Swaarm Launches Privacy Enabled Attribution in Response to Apple’s IDFA Removal

• Partner affiliate marketing attribution solution is first-of-its-kind for effectively capturing campaign and traffic source throughout the whole advertising network chain

Swaarm announced the launch of a new, first-of-its-kind attribution chain methodology Privacy Enabled Attribution (PEA Chain) for the mobile advertising industry. PEA offers an effective attribution model for companies impacted by Apple’s removal of its user device identifier for advertisers (IDFA) in iOS 14, which is used pervasively across the mobile industry for ad tracking and targeting.

“Our mission is to provide premium tracking services to mobile affiliate networks of any size and we believe that the current network ecosystem can continue to flourish despite the limiting changes Apple is introducing.”

Apple’s removal of IDFA is one of the most significant changes to occur within the mobile industry to date. It breaks the current user-level attribution model, which impacts optimization in the advertising chain. This leads to both decreased ROI and increased risk for advertisers as well as lower revenues for publishers who cannot monetize their traffic effectively. To alleviate the impact and allow attribution and ad measurement, Apple introduced two new frameworks: App Tracking Transparency (ATT) and SKAdNetwork that allow campaign-level attribution; however, this won’t close the gap on key capabilities like user-level attribution, retargeting audiences, look-a-like audiences and more.

Most mobile marketing partners (MMPs) can only provide the attributed network with the source and sub-source to at most two networks in the advertising chain, which puts all the mid-size networks and publishers at a serious disadvantage while consolidating even more power to large established networks.

With today’s news, Swaarm is solving this two-network attribution problem with its PEA Chain.

David Frei, CEO of Swaarm, said: “We at Swaarm believe that the power and beauty of the internet consists in its distributed and varied nature, where small publishers and large media conglomerates can thrive and provide valuable content to internet users. This is why we created the Privacy Enabled Attribution chain method to enable attribution throughout the whole chain without collecting any personal information.”

Oleksandra Gipsh, Co-Founder & COO of Apptrust said: “Apple’s removal of IDFA has been concerning businesses like ours and our marketing partners that rely on user-level tracking to effectively optimize our campaigns. Since Swaarm’s Privacy Enabled Attribution Chain largely solves for the lack of IDFA-based tracking, we’ve moved to their platform and can now say we’re better prepared for when Apple finally removes IDFA from the mobile ecosystem.”

Swaarm’s platform will generate a special token called “PEA Chain” that is passed in the click and can be retrieved in the postback. The token contains all the information needed for the network to determine the campaign and traffic source. Furthermore, the token also contains all the data for the rest of the networks in the chain to identify their traffic sources, given that this information was provided for the impression and click. This allows networks that use Swaarm to work with publishers of varied sizes by giving them access to the attribution data that they need to successfully optimize their traffic.

In addition to the PEA Chain method, Swaarm also supports a basic attribution method that can be used when the advertising partner has a very strict or rigid model.

With the PEA Chain attribution method, Swaarm ensures that correct non-probabilistic attribution can be made throughout the whole network chain. The method successfully protects the user’s privacy and guarantees fairness and exactness in the attribution process.

Frei continued: “Our mission is to provide premium tracking services to mobile affiliate networks of any size and we believe that the current network ecosystem can continue to flourish despite the limiting changes Apple is introducing.”