YouAppi reveals proprietary contextual targeting algorithm ahead of Apple's IDFA changes with iOS14

Apple's decision to eliminate IDFAs (Identification for Advertisers) across all devices using iOS14 is likely to have a major impact on the mobile advertising market

Ahead of its implementation, YouAppi, a leading performance-based mobile app marketing platform for the world's largest app publishers and brands, unveiled their proprietary contextual targeting algorithm to help address the challenges brought on by Apple's IDFA changes while still meeting advertiser KPIs on iOS.

In a nod to privacy advocates last summer, Apple announced they would soon require a user prompt "requesting to share" IDFAs across all Apple devices. Device IDs are a key advertising tracking identifier that helps brands capture user data across platforms for targeted mobile advertising campaigns. Now, though, users on all Apple devices will need to opt-in to the sharing of their data on an app-by-app basis or they can't be tracked.

These new changes make targeted messaging and advertising extremely challenging. Fortunately, YouAppi will still be able to support targeted campaigns by using its proprietary contextual targeting algorithms. YouAppi uses machine learning to find connections between a diverse set of contextual signals. Best of all, this type of contextual targeting driven by machine intelligence is beyond the scope of Apple's IDFA changes.

"Personalization is still important for targeted advertising," says YouAppi CEO Moshe Vaknin. "That's why it's vital that we find ways to enable brands to leverage addressable devices to optimize our contextual targeting and leverage even more rich, diverse signals about what, how, and when a brand's prime audiences engage with our in-app inventory."

YouAppi achieves this alternative level of targeting through algorithms that harness interoperability while enabling probabilistic correlations. This solution is a unique blend of machine learning, scalability, quality, flexibility, and privacy-safe data used to meet customer needs.

"The changes to opt-in could reduce the scalability of device-ID targeting tactics on Apple devices but contextual targeting algorithms should help blunt the impact there," says Eyal Hilzerant, Chief Product Officer at YouAppi. "We have internally tested 2.5 million devices using our own contextual data parameters with an 80% accuracy when compared with deterministic (IDFA based) UA campaigns"

Hilzerant also notes that Android scalability, which controls the majority of the mobile OS market, will not be affected.

While it's safe to say that Apple's IDFA changes will dramatically alter the way brands advertise across apps going forward, more and more in the mobile ecosystem are seeing this moment as an opportunity to spur the industry forward. YouAppi's deep sector expertise and extensive experience in building optimization algorithms make them extremely optimistic about how brands will be able to meet the challenges of an IDFA-less mobile ad world while still engaging directly with the mobile consumers they want to target.