Another digital marketing attribution metric bites the dust

[tnfly]

Yeah, it will be interesting to see how Apple implements this.

It's very possible they will detect the 301 redirect of the shortened URL and auto-update the destination URL to have the tracking parameters stripped. I doubt they will leave such an obvious and easy loophole open.

With pretty much all mainstream mail apps using web views rather than the device browsers for links, they will close the redirect loophole. That will be low-hanging fruit. Third-party marketing platforms will have some tricks, but the privacy police will play whack-a-mole as they have been doing for years, already destroying attribution on iOS. Next year will be fun when Chrome finally follows through on third-party cookie depreciation too.

Also, I've noted an uptick in traffic from "iCloud Private Relay" networks, which will make it harder to fingerprint devices.

About iCloud Private Relay - Apple Support

iCloud Private Relay — part of an iCloud+ subscription — helps protect your privacy when you browse the web in Safari.

support.apple.com

 

[ChrisR]

Yeah, it will be interesting to see how Apple implements this.

It's very possible they will detect the 301 redirect of the shortened URL and auto-update the destination URL to have the tracking parameters stripped. I doubt they will leave such an obvious and easy loophole open.

Just means more custom pages will need to be created, one for each campaign. Not as easy as UTM tagging, but can't be stripped.

 

[Ryan Everson]

Just means more custom pages will need to be created, one for each campaign. Not as easy as UTM tagging, but can't be stripped.

Yeah, you can automate a lot of it on the server/DNS side without creating separate pages per source. Cloudflare will come in handy!

Dynamic URL Rewriting at the edge with Cloudflare

Today we are announcing the immediate availability of Transform Rules for all Cloudflare plans. Transform Rules provide Cloudflare administrators with the ability to create URL rewrite rules.

blog.cloudflare.com

 

[DrewAment]

Yeah, you can automate a lot of it on the server/DNS side without creating separate pages per source. Cloudflare will come in handy!

UTMs are just a passed variable query string, if they are looking for a UTM variable to strip, why not just do a mod_rewrite to change a variable on the server side?

Am I missing something, because this is what is looks like Cloudflare Dynamic URL does?

 

[Ryan Everson]

UTMs are just a passed variable query string, if they are looking for a UTM variable to strip, why not just do a mod_rewrite to change a variable on the server side?

Am I missing something, because this is what is looks like Cloudflare Dynamic URL does?

Yeah, Cloudflare just offers a relatively easy-to-use interface to do it yourself, website vendor agnostic. Because good luck getting most automotive website providers to give you the ability to modify your .htacess.

Luckily, we don't have to worry about this too much (yet).