Several people have asked whether the ability to measure clicks on links in emails disappears when Apple launches their new privacy features.
31. juli 2023
The purpose of the new Link Tracking Protection is, in short, to protect users from companies recording their behaviour across the internet.
What Apple intends to do with the new protection is to let their mail program and browser strip out some of the so-called "tracking parameters" that various systems insert into links, precisely in order to record users' behaviour across the internet – through different mails, websites and apps.
It appears that to begin with, only the parameters from Google, Facebook and HubSpot that identify unique users' clicks on specific ads and links in mails are removed.
The parameters are removed automatically in so-called "Private Browsing mode", which you actively choose when you want to use a browser relatively anonymously.
It will also be possible to actively enable the protection in ordinary browsing mode.
Only the built-in Safari browser and Apple's built-in mail programs are affected – but those are also what the great majority of Apple users use.
Clicks by users on the various links and ads will still be measured, so both mail statistics and ad statistics will show that a click happened.
So the new protection does NOT affect the click statistics in your email marketing program, the way open statistics were affected by iOS 15!
The actions users take after clicking from an ad or a link in a mail will no longer be traceable back to that specific user's specific click – if the tracking is based on the IDs now being removed.
Exactly how this affects an individual company's statistics and reporting depends entirely on how they use the information from the unique parameters now being stripped.
It can mean, for example, that purchases made directly after clicking a link in a mail or an ad can no longer be traced back to precisely which click led to the sale.
For Yulsn Marketing Cloud specifically, the new protection does NOT affect the measurement of sales from different mails, since we do not base that measurement on data collected in the browser.
Most people expect that the removal of unique IDs, which right now only seems to cover Google, Facebook and HubSpot, will soon extend to systems such as MailChimp, Klaviyo, TikTok and other widely used systems and social networks.
The effort to protect user data is also generally expected to continue.
That is why there is – and should continue to be – increasing focus from companies on working with what Seth Godin launched in 1999 as "Permission Marketing".
Beyond the increasing focus on companies creating and "owning" relationships directly with their individual customers, the development also means companies will have to get used to it becoming harder to measure precisely which parts of their marketing produce which results.
Companies that have been particularly good at creating strong growth by knowing exactly how much value specific ads created – and could therefore automatically scale precisely what was profitable – will be forced to base their decisions on less detailed knowledge in future.
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