Post iOS 14. 5 Tracking, Modelling & Remarketing Strategies For Marketers

What is iOS 14.5 ATT & Why Does it Matter?

Earlier in 2021, marketers were introduced to a new hurdle to overcome with the release of iOS 14.5 and the introduction of Apple’s ‘ATT’, or ‘App Tracking Transparency’. ATT essentially hands the power over to the user by letting them decide if they would like to opt-out when it comes to user tracking on each of their apps. This means, that if the user prefers, they can tell the app that they do not want their personal information tracked and farmed.

This creates an obstacle for businesses and marketers in two ways: i) tracking conversions, key actions and ii) accumulating custom audiences to be used for remarketing or audience exclusion.

How Many Users Have ATT Available?

About 55% of people in Canada use iOS as their mobile operating system (statcounter), of these users, 75% have a device that is upgraded to iOS 14.5 or higher (statcounter), and with each passing day, this number will continue to go up. So, this means that almost half of mobile devices have the opportunity to integrate ATT into their array of apps, and of these users, pretty much all are deciding to do just that, in the first year of this introduction, it is estimated that only 4% of iOS users are allowing for opt-in tracking. (MobileSyrup)

These numbers are important because it gives you an idea of what percentage (somewhere around 35–40%) of your tracking could be impacted when running campaigns on things like Facebook Ads Manager.

How Marketers Can Navigate These Changes

Before looking at possible techniques to help with more accurate tracking, audience building and attribution modelling in the future, I think it is first good practice to become familiar with a few things:

1. Baseline Conversion Data: If this is your business or client, it is something that you should probably already be quite familiar with — know your baseline conversion data inside and out. It is much easier to analyze the impact of a campaign on your bottom line if you know standard benchmark conversion data for your business year round. For example, you should be able to determine the impact of an ad campaign by just looking at sales fluctuations while in-market.
2. Analyze Offline Businesses: Analysis businesses that require both online and offline conversion data to determine campaign performance. Many of have been spoiled over the past decade with the amount of transparency we get in our data, but businesses like restaurants and retail have been battling with curating offline and online data for a long time, and some of these solutions can be helpful today as well.
3. New Conversion Tracking Techniques: Many platforms such as Facebook Ads Manager are already implementing new tracking techniques to attempt to get as accurate and complete data as possible. Things like Facebook Conversion API will ensure that you have the most up-to-date methods of tracking.

Other Tracking & Audience Building Strategies

Leverage Coupons & Discount Codes

Pretty old school but pretty effective. This is taken right from the offline conversion playbook with places like restaurants, retail etc. using this forever. For this to be effective for online tracking purposes, you’ll need to be a little more strategic and granular with your implementation. Try to make sure you use codes that are specific to platforms and different targeting groups. This will allow you to pretty easily link campaigns to conversions based on the codes used.

Utilize Unique Landing Pages & UTM Codes

A practice that you should have already been doing will be more important than ever. If you have the resources, you should be making unique landing pages for campaigns that have different target audiences and come from different platforms. Having unique landing pages will allow you to back-track where conversions came from and as a result, what traffic source it came from. This just won’t help from a tracking perspective, but should also increase your completion percentage with having more personalized landing page experiences.

At minimum, make sure to use detailed UTM codes on all campaigns so that you can get a more clear data picture by leveraging Google Analytics data with your marketing channel.

Grow Internally Owned Data

Creating larger custom audiences for remarketing is going to become more difficult with the introduction of ATT. Being able to accumulate a larger internal database will create a competitive advantage for customer communication and more effective targeting.

Know Traditional Advertising Measurement Tactics

Leverage classic measurement tactics such as monitoring purchases during time in market, taking a look at geo-specific purchases based on geo-targeting and having unique tracking phone numbers for campaigns.

Send Post Conversion Surveys

Don’t miss out on the opportunity to get more data after you have received a conversion. Surveys aren’t only great for customer feedback, they can also be used to find out more on how the customer interacted with your brand before converting.