I built Bright Storm as a programmatic DSP, which meant my job was literally to know where an install came from and prove it to a media buyer who was paying for that install. When Apple shipped App Tracking Transparency, that job got a lot harder - not because the ad networks got worse, but because the ground truth we all relied on disappeared overnight.
Here's what almost nobody tells founders: your attribution didn't fail cleanly. It failed unevenly. Meta kept a decent chunk of signal through modeled conversions. Google's SKAdNetwork gap is worse than most dashboards admit. First-party events - the one source you actually control - usually aren't wired up at all. So your numbers still look confident. They're just confidently wrong in different places for different channels.
That's the trap: a founder sees a channel "underperforming" post-IDFA and kills it, when really the channel is fine and the measurement collapsed. I watched this happen from inside a DSP, then again managing UA at a gaming studio through the same transition.
The fix isn't a bigger dashboard. It's knowing, channel by channel, how much of what you're looking at is real signal versus a model's best guess - and then deciding where to invest in first-party tracking before you decide where to cut spend.
Reading this tells you the pattern exists. Running the diagnostic tells you where it's happening in your own stack, and what to fix first.