How Apple iOS Update Affects Digital Marketing
By Lindsay Valenty -
In its most recent update, Apple's iOS has changed how data gets transmitted.
The new Apple iOS features "App Tracking Transparency," which means you have to grant apps permission to track what you do. This includes sharing your personal data—which is currently used for ad targeting purposes. This is available not only on iOS but iPadOS and tvOS.
Apple's updated user privacy and data use policy prohibits specific data collection and sharing unless users opt-in.
This change affects services like Facebook/Meta, which shares your data with businesses so you can receive personalized ads. It also affects your email marketing efforts.
What does this mean for advertisers? Is there anything you can do to continue to deliver your ad and email campaigns to your target audience?
Facebook/Meta Advertising
When it comes to Facebook/Meta, here are some tips and tricks you can use for their Aggregated Event Measurement.
Verify Your Domains. This establishes who has the authority to edit web events for your Business Account.
Rank and Configure Your Top 8 Goals/Events on Your Domain. If you're trying to send customers to a specific landing page on your site, you can choose up to 8 standard or custom events to track as conversions in your campaigns.
Change Your Targeting Strategies. Any custom audiences you currently have in Facebook/Meta may decrease following the update, which means you're going to have to use a broad audience or targeting expansion moving forward.
Only use one pixel per catalog and domain. By having more than one pixel set up for your conversion events, you may not be able to capture the data you're looking for accurately.
Email Marketing
The newest update allows for the following regarding email privacy:
Mail Privacy Protection prevents senders from seeing if an email was opened in Apple Mail and hides the user's IP address so they can't be geo-located.
Hide My Email allows users to create unique email addresses that forward information to their inbox, allowing them to keep their primary email private.
What does this mean for your email campaigns?
Open Rates May Decline. Apple will now be loading pixels on behalf of their users, and these "opens" may appear as bots vs. humans. Simply put, your metrics may shift depending on how your engagement data gets tracked in your CRM.
Realtime Tracking Won't Be As Effective. If you're using time zones to send out your campaigns, this function may not work for users whose IP-based locations are hidden with the new iOS. Creating a standard send time using your time zone will be your best bet moving forward.
Email Opens May Span Several Contacts. Since users can generate fake email addresses with "Hide My Email" to prevent using their personal, primary account, you may have the same person accessing content with numerous emails.
Depending on your CRM and how you track engagement, a few areas may be impacted by this change.
Properties
If you're running a campaign that tracks user engagement, you may have to keep an eye on the following triggers:
• Last email open date
• Emails opened
• First email open date
• Sends since last engagement
Workflows
You may want to perform an audit on your workflows where any criteria include "open" metrics. These may include:
• Triggers
• Delays
• Goal criteria
• Suppression lists
• Branches
Even though this update makes it more challenging to reach your desired audience, one thing is clear: users care about their privacy and the information they share. As marketers, we should respect that and ensure that the content we provide our audience is worthy of them allowing us access to their personal information.
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