iOS 17 Impact on Digital Marketing: Link Tracking Protection

The digital marketing world has recently been rocked with a series of technological advances in the realm of generative AI. These recent advances have changed the way digital marketers think about their strategies. These strategy changes will continue to evolve as Apple releases the newest iOS update in September.??

The iOS 17 update which will be released on Sept. 18 will feature many updates for Apple users. However, the one that will affect digital marketers is the Link Tracking Protection. Automatically activated across mail, messages, and Safari in private browsing mode, this update will detect user identifiable tracking parameters within URLs and will automatically remove them, potentially hindering digital marketers’ ability to accurately attribute their efforts.??

This will have a major impact since iOS owns almost 30% of the worldwide mobile market share. This update will detect user identifiable tracking parameters within URLs and will automatically remove them.??

A statement from Apple’s website regarding Link Tracking Protection stated:?

“Some websites add extra information to their URLs in order to track users across other websites. Now this information will be removed from the links users share in Messages and Mail, and the links will still work as expected. This information will also be removed from links in Safari Private Browsing.”?

Removing things like Google Click Identifiers and Meta Click Identifiers will make tracking a user’s journey much more difficult. Users will also have the ability to select “All Browsing” within their settings to have Link Tracking Protection on all sessions not just Safari Private Mode.??

While it won’t include the rich data offered by GCLIDs, Apple will be enabling an alternative way to measure campaigns for marketers through?Private Click Measurement.?Another important thing to note is that this will not impact UTM codes which is a snippet of text added to the end of a URL to track metric and performance of a specific digital marketing campaign.??

It will be tough to measure the actual impact this update will have on digital marketers until the update is officially released, but in the meantime, the best thing to do is to stay up to date on the release and to have strategies in place to prioritize first-party data access.??