Amazon compliancy with the Digital Markets Act (DMA)
The European Commission's Digital Markets Act (DMA) is legislation designed to harmonize platform regulation across the European Economic Area (EEA), and ensure fair and open digital markets.
Here, you can find details about how Adjust supports you to comply with Amazon's requirements concerning use of its attribution APIs under the DMA regulation.
Why does the DMA affect Amazon?
The DMA aims to reduce the power of major players in the digital industry, which it calls ‘gatekeepers’. The definition of a gatekeeper is a company that provides a core platform service to more than 45 million monthly active end users established or located in the EEA and to more than 10,000 yearly active business users established in the EEA.
As per this definition, Amazon is considered a gatekeeper. This means that it is their responsibility to comply with the DMA legislation. Neither Adjust nor our customers are under such an obligation.
The DMA provides ex ante legislation, which means that it seeks to regulate future actions of gatekeepers, rather than outlaw existing practices. Going forward, gatekeepers must observe the following:
- Effective consent must be granted to track end users outside of the gatekeepers' core platform service for the purpose of targeted advertising.
- Gatekeepers are obliged to document consent for any type of profiling.
The DMA affects other companies besides Amazon who fall under the definition of “gatekeeper” (Meta, Microsoft, ByteDance, Apple).
How does Adjust help Amazon remain compliant?
To remain compliant with the DMA, Amazon has determined that they cannot target nor attribute EEA residents without their consent. Therefore, Adjust needs to send Amazon consent data along with every request we send to their attribution APIs.
Consent data is to be transmitted via two parameters. These are attached regardless of whether the install has taken place within the EEA.
ad_user_data=<boolean>
ad_storage=<boolean>Required parameters
Adjust requires you to send the following two parameters with each request.
| Parameter | Description | Value |
|---|---|---|
ad_user_data | The ad_user_data parameter informs Amazon whether users granted consent to personal data (e.g cookie ID, device ID, advertising ID) being shared for advertising purposes or not. The parameter type is boolean. | 1 = user consented 0 = user did not consent |
ad_storage | The ad_storage parameter informs Amazon whether users consented to Amazon reading or writing Amazon cookies in their browser or accessing the advertising ID on their device. | 1 = user consented 0 = user did not consent |
What does this mean for you?
If you work with Amazon Ads, you need to ask all your iOS and Android app users within the EEA for consent to data sharing with Amazon Ads, along with consent to being retargeted with personalized ads via these ad networks. You then need to start sending Adjust the consent data using the parameters we provide. This can be done directly or via your consent management platform.
Amazon requires user consent signals, and Adjust supports sending these signals.
If you are concerned about sending Amazon data without having user consent, you can use our third-party sharing feature to ensure no data is sent to Amazon.
The EEA DMA setting available in your app settings does not apply to Amazon. Amazon requires user consent to be sent in all cases, regardless of the user’s region. Even if you don’t have users in the EEA, you must still send DMA parameters to remain compliant with Amazon’s requirements.
Setup in Adjust
If you’re already working with Amazon Ads in Adjust, follow steps 1 and 2 below. This ensures you are collecting and sharing consent data with Adjust, so it can be forwarded on to Amazon.
To start working with Amazon in Adjust, follow all of the following steps:
- Request user consent
- Share consent data with Adjust
- Set up the Adjust integration with Amazon
- Set up additional data sources
1. Request user consent with a consent dialogue
Userconsent can be obtained through a consent dialog. Please note that the wording of the prompt may need to be adjusted to clearly reflect that consent is being requested for both data sharing and data retrieval.
We recommend you consult your legal team for guidance on the language to use in your consent dialog.
When you display a consent dialogue for users in the EEA, and negative consent for data sharing is given, installs may not be attributable.
2. Share consent data with Adjust
To share consent data with Adjust, you need to use our third-party data sharing feature. The minimum required version of our SDKs supporting this feature are shown below.
How does the enableFirstSessionDelay function help with DMA compliance?
Adjust has introduced the enableFirstSessionDelay function to help clients comply with the Digital Markets Act. This function gives you greater control over when user data is sent to Adjust servers, making it easier to manage DMA compliance.
By enabling this function, you can effectively control when the consent dialog is shown, giving you more flexibility in how you handle consent requests before sending any signals to the Adjust servers. However, it’s important to note that delaying the consent prompt may affect attribution capabilities and could limit personalized ads for users who do not provide consent.
Follow the instructions for your app development platform to implement this in the Adjust SDK.
To confirm you are successfully sending the required parameters to Adjust, your developer can check the SDK verbose logs to see that these values are present.
If you are working with Amazon Ads for the first time in Adjust, you will need to additionally check that you have completed the following steps to ensure that Adjust measurement is correctly set up.
3. Set up the Adjust integration with Amazon Ads
You can set up the network integration with Amazon Ads in the Adjust dashboard. Use the dedicated article for details on the setup.
4. Set up additional data sources
With Adjust, you can see different kinds of app data alongside your attribution statistics. By connecting Adjust to other measurement data sources, you get a comprehensive overview of all aspects of your app and campaign performance within the Adjust dashboard. Click the links below to find out more about these data sources.