Apple's iOS 17 Shakes Up Paid Media with Enhanced Privacy Features

Jun 20

In the evolving digital world, the pursuit of true privacy remains a prominent goal for many individuals. However, within the realm of paid media, the need for tracking has often conflicted with this desire for privacy, hindering our ability as marketers to truly comprehend audience behaviours.

Amidst this challenge, one company has been making big moves towards achieving the pinnacle of privacy: Apple

At the forefront of user privacy, Apple’s latest move with iOS 17 is set to shake up the world of paid media. The introduction of 'Link Tracking Protection' is a significant development that aims to enhance user privacy when using Mail, Messages, or Safari. Effectively it acts as a super-sleuth for URL tracking by automatically recognising and removing tracking-specific segments from URLs with Safari's Private Browsing mode and links from Mail and Messages also handling this process in the background. As a result, marketers lose visibility into individual user activity, although workarounds like 'Private Click Measurement' offer top-line results from ad campaigns on private browser websites - but this still leaves us in the unknown when it comes to individual user activity.

Previously, with iOS 14.5, Apple introduced 'Opt-in Tracking,' allowing users to choose whether apps or websites could track their activity. While it provided some campaign metrics, it significantly limited marketers' ability to fully understand user behaviour. Paired with ‘Hide my Email’, another Apple update that allowed users to generate random and anonymous email addresses to use on websites instead of their personal email. With these existing features combined with Link Tracking Protection, there is no true way to map back performance with any known solution. Developments like these highlight the importance of testing, specifically geo-split incrementality testing, on understanding the true value of your marketing.

This shift by Apple stands to challenge the digital marketing industry as it will not only have consequences for audience targeting but also for performance measurement. The signs have been around us for a while now with EU regulations slowly integrating a heightened focus on privacy into digital society, yet when a company enforces these restrictions, the transition tends to be a lot quicker and dynamic.

What will this mean for us marketers? We’ll need to act fast, racking our brains for creative and privacy-safe means of measurement to ensure we can still access the granularity of data needed to properly structure our audiences and activity. A fair challenge indeed, but a welcome one all the same.