Apple is making it clear – it’s time to rewrite the digital marketing playbook
SEO Advantage CEO Zac Basara looks at the ready-or-not changes for marketers coming with Apple’s next iOS update.
As a profession, we love data. We use it to build our campaigns, we use it when making decisions on what to do next and we use it to prove our worth to respective bosses and clients. Apple’s latest changes threaten our way of doing business; we must now start working with less accurate, or simply just less data altogether.
The iOS 14.5 update was already a major hit for advertisers as it heavily limited the amount of data that apps were able to track from users. At WWDC, Apple’s annual Worldwide Developers Conference, in June this year, Apple announced that iOS 15 will bring more pain: “This year, Intelligent Tracking Prevention is getting even stronger by also hiding the user’s IP address from trackers. This means they can’t utilise the user’s IP address as a unique identifier to connect their activity across websites and build a profile about them.”
On top of this, we’re told to expect Mail Privacy Protection and App Privacy Report features from Apple soon. Of the two, it’s the Mail Privacy Protection feature that is the most disruptive – built into the stock Mail app (which is often the preferred client for iOS email), it will block the use of tracking pixels entirely.
