How will iOS15 affect my campaign analytics?

Apple is releasing its next update, iOS 15, on September 15th. This update coincides with the release of Apple’s iPhone 13, and while there will be changes related to how users interact with their iPhones and iPads — as there are with any iOS update —  many of our clients are asking: how does this impact the marketing campaign data I’m collecting?

Like many companies, Apple is increasing its commitment to consumers’ data privacy with features like Mail Privacy Protection, which stops senders from using invisible pixels to collect information about the user. What does this mean for Marketers’ email campaigns? This means that Marketers will not be able to collect email engagement data such as email opens and data related to the email recipient’s location for customers that use Apple’s Mail app.  

But there’s good news… 

From an email marketing perspective, this update only affects pre-click engagement activity. This means that any email traffic that you drive to your website will still be collected in your web analytics platform, e.g. Google Analytics or Adobe Analytics. With proper campaign tracking in place, Marketers can still collect data related to email campaigns, content and CTAs clicked, and can tie this campaign data to website engagement and conversion activity. Net-net… while you should expect some data loss pre-click, this update should have little impact on your post-click data collection, reporting and optimization.

So what should Marketers do?

1. Ensure all emails have clear and strong CTAs that drive users to your website(s); now is the time to deprecate “in email” experiences, if you haven’t already.
2. Ensure you have proper campaign tracking in place to tie ad campaign, content and CTA to a user’s engagement on your website, which will allow you to report on activity and optimize experiences
3. Ensure your Google Analytics or Adobe Analytics implementation reflects business and reporting requirements
4. If your company’s privacy policy allows, categorize your web analytics cookies as “strictly necessary” to allow data collection for your website. This will ensure that you’re able to track the visits and site activity of users originating from email.
5. Come up with a plan for how your organization will adapt analytics for a privacy-by-design era

Ultimately, as the world continues to march towards a cookieless future, it’ll be more important than ever to be anchored in a consumer-first mindset, delivering real value. If we’ve learned anything from the past couple of years, it’s imperative to be proactive in digital transformation rather than suffer the consequences of being a reactive organization.