App Tracking Transparency is Killing Your Ad Strategy
My favorite new feature of Apple’s iOS 14.5 has finally rolled out and it’s wreaking havoc on marketers everywhere. It’s caused a huge decrease in ad spend for iOS devices (iPhone and iPad), a huge decrease in data from iOS users, and an increase in Android ad spend (and pricing!). It’s being praised by data privacy advocates around the world. Facebook and other ad-driven apps have been up in arms about its release.
Have you seen it yet? It’s called “App Tracking Transparency” and it’s wonderful. If you’re an iOS user, here’s where to find it: Settings => Privacy => Tracking.
Apple has made a very nice video explaining why this feature is necessary.
The short version is: Apple’s new feature prevents apps and websites from gathering more data about you than you’d like. It’s done at the operating system level, so it’s not just some feature that only works in some places and not others. All iOS 14.5 users can take advantage of this feature without a paid subscription to any services.
What’s a digital marketer to do?
A huge number of digital marketers depend on the data Apple now blocks because there’s a huge number of dollars available from personalized advertising. One reason advertisers love iOS users is they typically spend twice as much money online as Android users. If advertisers can’t target ads to iOS users, how can they be successful?
Well, when you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail. And my hammer is: content marketing.
Good content doesn’t require harvesting personal data behind the scenes. In fact, good content will make your audience want to give you their information:
“I want to get their newsletter, so I’m happy to hand over my email.”
“I want to have a call with these people, so I’ll give them my phone number.”
Compelling and engaging content is the very opposite of surreptitiously collecting information behind a user’s screen.
Interested consumers want engagement. They hope for acknowledgement and interaction. In fact, last night I saw a Silicon Valley CEO tweet in excitement about Jason Sudeikis liking her Ted Lasso tweet.
Was it actually Jason Sudeikis hitting the little heart icon? Who knows?! But that “like” made me think about watching the new Ted Lasso season, and that’s pretty good marketing.
As Ellis recently wrote, dbrand’s followers practically beg for acknowledgement, especially if it’s antagonistic. Brands can be engaging and absolutely have the power to draw large audiences who are desperate for recognition. The problem is: Brands often write such unengaging content that no one cares. Then the brand hires an agency like us to fix the unfixable.
If you are in digital marketing and you’re trying to figure out how to buy user data for ad targeting, your time is running out. Content is the key to the future of marketing. Be appealing, learn how to use the tech your audience is using, draw customers to you, and keep it going. That’s it.
Why use App Tracking Transparency?
We all use apps on our phones. Some apps are so popular, you’d think they’d come pre-installed on all phones. Think Netflix, Facebook, or Twitter. Apple now offers a “Must-Have Apps” section on their App Store, featuring Snapchat, Google, Amazon Prime Video, Discord, Walmart, and many others.
With each app install comes a new corporate privacy policy to which you must agree. Wanna shop on Walmart’s app? Well, you’d better be prepared for Walmart to track every item search, where you are when you make an online purchase, and link all of your online activity with your in-store shopper account.
Their 2018 patent filings also allow them to track you in their stores, “with or without your consent.” You can bet dollars to donuts that as soon as you walk into a Walmart, they know exactly who you are, what you’re likely to purchase, and what discounts you’ll want.
On the one hand, this sounds super convenient, right? Heck, I almost wish I could walk into a Safeway and they hand me a cart with all the stuff I needed right at that time. We need to ask ourselves: What are we giving up, what is the long-term cost, and can I even opt out?
To take matters further, Walmart shares your information with interested advertising and retail partners. They go on to say, “We’ve always disclosed how we share your personal information in our privacy policy.” When was the last time you actually read a privacy policy before agreeing to it?
The world was shocked to learn that Facebook knows more about Americans than the CIA. Wired Magazine’s bombshell 2019 report demonstrated how free social media networks like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube design their apps to be as addicti—er, engaging as possible, meaning they want you to spend more of your life looking at a screen with their logo than living your own life.
