Apple’s 2021 privacy changes around user targeted ads hurt revenues of around two in five mobile advertisers, according to a joint survey by two market intelligence firms.
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75% of those who have lost revenue feared that Apple’s changes to its identifier for advertisers (IDFA) would put their business at risk and 55% of respondents believed mobile marketing to be more difficult in 2021 than in the previous year, according to a survey by Tenjin, a mobile measurement platform, and Growth FullStack, a business intelligence platform.
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The launch of iOS 14.5 in April 2021 saw the removal of user-level and device-level data for users who opt out of sharing it and pushed the industry towards Apple’s new SKAdNetwork framework on iOS.
Designed as a more privacy-focused approach to campaign measurement, SKAdnetwork made it extremely challenging for mobile marketers to track real-time performance and campaign delivery, the survey found.
More than half of the respondents said that they have increased their spend on Android and decreased their spend on iOS.
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“2021 was a difficult year for mobile marketers. The introduction of app tracking transparency on iOS accelerated the trend of budgetary shift from iOS to Android,” said Christopher Farm, CEO and co-founder of Tenjin.
However, the respondents were concerned that Android would implement similar changes this year like Apple introduced last year.
The survey included 302 respondents with responsibility for advertising budgets at mobile game and app developers in the U.K. and the U.S.