As Advertisers Struggle to Reach iOS Users, Deep Contextual Can Help

Combating the aftermath of ATT and reassessing traditional targeting methods

Since the launch of Apple’s App Tracking Transparency (ATT), which asks users whether they want to be tracked by apps on their devices, Apple has faced significant criticism from the IAB and others. By asking consumers direct permission to use their identifying data, the idea is that users have more control over what happens to their data. This is partly true, but before the implementation of ATT, users could still change their device settings to control what apps they were sharing their data with. As the impact of these changes continues to reverberate throughout the industry, our team realized that advertisers’ traditional targeting tools were not reaching a large portion of iOS users. With user-tracking off by default, audience targeting cannot reach users on iOS devices. The digital advertising industry supports an ecosystem moving towards greater transparency, – but without tracking, traditional targeting methods don’t have the same impact as before. 

These restrictions are also heavily impacting Apple’s competitors like Meta, Google, and others who now have limited access to data from Apple devices – benefitting Apple as they have been working behind the scenes to build up their own ad business. When the news broke last year that Apple may be launching its own DSP, our President and CRO Jenn Chen sat down with AdExchanger to explain how the brand continues to push its privacy-centric mission, keeping Apple user data in a vault.

Losing sight of iOS users amidst the noise

According to a survey by Slickdeals, iPhone users have an average higher annual salary in comparison to Android users, and are more likely to splurge on shopping. iOS users are an extremely valuable target audience that many advertisers are now missing out on. After digging deeper into Connatix’s  iOS traffic and analyzing audience-based buys, we found that iOS traffic made up just 48% of ad revenue despite iOS devices accounting for 64% of total traffic. On the other hand, Android devices accounted for 52% of ad revenue despite only making up 36% of ad requests. Our unique position as a code-on-page player for publishers and a premium video marketplace for advertisers enabled us to identify this issue. The improperly monetized iOS inventory is an issue across the board for the entire industry with all audience-based buys on iOS, but most companies haven’t been able to find a solution. Our Head of Client Success Binda Patel also noticed that publishers are much more aware of the impact than advertisers, as in-house teams tend to notice the ongoing issue more than advertisers that outsource media buying to agencies.

Leveraging Deep Contextual™ to reach iOS users

So what exactly is the solution? How can we ensure that advertisers are reaching the audiences they want, and that users are seeing more content related to their interests? As a simple solution, turning off audience targeting could potentially do the trick – and could be applied not just through buys with Connatix, but across the board for all programmatic deals. But for advertisers truly looking to scale campaigns while still finding a relevant audience through content alignment, turning to our contextual targeting solution Deep Contextual has been a game-changer. 

Our Deep Contextual solution leverages AI (including deep learning, natural language processing, and computer vision) to analyze audio, text, metadata, and videos in real time. After extracting multimedia data points, a knowledge graph contextualizes and classifies the outputs using a real-world understanding of media content, trends, and connections between topics to derive insights about notable brands, celebrities, language sentiment, and content categories/subcategories that are either mentioned or seen within the video. These outputs can then be targeted broadly or granularly depending on a brand’s campaign goals, allowing advertisers to reach the right audience when and where they are most receptive, meaning that consumers are more likely to engage as they’re seeing more content relevant to their interests. 

Our team worked with one agency client in particular to assess their strategy and when comparing the client's non-audience based buys leveraging Deep Contextual, to audience buys, we could see that in the audience buys the overall percentage of the traffic was 66% of iOS inventory, but they were only monetizing 4% of the traffic by using audience segments that don’t work well in iOS environments. When looking at the non-audience based buy leveraging Deep Contextual,  76% of the traffic represented 72% of the ad impressions, meaning that when comparing Deep Contextual to audience targeting based buys, we see better inventory being filled on iOS, while still reaching relevant audiences.

Advertisers are unknowingly losing sight of iOS audiences and the cookieless future is imminent. In the midst of ever-changing privacy regulations, Deep Contextual is a future-proof solution proven to help. Stay tuned for our next blog in our disruptor series where we’ll continue to unpack the pivotal changes disrupting the industry, and the solutions to combat the changes. To learn more about Connatix’s Deep Contextual solution visit connatix.com/deep-contextual.

As the impact of these changes continues to reverberate throughout the industry, our team realized that advertisers’ traditional targeting tools were not reaching a large portion of iOS users.