How Apple’s iOS Privacy Update Impacts Digital Marketing

With nearly 64% of Americans owning an Apple device, the recent iOS privacy update has marketers scrambling to learn how the update will impact targeted digital marketing campaigns. Here’s what you need to know:

WHAT’S HAPPENING?

Apple, Inc. has recently rolled out an iOS update to Apple devices that will give users greater control of how their data is used.  Users can essentially opt-in to less control, which maybe less than 5% will do.  As a result, it will make targeted advertising more difficult for less experienced marketers and self-serve businesses and organizations.

WILL THIS IMPACT PERFORMANCE DATA REPORTING?

Unfortunately, yes — at least in the short term.  Data reporting through targeted display, email marketing and social ad-buying (to name a few) rely on having data access to a specific IP address engaging with the ad, email or social post.  If the platform cannot see that data, it cannot report it back to you. So, for example, if you’re sending out email marketing to 10,000 people in your audience list, apple device users may see your email, but you won’t see that they opened the email.  And this could impact your reporting on a large scale.

THAT SOUNDS TERRIBLE. IS THERE ANYTHING I CAN DO?

Fortunately, yes!  You’ll need to work with your ESP/Marketing Automation provider to determine how many subscribers open your emails on an iOS device, which is not a hard thing to find out.  If you find that 45% of your database uses iOS devices, you can incorporate that in to your math when reviewing your opens, open rates, etc. to account for projected iOS users that opened your email.  Here’s a sample of the math:

Email Campaign Tracking 100,000 = Emails Sent Open Rate = 22% (22,000 Opens)

BUT – Discount 45% of iOS 15

55,000 = Emails Sent That Are Trackable 40% = Actual Open Rate

HOW WILL IT IMPACT MY ABILITY TO TARGET DIGITAL ADVERTISING?

That’s a great question, and one that is difficult to answer, because us marketers don’t fully know yet.  Regardless, targeted inventory remains high in the programmatic space, so there’s a lot of inventory that will not be impacted and available.  Unless you’re targeting with the strategy of 50% plus market saturation, you shouldn’t feel the pains of this as much as others. Hopefully, big tech like Google, FB and MailChimp/Constant Contact will work to figure out better ways to address these issues, because let’s face it, they’re going to be as impacted as the businesses using their platform to market. Data-driven targeted marketing will never go away, but it’ll certainly continue to evolve and adapt with a very turbulent data-control environment.  But if you’re running a comprehensive and professionally crafted marketing campaign using traditional and extended marketing channels, you should feel much less pain than those that are putting all of their marketing budget in to the extended digital.