GameRefinery says the best time to push ATT notifications is the first 6-30 seco | Pocket Gamer.biz

With Apple’s latest App Tracking Transparency (ATT) reforms, the question of when to push notifications for permission to use app tracking is on many developer’s minds. But when’s the best time to do so?

For games analytics firm GameRefinery, this is the main topic of their latest research. To do so, they first examined which games in the US top-grossing 200 list had ATT pop-ups within the first 25 minutes of play, their hypothetical “first session”. GameRefinery found 88% had ATT pop-ups within this timeframe, but out of these 72% displayed them within the first 30 seconds of gameplay.

23% of the top 200 also used “pre-ATT prompts” or small pop-ups before the ATT request notification. These prompts often promise users a personalised or tailored experience by allowing app tracking. Notably, this increases slightly when the sample is narrowed down to the top 100, with 27% featuring pre-ATT prompts.

13% of the top 200 also included prompts for further user information, such as phone number, age, gender etc.

All of this indicates that the top-performing games are bringing ATT forward as quickly as possible, and that priming users with pre-ATT prompts is popular, but not necessarily essential. However, GameRefinery cautions that pushing notifications too early can drive users off.

Overall, GameRefinery concludes that the “‘golden window’ for ATT pop-up timing exists somewhere during the first six and 30 seconds of gameplay.” This, they argue, is the perfect sweet spot between user engagement and compliance with ATT requirements.

Why does this help?

A potential factor behind the quick introduction of ATT notifications would be to ensure that users are quickly presented with all necessary information upfront. Ensuring that they are then comfortable knowing what is being tracked in the app without any caution from the very start of play. Thus, further requests for info being less popular might be due to users only being prepared to accept basic ATT tracking.

The use of pre-ATT prompts can also help to set expectations for users not altogether familiar with ATT. From the numbers offered by GameRefinery it seems clear that for the moment, pushing ATT requests first and making it clear to users what permissions a game is looking for is the most practical approach.

GameRefinery recently analysed the state of the mobile gaming market in April.