Five ways your marketing is losing to Safari´s ITP
Safari changed the tracking game forever. With its Intelligent Tracking Prevention, Safari introduced restrictions on cookies that are creating challenges to businesses that rely on online marketing, and especially on first-party data.
Safari´s ITP in a nutshell
ITP stands for Intelligent Tracking Prevention and is an anti-tracking mechanism that Safari developed to protect user privacy online. ITP does so by limiting the ability to track users across different websites in Safari (cross-tracking).
Its first iteration was released in 2017 and targeted third-party cookies. However, what not many marketers are aware of is that ITP restricts first-party cookies too. First-party cookies have now a decreased lifetime of 7 days. If you make substantial use of UTM parameters (link decoration), your first-party cookies may be capped to 24 hours.
In other words, data collection carried out through marketing tools and other analytics platforms is being impacted. Indeed, platforms like Adobe Analytics or Google Analytics can collect data thanks to first-party cookies that track the online behavior of your website visitors.
Safari did not intend to limit first-party tracking, but it was deemed a necessary restriction to eradicate any possibility for cross-trackers to find workarounds- it is an unintended impact.
Limiting first-party cookies means limiting access to your own website data (first-party data).
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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.
Stop losing data to ITP
Based on browser usage, businesses are missing up to 36% of data on average in the USA.
Unless you work in MarTech, it is unlikely you have heard of ITP´s restriction on first-party cookies and its impact. However, at this point, you should be aware that you are losing a lot of data. Action is required to protect your cookies and take back control over your first-party data.
This is also an opportunity for you to gain a competitive advantage. Regardless of you being a small business owner or a big marketing agency, everybody with Apple users in their audience is affected. However, very few marketers are doing anything about it. So, this is your chance to win on first-party tracking – to have visibility on what works and spend on what matters.
With the latest iOS14 update, ITP is also extended to all browsers on iOS devices.