How iOS 14 and cookie policy changes affect your conversion tags
Over the last few years, a lot has changed in what can be done with conversion tracking to assign attribution to third party websites. Though this is stated to be about your privacy and for the good of the internet, you do have to wonder if it is a bit of a power play: If Facebook can’t prove its ROI, then it is harder for marketers to invest in them and without money, they can’t keep up with other social platforms and loose customers. Similarly, Google relies heavily on paid ads for its revenue, though it is also one of Apple’s biggest competitors in the phone space. Another thought is if app developers can’t get their money through ads, they will have to get it through charging for their app, which Apple will get a cut of. So…is it really just about what is good for us end users? I know it just makes my life as an analyst harder. But enough of my conspiracy theories, what is actually going on, and how can we fix it.
iOS 14 update
In the iOS 14 release, Apple announced the App Tracking Transparency policy (ATT), making apps ask permission before they send data to a third party.
Twitter.com
According to the Apple site, this applies to:
Displaying targeted advertisements in your app based on user data collected from apps and websites owned by other companies.
Sharing device location data or email lists with a data broker.
Sharing a list of emails, advertising IDs, or other IDs with a third-party advertising network that uses that information to retarget those users in other developers’ apps or to find similar users.
Placing a third-party SDK in your app that combines user data from your app with user data from other developers’ apps to target advertising or measure advertising efficiency, even if you don’t use the SDK for these purposes. For example, using an analytics SDK that repurposes the data, it collects from your app to enable targeted advertising in other developers’ apps.
What does this mean for me?
Below is how the two big ad platforms are dealing with the change. Facebook seems most affected by this.
Facebook asks that you verify your domain using the steps outlined in the Facebook Help Center. This is critical for businesses with pixels used by multiple Business Managers or personal ad accounts. Domain verification will ensure no immediate or future disruption in the ability to configure conversion events.
You will be limited to the use of 8 conversion events per domain
28-day click-through, 28-day view-through, and 7-day view-through attribution windows will not be supported. Historical data for these windows will remain accessible via the Ads Insights API.
Google doesn’t seem to be as worried; as long as you are using Google Analytics for Firebase, you should be fine.
ITP, ETP and all the cookie blocking
ITP (Intelligent Tracking Prevention), ETP (Enhanced Tracking Prevention), and Chrome’s updates (which doesn’t have a fancy acronym) all are doing pretty much the same thing, stopping you from sending data to a third party. So if Jane Doe bought those nice pair of shoes, you can’t tell Facebook about it. If Mario Rossi looked at that TV and didn’t buy it, you can’t tell Google.
Google and Facebook got smarter and decided to make it all work with first-party cookies. Basically, instead of telling Google and Facebook directly, you tell your own site that it happened and then it passes the data under the table.
Apple wasn’t too happy with these sly dealings and now are clearing first-party cookies after 1 day. Clear code also says:
As of ITP 2.1, Safari uses its machine-learning magic to identify which first-party cookies can be used for tracking. Then, it blocks cookies unless you use the Storage Access API to ask users to allow the use of your cookie. Cookies created via the JavaScript document.cookie API (even first-party cookies for things like web analytics) will be set to expire in seven days, regardless of their existing expiry date. JavaScript will be able to access cookies created via the HTTP response, as long as they don’t contain HttpOnly flag.
Chrome and Firefox are blocking third-party cookies by default, and I can’t see it being long before at least Firefox starts blocking specific items from first-party cookies.
What does this mean for me?
Not too much if you are using the major advertising platforms that have already accounted for this change. You may not be able to get attribution windows, like the 7-day view through on Safari (though I always think view-through is a waste of a metric anyway). If the user clicks through and has the appropriate campaign tracking, you can always get the attribution windows from your analytics platform, especially if you have raw data.
Server-side tracking will also help with these changes as they don’t rely on cookies to track the user and are more resilient to future updates the browser try to make.
Server-Side tracking
The analytics world has come full circle. When it started, it was using server logs to track people, and then we thought, no, it will be better if we are client-side with javascript, and now we are forced back into the world of server-side, not by choice but by necessity. Updates such as the ones above and more and more people using ad blockers means we cannot accurately measure interactions on our websites.
By moving the tracking from being controlled by the browser and the end-user to be put in the foundation of the code, we can have more control and more certainty about what is being sent.
Google Tag Manager has now set up server side tracking containers, and I would recommend anyone starting to track a new site should use one of these; and it will set you up for long-term success as more browsers create more rules on what can and cannot be done.
If you would like to know more about server-side tracking, please get in touch through the contact form below.
