Apple’s annual Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) for years has served as a flashy opportunity for the tech giant to showcase its latest and best consumer-centric updates, the most recent installment this June no exception. However, as a tightened privacy landscape continues to take shape, the subject of information collection on Apple’s itinerary has often stoked anxiety for marketers.
Undoubtedly at the middle of this yr’s WWDC was the revealing of Apple’s long-anticipated mixed-reality headset, Apple Vision Pro, which has already garnered a sea of feedback — including criticism of its hefty $3,500 price tag — ahead of its official rollout early next yr. The company also revealed its latest software update, iOS 17, set to be released in September, that boasts a latest level of personalization for apps like Phone, Messages and FaceTime.
Beneath the thrill of features like Live Voicemail, Contact Posters and a latest mindfulness app, Apple also indicated that it’s hunkering down further on efforts to limit the power to access consumer data. With iOS 17, the corporate will remove URL tracking parameters from links accessed in its Mail and Messages apps together with removing them from Safari Private Browsing, a move that would make it tougher for marketers to accurately follow the patron journey.
“Companies are understanding now that buyers want their privacy, they need to take back their data,” said Rae Guimond, director of strategy and business development at PriceSpider, a brand commerce platform with retail network partners including Amazon, Target and Kroger.
For years, advertisers have been in a position to use URL tracking parameters as a option to follow consumers across multiple web sites after they click a single link, unlocking data that would help inform a targeting strategy. But with Apple’s latest Link Tracking Protection feature, user-identifiable information might be stripped from URLs accessed inside Safari Private Browsing, Messages and Mail, while the links will still proceed to operate as expected for consumers.
In addition to creating it tougher for marketers to know specific audiences, Link Tracking Protection could make for a challenge relating to thoroughly measuring campaign success, tasking those reliant on that data to strategize ways to fill the holes, Guimond said. Marketers have needed to repeatedly pivot lately while contending with Apple privacy changes like iOS 14.5, which notably introduced App Tracking Transparency, and iOS 15, which dramatically altered the power for email marketers to trace open rates.
Meanwhile, Google has similarly been ironing out privacy changes, namely its planned phaseout of third-party cookies in Chrome, an effort slated to start in Q1 of 2024. As the phaseout approaches, the enormous has explored a handful of initiatives, including its Privacy Sandbox API, an area meant to assist advertisers discover cookie-free ad solutions, and the rollout of Google Analytics 4 (GA4), its latest data measurement property that it describes because the “next generation of analytics.”
“Brands have been talking about, where does the road stop with the form of deprecating or removal of third-party cookies?” Guimond said. “And I feel all of us suspected that it will go a bit further — I feel now we’re at form of that bit-further point.”
Apple helps advertisers take care of the upcoming change by extending its Private Click Measurement solution, a privacy focused alternative for tracking ad attribution, to make it available for Safari Private Browsing. Guimond also noted that, while there hasn’t been a confirmation, evidently Apple isn’t stripping UTM codes from URLs. UTM codes are small clips of text added to a URL that advertisers have often used to measure campaign attribution without identifying individual users.
“If that is the case, that is a great thing for brands and marketers … but I feel the difficulty comes with how [they will] take a look at continued personalization in the event that they’re missing a few of those other data points that they might need gotten from the third-party cookies,” Guimond said.
(*17*) the impact
Some marketers are already preparing for the rollout of Link Tracking Protection, looking deeper into the small print to know the way it could play into business. From the lens of an email marketer, Apple’s announcement at first glance ushered in similar concerns raised with iOS 15, said Brian McKenna, vp of CRM at Philadelphia-based agency DMi Partners.
“Going back to iOS 15, we saw that [it] did have a dramatic or a huge impact on the e-mail space, largely bringing a ton of noise to the concept of opens,” McKenna said. “So I feel when iOS 17 was announced, we were apprehensive that we were going to see the same impact, but with clicks.”
However, if Link Tracking Protection functions at its official release because it currently does in beta, McKenna feels confident that its impacts on email marketing won’t be devastating, a conclusion informed by analyzing a public report — not confirmed by Apple — that’s suspected to contain the particular URL parameters that the brand new tool will search for and take away. Of the handful of parameters identified, which include the press IDs for Google and Facebook, none are currently getting used by DMi’s clients for email marketing, and in the event that they were, there are workarounds that would help gather the identical insights, he said.
For other features of promoting, like paid search, certain click IDs might be more worthwhile, nevertheless it’s essential to do not forget that the removal of URL parameters in Safari will only occur inside links accessed on private browsers, impacting a smaller data subset that already comes with its own set of challenges, McKenna added.
“Today, I feel our team that manages some of these campaigns, they probably wouldn’t expect necessarily to get full transparency for people who are in private browsing mode anyway,” he said.
Moving forward
Only time will reveal the total implications that Link Tracking Protection could have on promoting, but regardless, any further tightening of consumer privacy is sure to have an effect, Guimond said. To get ahead of the curve, the exec recommends that marketers prioritize gaining consumers’ consent to gather first-party data, in the event that they aren’t already doing so.
Additionally, Guimond recommends that marketers review existing processes to see how often third-party data is being utilized and strategize the right way to fill those gaps through workshopping efforts like a strengths, weakness, opportunities and threats (SWOT) evaluation. Perhaps most significantly, marketers should approach ongoing privacy shifts with an open mind.
“It’s like a test and learn, if anything, identical to with technology updates, brands have to test and learn and be flexible and agile, and that has been the case for the last three years,” she said.
Read the total article here
