Fall has finally arrived! Football, Red October Baseball (Go Phillies!), and of course – new products/updates from Apple. iOS17 rolled out last week along with the new iPhone 15. While the latter is getting most of the buzz (titanium, USB-C, breaks easily, etc.), for those of us in marketing – iOS17 needs your attention.
One of the newest features of the new operating system is Safari now limiting link-tracking in Privacy mode. The UTM parameters placed on many of your campaigns may soon be useless. What does this mean to marketers? For years, we have used these links for information to optimize campaigns (search, social, email, etc.) and visits on our websites (users, sessions, time on site, and engagement/bounce). If this new update does what is promised, those visits will no longer be attributed to the medium, think a LOT more “Direct” visits to your site.
What can you do? In the short term – unfortunately, not a lot. Apple offers another way to measure campaign success through Private Click Measurement ad attribution. It’s too early to tell if this will be a useful tool so keep a close watch on campaign metrics with this information in mind. Examples:
- Are you seeing more direct traffic than ever before?
- Are campaigns showing less performance since mid-September?
If the answer to either of these is yes, this may just be the beginning of fewer insights through Google Analytics. One thing to note, this doesn’t mean your ads are performing worse, just the tools used to measure aren’t working as they did before. If you have an e-commerce site or other secondary conversion attributions established, make sure to watch those closely. These figures will be very important in the months ahead.
Have a great October!
Ron
President and Founder, Engage Media
To learn about how Engage Media can help your business, please visit www.engagemedia.com, email us at info@engagemedia.com, or feel free to book an appointment here. Our team of professionals is ready to assist you with all your digital and traditional media needs.
