A self attributing network, or SAN, refers to an ad network that measures its results internally, which means they have a different relationship with third party mobile measurement partners (MMP). Many of the largest and most popular ad networks are SANs including Facebook, Google, Twitter, Snapchat, and several others.
SANs are different from traditional ad networks, which report user activity (i.e. clicks) prior to the app install or conversion event report. Conversely, SANs provide user activity to attribution providers like Singular through an API after the event has taken place. Attribution providers, or MMPs, see an install, and request more information from the SAN associated with the device ID for the phone or table where the install happened. Then the two platforms share data and MMPs like Singular enrich the conversion data with additional insights from the self attributing network.
However, with the removal of IDFA in iOS 14 however, device IDs are not used in SAN and MMP reporting anymore on iOS, though they continue to be in use on Android.
As highlighted by Admiral Media:
Apple announced they will be stripping Facebook, Google, Twitter, and others of their status as self-attributing networks in the next version of iOS. With this change, advertisers will be able to opt in to get copies of the winning postbacks via SKAN, Apple’s privacy-preserving attribution API for iOS 14 and above.
You can learn more about iOS 14, 15 and how they will affect attribution in our blog post on Advertiser access to SKAdNetwork postbacks, App Privacy Report, and more from WWDC.