What iOS17 Tracking preventions mean for advertisers.

Apple's iOS17 update was announced this month, with some more advanced tracking prevention features.

What do these new updates mean for advertisers?

1. Marketing attribution was already difficult. Its going to get harder.

2. Advertising costs could go up further as ad platforms face further challenges to attribute ad interactions to conversions.

3. You need to embrace these changes, own your first party data collection, and adopt newer contextual measurement approaches. No attribution report can tell you ‘exactly’ what your channels and campaigns did.

A quick run down of tracking prevention updates in IOS17 :

1. When a user clicks your ad and lands on your site, Safari will strip all tracking parameters from URLs (such as fbclid, gclid and so on.)?
2. By default, this would be applied only when in 'private browsing', but a simple toggle allows the user to apply this to all browsing.
3. UTM parameters will NOT be stripped for now; however utm_ parameters are only useful for attribution reporting in analytics platforms (such as GA) and has no relevance to the advertising platform itself.
4. If a user clicks on a link in Apple Mail / Messages, some tracking url parameters would be stripped before loading the url even if the user is not in private browsing mode.

In summary, state of tracking prevention in iOS devices is as below:

1. Third party cookies were already blocked on all browsers, which meant that view-through attribution was already severely impacted. [Third party cookies are the clear deterministic link between a user seeing an ad somewhere and then completing the purchase on your site.]
2. First party cookies were already being expired within 1-7 days, which meant that the click-through attribution was impacted if the conversion did not happen within 1-7 days of the ad-click happening.
3. Now with this new change, explicit url tracking parameters would be removed, which means that click-through attribution will be further impacted, as the ad click identifier would not be present at all.

What can you do as an advertiser?

1. Own your customer data collection as early as possible. i.e the moment users jump onto your website, make it valuable for them to identify themselves.
2. If you have managed to do that (and have the right consent) you can then use these 1P data identifiers in your marketing tracking hits.
3. Accept the fact that deterministic attribution is dead. Embrace alternate approaches such as customer surveys, marketing mix tracking, and other probabilistic attribution approaches.