At WWDC in June last year, Apple announced its App Tracking Transparency framework which the majority of the industry read as IDFA depreciation. Fast forward to 26th April 2021. and these changes are finally here with iOS 14.5 (originally, the framework was supposed to be enforced with iOS 14 which came out in September last year).
Less than 48 hours into the change, it is still too early to tell how the industry has been affected, from the ad monetization side of things, at least. According to this article published by Flurry, it may take a few weeks until a significant portion of iOS users updates to 14.5 And while we wait for the eCPMs to drop, I decided to look into the implementation of ATT prompts, try to see how creative developers were when designing and framing these and if there are any particular examples that stand out.
Covering the basics first.
#1 The scope of work – First, to specify in more detail what was the scope of this research. Together with my team, I looked into different solutions from the top 100 grossing games in the United States (based on the AppAnnie report for 26th April 2021). *Note: the list takes into account only in-app purchase revenue and not revenue coming from in-game ads.
#2 Types of games – As can be imagined, the list contains everything from casual games to hard-core games. From match-three, across first-person shooter, battle royale, slots, sports, racing, etc. So basically, from Candy Crush Saga to Call of Duty Mobile and everything in between. I also checked out some other titles, around twenty of them – without particular criteria, games I had on my phone, that I played for work or for fun (note: they have not been included in the statistics below but will be included with examples).