Overview

SKAdNetwork (SKAN), once enabled, will give you enhanced reporting on all of your SKAN-related campaigns directly on the Branch Dashboard.

What does it look like?

The Branch Dashboard shows you all the information about your SKAN campaigns in the SKAdNetwork tab, which is found on the Analytics page under Ads.

You'll be able to determine:

• Which ad networks drove the most downloads
• Which highest conversion events are being performed the most
  • You can identify the effectiveness of each conversion value tier as low, medium, or high (only available for SKAN 4.0)

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Branch SKAN Dashboard Availability

You are only able to view SKAN Data in the Branch in the following areas of the Branch Dashboard:

• SKAN Activity
• SKAN Unified View

You cannot view SKAN data in other areas of the Branch Dashboard (ex. Sources) due to Apple's intentional SKAN design limitations: Apple only shares a limited amount of attribution data with advertisers and does not provide any device-level data (i.e., device ID, timestamps, geo, IP, etc.) that could be used to deduplicate against other sources that Branch tracks.

SKAN Unified View

There is also a view in the Branch Dashboard that combines both your SKAN and non-SKAN attribution data in one unified view called SKAN Unified View.

For more details, please see our full SKAN Unified View guide here.

SKAdNetwork Activity

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SKAN 4.0+ Granularity

With SKAN 4.0+, additional attributed touch granularity will be available such as ad and creative. As ad networks expand their APIs to support these fields, Branch will retrieve all available data.

Different from how other Branch Dashboard reports are configurable, SKAN reports are configured mainly through setting a specific metric to compare. These metrics can be found at the top of the page underneath the Date Range section:

Selecting your preferred metric will dynamically update the report generated on this page.

For more details on general Branch Dashboard Reports can be found here.

Dimensions

Comparison Parameters

SKAN 4

SKAN 4 introduced new data fields that Branch can use to enhance your reporting to help you understand campaign performance. A simple way to look at SKAN 4-only metrics is to apply the following filter to the activity chart and/or table:

Coarse Conversion Value

You can also generate reports to analyze your campaigns with respect to Tier 1+ postbacks for SKAN 4 campaigns. To do this, you can apply the following:

Troubleshooting

SKAdNetwork (SKAN) introduced a brand new type of attribution when it comes to mobile measurement. As such, there can rise many different types of issues related to integration, data, and reporting. This guide serves to help debug and troubleshoot anything SKAN-related.

Data is not Appearing in the Branch Dashboard

Because SKAdNetwork is meant to prevent the ability of any party to tie attributions back to a user, Apple only confirms conversions to advertisers after an undetermined threshold of conversions happens for the publisher & campaign ID.

SKAdNetwork does not attribute conversions in real time. When the app is installed, a 24-hour rolling timer begins, and only when that timer expires, can the install then be attributed after an additional 0-24 hours. Every time an additional conversion is reported with a conversion value greater than the previous value, the 24-hour rolling timer is reset and the install does not get attributed until that 24-hour timer is allowed to expire. Apple offers a developer profile here, that can reduce the timers for testing from 24 hours to 5 minutes.

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App Clips

If your app uses App Clips, any API calls to SKAdNetwork from an app clip’s code will have no effect, return empty strings, or return values that indicate unavailability. See the disclaimer at the bottom of Apple's docs here.

Fewer conversions after updating my app for SKAdNetwork

When a conversion is reported to Apple from inside the app, it does not add that count to a running tally or immediately sends a conversion postback. It only replaces the prior reported conversion value, as long as its value is a higher priority (63 is the highest priority, 0 is the lowest).

When the app is installed, a 24-hour rolling timer begins. If no additional conversion is reported before that 24-hour rolling timer expires, only an install will be attributed to that user. Any subsequent conversions sent to Apple for that user will not be attributed.

This means that for any user, Apple will at most, only report a single postback containing an Install or Reinstall and the highest priority conversion associated with that install session.

I'm not seeing my event metadata in the Branch Dashboard

SKAdNetwork works differently from traditional app attribution systems, which means the data you see is more limited.

• Traditional attribution. Typically, when you track events via the Branch SDK, you can view contextual metadata (i.e., Geo, Revenue, timestamp) for those events in the Branch dashboard.
• SKAdNetwork attribution. SKAdNetwork only allows a single conversion value for down-funnel reporting, and Apple intentionally designed the system to limit the contextual metadata available for that event. This means you won't see event metadata like Geo, Revenue, or timestamp for SKAdNetwork events in the Branch dashboard.

SKAN Reinstall Numbers

SKAdNetwork reports reinstalls via the redownload postback parameter, which Apple defines this way:

A Boolean flag that indicates the customer redownloaded and reinstalled the app when the value is true.

Similar to the Redownload numbers provided by Apple Search Ads, this data is likely coming directly from Apple's internal records for that customer. That means it is different from (and more accurate than) anything a third-party like Branch could infer, even prior to iOS 14: depending on the situation, Branch would see these events as either re-opens or simple installs.