 7 days (click)

  • FB: Mobile App Installs - 28 days (view)

  • FB: Mobile App Installs - 28 days (click)

...where (click) implies the user did click on your ad, and (view) implies they only saw it but did not click on it.

Facebook is able to provide such granular insights into the attribution since these conversions are tracked using their own technology. For conversion reported through SKAN, Facebook only receives information about the aggregated number of conversions. SKAN-reported metrics will appear as separate metrics in Clarisights, and have no concept of attribution window:

  • FB: Mobile App Installs (SKAN) (click)

  • FB: Mobile App Installs (SKAN) (view)

...where (click) implies the user did click on your ad, and (view) implies they only saw it but did not click on it.

In your report, this will look as follows:

Concluding this section, you see how one conversion event (Mobile App Installs) is reported through 9(!) different metrics. This preserves as much granularity as possible, but understandably adds some complexity for reporting. If you would want to report conversions from multiple channels, this quickly gives you 40 to 50 potential metrics to choose from.

In the next section, we will check how we can put it all back together and reduce that complexity.

Leverage Clarisights' Custom Metrics to get the complete picture

As we learned, there are lots of metrics to choose from, and Facebook reports SKAN- and self-attributed metrics separately. Custom Metrics are designed to help you quickly aggregate metrics, so we can utilise them to pick and combine only those conversion metrics that we are interested in.

Say we want to consider app installs from Facebook, where we attribute all installs that occurred within seven days after seeing an ad, or one day after viewing it. On top of that, we want to count installs reported through SKAN for our campaigns targeting devices running on iOS 14.5 or above.

Here is how you would implement this in Clarisights using Custom Metrics.

Example of a custom metric combining different app install metrics reported by Facebook

You can learn more about Custom Metrics in this article.

Alternatively, if you don't want to rely on conversions reported by the ad networks, you can integrate a Mobile Measurement Partner (MMP) like Adjust or Branch to Clarisights - we will match their reported conversions to the data from your marketing channels, so you can get all your relevant data in one view.

SKAN-supported channels on Clarisights

The following channels currently support SKAN-conversion reporting on Clarisights:

Advertising Data Sources

  • Facebook Ads – SKAN-reported metrics have the post-fix (SKAN), (SKAN) (click) or (SKAN) (view)

Skan metrics for Facebook

  • Google Ads – SKAN-reported metrics have the pre-fix AW-SKAN:

  • Tiktok Ads – SKAN-reported metrics either have the pre-fix SC-SKAN: OR the post-fix (SKAN) for VTA and CTA attributed conversions.

  • Snapchat Ads – SKAN-reported metrics have the pre-fix SC-SKAN:

Analytics Data Sources (MMP)

  • Adjust – SKAN-reported metrics have the pre-fix AJ-SKAN:

Please note that for Analytics sources like Adjust MMP you would need to review and update the Tracker - Channel maps to ensure the Adjust data is joined to the right ad channels. You can find more about this in the Adjust Help Article.

For more details on the metric naming conventions for SKAN-reported metrics in each of these channels, check out the respective 'Dimension and Metrics' overview.

As SKAdNetwork evolves, we expect further updates and new metrics to be added. This article will be updated accordingly.