Five ways your marketing is losing to Safari´s ITP

5 ways Safari´s ITP impacts your marketing

Here are 5 ways ITP´s restriction on first-party cookies is affecting you.

1. Audience segmentation is inaccurate

As cookies are deleted after 7 days, at most, you struggle to have a clear view of your audience. Indeed, any ´returning user´ that revisits your website after an absence longer than 7 days, is regarded as a ´new user´ with ITP. Even if it is the same user, analytics platforms cannot recognize it – the cookie identifying the user was deleted. Hence, you are likely to see an increase in your audience and ´new users´ that are simply duplicates. You are lacking complete and relevant data to be able to build accurate audience segments.

2. Customer journeys are incomplete

With the inability to clearly distinguish between users, customer journey mapping is also limited. Before ITP, it was possible to build a user profile and map its journey for up to 2 years. First-party cookies made it possible for you to know when users were returning to your website and to allow you to target them with ads at specific points of the journey. With ITP, customer journeys reset every 7 days if there has not been any interaction in the meantime. A ´returning user´ appears as a ´new user´ and the visit is not connected to previous behavior on the website anymore. If users do not visit your website frequently, this leads to a loop: ´new user´, cookie is deleted, ´new user´, cookie is deleted, ´new user´ and so on. This makes customer mapping almost impossible.

3. Broken attribution models cause an increase in your Ad spend

Attribution models become fragmented because the lookback history is restricted to 7 days. You have this short window to track conversion. Otherwise, you risk to attributing conversion incorrectly. This leads to allocating budgets ineffectively, maybe to campaigns that do not work instead of optimizing and investing in campaigns that drive revenue.

4. Performance data is unreliable

The boost of ´new visitors´ because of the cap on first-party cookies messes with your overall analytics. As user metrics are incorrect, this creates a bias in other metrics, altering performance KPIs, for example. The unrealistic influx of web visitors distorts your visibility on what is working or what not – how campaigns, content, and your overall marketing is performing.

5. Personalization becomes inconsistent

For some of us, personalization is very important, as it helps with retention and to improve user experiences with tailored content. However, with ITP, you risk building faulty audience segments and cannot deliver personalization with consistency. This happened because you have no historical data at hand, and hence, miss knowledge of your customer journey. Let´s take an A/B testing example. A user visits your website and becomes part of an audience pool. After 7 days, the user that is revisiting becomes part of a new audience pool. Tracking to finding out what works and what doesn’t become fruitless.