The industry was ablaze with excitement in October 2022 when Apple unveiled SKAdnetwork (SKAN) 4. With more data made available to app developers, mainly in campaign dimension reporting and longer post install windows, a major SKAN upgrade was announced for the first time.

However, there was a slow adoption rate, especially on the network side, which meant apps weren't particularly eager to get ready.

At last, in the past few weeks, adoption has begun to accelerate. At this point, we strongly advise networks to complete their implementation and advertisers to begin setting up their SKAN 4 schemas.

2) 20 is the minimum number of installs per campaign, per app, per day needed for tiers 2 or 3

Apple uses the term "crowd anonymity" to explain SKAN 4's privacy-centric method of attribution data provisioning. Based on the rationale that more installs equate to more data sharing, Apple establishes the crowd anonymity tier for every postback and shares data in accordance with it.

Based on our analysis, the optimal threshold to reach tiers 2 or 3, which is the desired position based on the above table, is 20 installs (postbacks) for each campaign, daily, and per app. This number is applicable to apps that combine a 97% degree of certainty with gaming and non-gaming features.

Distribution of SKAN 4 postbacks by tier in various ranges (average per campaign, per app, per day)

Also, we've discovered that tier 3 will probably be reached for 5 source app IDs and above.

Why it matters: You should maximize data signals in the face of privacy-driven data restrictions, or in other words, take what you are given. As demonstrated in the above table, in SKAN 4, this entails ensuring that your daily campaigns are sufficiently large to prevent receiving a null value (tier 0) and to guarantee that you are receiving tier 2 or tier 3, which contain more data.

The good news for marketers is that 20 installs is usually plenty, especially for smaller developers or those who run a lot of creative testing campaigns on a much smaller scale than their regular ones.

3) The number of postbacks with CV null has dropped by almost 70% in SKAN 4

When comparing the first SKAN 4 postback to earlier SKAN versions, the average number of postbacks per campaign per app that have a Conversion Value null has decreased by almost 70% (reminder: a null value comes in when the privacy threshold defined by Apple is not met).

The fact that this number has decreased, de facto, is encouraging even though this was predicted given Apple's opening up of a middle ground in SKAN 4 with coarse-grained value in postback 1. Since Apple has never revealed the precise privacy threshold, the fact that about 7% of postbacks in SKAN 3 had a null value caused a great deal of headaches for developers.