All of this leads me to suspect a dystopian future I wish I could run from. But Apple’s moves give me hope.
Can you protect your data while browsing the web?
I’m going to sound like an old man here, but when I started using the web in the late 1990s, it was a pretty innocent place. You could visit a website, read and understand their source code, and be pretty confident that they weren’t tracking anything more than a per-visit metric like, “A user with this IP address and web browser visited the site on this date and they were in this geographic location.”
Nowadays, advertisers and data resellers want to know everything they can about you. They want your name, email address, your home address, what you watch on Netflix, what pages you like on Facebook, what you recently purchased on Amazon, what device you’re using, the name of your spouse, where you recently ate, and more. All this in the hope of delivering a “targeted ad.”
And websites are so complex now that you can’t decipher any of the code that’s running in the web browser. Now they’re using huge javascript libraries with on-the-fly content loading, taking over how I scroll the mouse, and literally tracking cursor placement, where I click, what I type, and more. It’s kinda terrifying.
It’s like going to a friend’s house for dinner, and when they take your jacket, they scan your wallet, run a background check, use cameras to track everywhere you go in the house, who you talked to, what you said, when you went to the bathroom, whether it was #1 or #2, how long you ran the faucet, whether you finished your meal, etc.
Data brokers don’t care what the data is; they will sell whatever they can get, especially from big tech.
This is not the kind of world I want to live in and Apple’s new feature gives me a little bit of control over my digital life and footprint. It turns out I’m not the only person who wants this feature, either. App Tracking Transparency is so popular that an estimated 66% of all iOS 14.5 users have disabled tracking! That’s huge!
And Apple has added more tracking settings for Safari and Mail. Here’s what my Safari settings look like. Be careful about what’s enabled because you don’t want everything on. Only enable what will limit how companies track your activity and deny permission to track.
The “Prevent Cross-Site Tracking” and “Privacy Preserving Ad Measurement” settings prevent companies from collecting data while you’re on their website and then sharing it with other websites when you visit.
For example, when a Facebook Like button is embedded in a website, there’s a lot more going on than you might think. As an end user, you’re just clicking a little thumb button. On the back end, Facebook knows you visited that website, liked that article, can plant multiple cookies in your web browser, and do who knows what with that data. Apple’s Safari settings prevent this from happening.
Apple has even started offering Privacy Reports for websites visited in their Safari browser. You can access them here:
The privacy report will tell you how many tracking cookies were blocked on this visit and on all your website visits for the past 30 days. It will show you how many websites have attempted to profile you as well as showing you the websites with the most trackers blocked.
Pretty powerful stuff and goes to show you which websites are egregiously attempting to get your personal data.
iOS 15 will have even more privacy protections
If all of this sounds crazy to you, wait until you hear what’s coming in iOS 15:
IP address blocking in Safari and Apple Mail for all Apple devices
Automatic web browsing upgrade to HTTPS whenever available
Disable pixel tracking in marketing emails (that’s a whole other blog post right there)
App privacy reports (like the Safari reports, but for individual apps)
A private relay for your internet connection (like a double VPN) for any paying iCloud customers
Advertisers may find this information kinda scary. “How will my ads find their way to the most likely customer?” It might even feel like we’re taking a step back a few decades where billboards and TV ads and print were the best ways to reach people. Rest assured (for now): Apple is not the dominant player in the market (Android and Windows are), but the industry follows Apple when they take the lead. They’re taking the lead on privacy and it’s bad PR to be a company who doesn’t appear to care about customer data privacy.
It’s not too late to get around App Tracking Transparency
If you don’t want to deal with the loss of data, it’s not too late to start thinking about content. Remember, good content is leverage! It’s way better than a typical ad campaign, but the work is a lot more difficult.
There are a million content agencies out there, or you can just hire someone internally to be a content guru. Either way, the best time to start boarding the content train was 10 years ago. The second best time is right now.
Please feel free to reach out to us if you’d like some help or if you have any questions about getting started with content.
