Are SKAdNetwork conversion events sent from the client and not S2S?

Question

I have been told by our MMP that "Due to the 24h timer, even if an s2s event is sent before timer expires, this event still needs to reach the device itself, as only the client side (not server side) can change the conversion value.
So, an additional app open is needed after the s2s event to record this activity.
We have in AF a solution to pass this event to the sdk to record it, but this limitation should be known (not an AF limitation, an skadnetwork protocol limitation)". 

We have been sending subscription related events from backend up until this point as it doesn't require the user to open the app. So if this is the case, we're going to have to make some big changes on our attribution infrastructure in order to prepare for SKAdNetwork. 

Answer 1

Yes. Per Apple's documentation:

When a user installs and launches an app as a result of ad network’s ad, the app is responsible for calling registerAppForAdNetworkAttribution() or updateConversionValue(_:). These calls prepare the install validation notification that the device sends to the ad network’s registered postback URL.

Comments

Thanks for your reply! It is going to be impossible to track conversions from free trial to subscription for subscription apps anyways since you're going to need to send a signal everyday from the first day of the trial to the day of conversion to subscription - but I wasn't aware that we needed to send all these from client side.

Answer 2

I'm having this problem as well. More specifically, to qualify "free trials" better, I'd like to declare in SKAN conversion values the event "has started the trial but not cancelled within 20minutes" (or send both events separately, doesn't matter). The problem being that those cancellations events aren't recorded by the app itself but third party tools which sync though S2S.

I wonder if there's a way to send back that event to the app, and have its conversion value processed there, but it seems quite unreliable. If you find a way keep us posted!

Comments

Appsflyer supposedly has a solution that supports events being sent from backend instead of client for SK Ad Network but we have decided to continue with events from client side since this solution of Appsflyer is very new compared to the original solution and is likely to not work properly.

Answer 3

Seems like there is a lot of conflated vocab here. By technical definitions, you can only send SKAdNetwork Conversion Values (to Apple) from the client. Apple doesn't receive any "Events" in the way that most analytics and attribution companies use that word. What mostly needs to be taken care of, if you are mapping analytic "events" to Conversion Values, has to be taken care of on the client and recorded server side for optimization later.