We’re diving into one of the major announcements from WWDC 2024: Apple’s introduction of Add Attribution Kit, or AAK, which is set to replace SKAN. We’ll explore what this means for advertisers, the actual impact of these changes, and whether you need to make any adjustments to your current setup. 

In WWDC 2024, one of the announcements we were all anticipating was about any changes that would be forthcoming to SKAN and ad attribution. It turns out Apple did have a significant announcement: the introduction of Add Attribution Kit (AAK), which Apple said would replace SKAN.

On the surface, this appeared to be a huge deal, and many elements of the announcement did indeed appear substantial. However, once you look closely, you’ll find that there is very little change in AAK compared to SKAN. I went over Apple’s documentation to see if there was any small print that could be a big deal, but it turns out there really isn’t much.

So, what’s happening here? The building blocks of SKAN remain intact and unchanged through AAK. Apple’s documentation indicates that there will be interoperability between SKAN and Add Attribution Kit. If you have SKAN set up, Add Attribution Kit will essentially inherit the details of your past SKAN setup, although some parameter names will change. 

For instance, Ad Network ID becomes Ad Network Identifier, Transaction ID becomes Postback Identifier, Target App ID becomes Advertised Item Identifier, and Source App ID becomes Publisher Item Identifier. So, the terminology changes, but the core components remain largely unchanged. In other words, you still have 64 conversion values, you still have 3 postbacks, and you still have crowd anonymity (which used to be privacy thresholds). Much like in SKAN4, your 2nd and 3rd postbacks are largely meaningless. Also, some of the larger networks don’t have a great deal of adoption of SKAN4. For example, Meta has about 5% adoption, so really, the most critical piece is your 1st postback in SKAN.

So, if you’re an advertiser, what you have to keep in mind is that as long as you have SKAN set up and running, nothing’s really going to change. You don’t have to plan or change anything substantial. Yes, there are other features of Add Attribution Kit, like alternative app stores and re-engagement, but again, how many advertisers do you know that actually run re-engagement campaigns? In my experience, having interacted with hundreds of app developers, only a tiny fraction use re-engagement campaigns. This is, of course, in contrast with e-commerce and web, where re-engagement is much more common and substantial.

Furthermore, an even smaller fraction of advertisers consider alternative app stores. So, as of today, these new features are not going to be very huge or substantial. Of course, if you are in the tiny fraction of advertisers that do use alternative app stores, that is absolutely something you should look into. But for the rest of us, these features aren’t really substantial or meaningful.

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