Back in June of 2017, Apple held its WWDC event and announced the release of High Sierra, which included a feature called Intelligent Tracking Prevention (ITP) designed to protect users’ browsing data on Safari. ITP works to reduce cross site tracking by limiting cookies and other website data across desktop devices.
What Change Has Apple Made?
Safari’s market share is 14.9% globally, according to StatCounter. Here is how ITP works:
- Artificial intelligence algorithms will consider how often a user interacts with specific websites in order to categorize cookies
- In the first 24 hours after a user visits a particular website, all third-party cookies are supported
- Post 24 hours, Safari will partition cookies so that those solely tracking browsing behavior are disabled
- After 30 days, Safari purges ALL cookies and users will need to re-login to any sites
Why Did Apple Make the Change?
Apple’s stance has always been specifically around supporting a better user experience. They believe that ITP will remove irrelevant advertising that a consumer does not want and that a 24-hour window is sufficient time for a business to convince a consumer of an offer or message utilizing digital advertisements.
How Will It Affect Advertising and Marketing?
Based on discussions with various marketing leaders across a range of sectors, the impact of the change will not be significant with regard to third-party data, since third-party cookies are not accepted on Safari by default. This does change things for first-party cookies, essentially limiting a publisher’s 1st party targeting capabilities, unless a user is logged in or identifies themselves.
How Are Platforms Addressing ITP?
- Integral Ad Science: Since this data is collected in real-time, no major change expected.
- Google: Google is providing a stopgap by bringing modeling for conversion data that is no longer trackable.
- Facebook: They have shifted to people-based measurement and as a result see no impact to any media managed with their product suite.
I recommend keeping an eye on your analytics including monitoring Apple and having regular discussions with your key advertising technology partners to evaluate the impact of future iterations of ITP.
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