Verbs and Vocab
A professor opened a class I took once that the trick to learning any new skill is first to understand its unique verbs and vocab. It’s hard to play poker well without understanding its terms and similarly it’s hard to do advertising well without an understanding of its terms.
The A-Pixel-Lypse is upon us with Apple and Facebook battling it out in the hearts and minds of consumers about their views on privacy. This battle is forcing the industry to learn a new set of verbs and vocab as their status quo is disrupted.
Most articles on the topic have talked about predicted ramifications. Our recommendation after following the steps from our previous article is to get familiar with all the new verbs and vocab listed below.
Dust is still settling and the change will impact every online advertiser. There will be plenty to understand after seeing the impact from the switch over.
Identifier for Advertisers (IDFA)
“IDFA is the abbreviation for identifier for advertisers on Apple mobile devices (iPhones). You can think of an IDFA as somewhat analogous to an advertising cookie on the web, in that it enables an advertiser to get notified when a user of a phone has taken an action like clicking on their ad or installing their app.
Apple created the IDFA for ad tracking. It is also known as a MAID (see below)
And now, with the release of iOS 14 in September, it is essentially killing the IDFA.”
SKAdNetwork
There are many different ways to say this but join us saying it as Skad Network instead of S-K Ad Network. There is plenty to discuss on what this changes but the long-story boring of SKAdNetwork is Apple has introduced a new way to measure ad campaigns while protecting user privacy on iOS.
AppleTracking Transparency (ATT)
“Starting with Apple’s iOS 14 update, user consent for ad tracking will be managed through the AppTrackingTransparency (ATT) system. App developers will now be required to use the AppTrackingTransparency framework if their app collects data about users and shares it with third parties for purposes of tracking across apps and websites.”
Private Click Measurement (PCM)
This protocol will cause a lot of ramifications to the status quo on how eCommerce advertisers approach non-app based conversions. From Apple’s Unofficial GitHub Document, “defines a privacy preserving way to attribute a conversion, such as a purchase or a sign-up, to a previous ad click”
PCM does not support App-to-Web conversion measurement nor does it support Cross-domain measurement.
Aggregated Event Measurement (AEM)
Facebook will introduce Aggregated Event Measurement to support measurement of web events from iOS 14 users once Apple requires the ATT prompt. It is designed to help you measure campaign performance in a way that is consistent with consumers’ decisions about their data.
Nutrition Labels
“The App Store now helps users better understand an app’s privacy practices before they download the app on any Apple platform. On each app’s product page, users can learn about some of the data types the app may collect, and whether that data is linked to them or used to track them.” Here is an example of the nutrition label for Signal vs the Facebook Inc apps.
Microphone access to serve a person better ads is nowhere on there if curious 😉

Additional Terms to Know
Mobile Advertising ID (MAID)
Mobile advertising IDs are ways mobile app developers can identify who is using their mobile apps. Generally this is a bucket for IDFA and GAID.
Google Advertising ID (GAID)
Google ID for Android. This is potentially the other shoe to fall if Google goes a similar path to Apple (something we don’t expect at this time).
General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)
This is the current high mark for data privacy and is being used as a template for upcoming US policy such as CCPA. It sets the rules governing the processing of personal data within EU member states, including “the right to be forgotten”.
California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA)
State-wide data privacy law that regulates how businesses all over the world are allowed to handle the personally identifiable information (PII) of California residents.
Mobile Measurement Partner (MMP)
Historically a third party used by App advertisers to reconcile IDFAs seen in-app via SDK against IDFAs from a landing page that loaded from a recent ad click. They will continue to be an integral part for app advertisers looking to maximize performance and advertising capabilities.
Software Development Kit (SDK)
An overly simplistic definition, but this functions similar to a pixel by reporting actions users take within an app.
And with this knowledge, we leave the following sentence as an exercise for the reader to parse.
ATT is stripping IDFA due to SKadNetwork protocols via their new PCM standard that Facebook will attempt to fix via AEM. The potential impact on GAID and the weakening of SDKs within the MMP space will have massive implications on advertiser performance, especially when looking at the expansion of GDPR type legislation vis-à-vis CCPA.
Fun.
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Photo by Pisit Heng on Unsplash