Apple Changed What Advertisers Can See

What is actually changing

Apple is requiring apps to show a prompt before they may track a user across other companies' apps and websites.

The prompt asks plainly whether the app may do this, with declining as the easy option.

Where somebody declines, the identifier advertisers have relied on to connect an ad on one app to an action somewhere else is not available.

The prompt itself arrives with an update expected within weeks. The consequences began earlier, because platforms have been rebuilding their measurement in advance.

Why the effects arrived first

This is the part that surprises people who assumed they had until the update shipped.

Advertising platforms could not wait for the change to happen and then react, so they redesigned how conversions are counted and required advertisers to reconfigure accounts during the winter.

If you run ads and someone told you in February to verify your domain and choose eight priority events, that was this.

Attribution windows have already shortened, which alone changes reported results whether or not a single person has yet seen a prompt.

So an account that has not been touched since last year is already reporting differently from one that has.

What to expect from opt-in rates

Nobody knows yet, and anybody quoting a precise figure is guessing.

The reasonable expectation is that a large majority decline, because the prompt is clear, declining is frictionless, and the benefit to the person of agreeing is not obvious.

It will vary by app. Somebody may well allow it for an app they value and use daily, and decline for one they opened once.

Plan for most iPhone users being untracked across apps, and treat anything better than that as a pleasant surprise rather than a basis for a budget.

What this does not affect

Worth stating clearly, because the change is being described more broadly than it is.

• Your own website analytics measuring visits to your own site.
• Search advertising where somebody clicks through and converts directly.
• Email, which does not depend on this identifier.
• Android, which is unaffected by this particular change.
• Anything a customer gives you directly.

The change concerns following somebody from one company's app or site to another. Measuring what happens on your own property is a different thing and continues.

What to do before it arrives

A short list, and it is all configuration rather than strategy.

Verify your domain in any advertising platform you use, which is the step that gives you authority over how conversions from your site are attributed.

Choose and rank your priority events deliberately, because you are limited to a small number and the ranking determines which one is reported when somebody does several.

Put your most valuable event first, which for most small businesses is a completed enquiry or a purchase rather than a page view.

And record where your numbers currently stand, so that when reporting changes you can tell how much moved.

A worked example

A local retailer running ads to an online shop configured their events in February, ranking them purchase, add to basket, view content, and five others.

They also exported three months of reporting to a spreadsheet before anything changed.

A neighbouring business ignored the notices, on the reasonable view that nothing had happened yet.

By late March the first had a working setup and a documented baseline. The second had shortened attribution windows they had not noticed, reported conversions down by about a fifth with no change to actual sales, and no record of what the numbers had been before.

The second business spent a fortnight investigating a decline in performance that had not occurred.

The work involved was perhaps two hours. The difference was entirely in having done it in advance.

Reporting will be less complete

Prepare for this rather than being alarmed by it in June.

Some conversions will not be attributed at all. Others will be reported with a delay of a day or more rather than appearing within hours.

Platforms will fill some of the gap with estimates, which are reasonable in aggregate and cannot be broken down the way real figures could.

And the audience-building features that depend on following people across properties will have less to work with, which affects retargeting most directly.

None of this means advertising stops working. It means the reported figure and the real figure diverge, and the reported one becomes an underestimate rather than a count.

Where to shift attention

The strategic response is to depend less on data you do not own.

Ask people directly how they found you, at the point of enquiry, which is unfashionable, imprecise, and increasingly the most reliable signal available.

Count enquiries and sales, which are unaffected by any of this, and compare against spend at the level of a month rather than a campaign.

Build an email list, which is yours and does not depend on any platform's identifier.

And use dedicated phone numbers or landing pages for individual campaigns where it matters, which attributes without needing anybody's cooperation.

The counter-case

It is worth resisting the more dramatic framings, which were plentiful over the winter.

For a great many small businesses this changes very little. If your advertising is search-based, or local, or if most of your enquiries arrive by phone, the identifier in question was never doing much for you.

Businesses running app install campaigns or heavy retargeting to iPhone audiences are genuinely affected. A plumber running search ads in one city is not, whatever the coverage suggested.

Work out which you are before spending time on it, and note that the platforms describing the change most urgently are the ones with the most to lose from it.

This month

1. Verify your domain in each advertising platform.
2. Choose and rank your priority events.
3. Export a baseline of current reporting.
4. Add a how did you hear about us field to your enquiry form.
5. Check whether this affects you before reallocating budget.
6. Expect reported conversions to fall without sales falling.

Step three costs ten minutes and prevents the fortnight the second business in the example lost.

Budgets too small to read reliably are covered in a budget too small to learn anything.

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