Another digital marketing attribution metric bites the dust

[Ryan Everson]

Farewell email click reporting. Another digital marketing attribution metric bites the dust.

Apple has released a new feature in iOS17 (turned on by default) that removes the ability for marketers to track which users clicked on a link in your email campaigns.

Email open stats had already become unreliable thanks to iOS15's Mail Privacy Protection, now email click stats are the latest victim to big tech's privacy crusade.

With Apple Mail having ~40% market share of email opens/clicks, the impact will be immediate. And if I were a betting man, I'd put my chips on Google likely following Apple's lead.

What does this mean for car dealers? Dealers will no longer be able to send an email campaign and track how many sales were "generated" from the campaign via post-click attribution.

Don't get me wrong, email is still a great and inexpensive marketing channel, it will just become much more difficult to prove its ROI and optimize for sales moving forward.

 

[Ryan Everson]

In related news, iOS17 also released a feature that strips UTM tracking parameters from ALL links. Luckily this feature is not enabled by default (for now at least). A sign of things to come...

 

[joe.pistell]

Pre-internet , Car dealers had very low marketing performance visibility. Marketer's had to be ultra creative in exploring new ways to make their work productive and visible.

JIC you missed it:
Marketer's had to be ultra creative to in creating new ways to make their work productive and visible.
Marketer's had to be ultra creative to in creating new ways to make their work productive and visible.
Marketer's had to be ultra creative to in creating new ways to make their work productive and visible.

 

[Alex Snyder]

If only we could see the newspaper ad in the backseat of the trade again...

 

[Marc Lavoie]

Pre-internet , Car dealers had very low marketing performance visibility. Marketer's had to be ultra creative to in creating new ways to make their work productive and visible.

JIC you missed it:
Marketer's had to be ultra creative to in creating new ways to make their work productive and visible.
Marketer's had to be ultra creative to in creating new ways to make their work productive and visible.
Marketer's had to be ultra creative to in creating new ways to make their work productive and visible.

I'm personally super excited by this. A lot of people will move on from email because they won,t be able to justify it. More room for the people that know what they're doing

 

[Jeff Kershner]

I'm personally super excited by this. A lot of people will move on from email because they won,t be able to justify it. More room for the people that know what they're doing

You mean less marketing emails flooding my inbox each day? I highly doubt it but it's hard to complain if thats the outcome.

Question: If directing links to your website, will your GA/analytics tool still be able to track the referring URL - allowing one to track some overall performance or am I not thinking this through correctly? It's been a long day already.

 

[Ryan Everson]

I'm personally super excited by this. A lot of people will move on from email because they won,t be able to justify it. More room for the people that know what they're doing

That's assuming dealers even look at the data today.

As @Alex Snyder can attest, many dealers will choose to cancel or continue a service without even considering the data that tells them to do the opposite.

With this change, relationships and feelings will trump data more than they already do.

 

[Ryan Everson]

Question: If directing links to your website, will your GA/analytics tool still be able to track the referring URL - allowing one to track some overall performance or am I not thinking this through correctly? It's been a long day already.

Right now, only tracking parameters that identify an individual user are being stripped from Apple iMessage and Mail links. This is how most CRM's and email marketing providers track link clicks down to the individual recipient. UTM parameters are safe, allowing you to report at the aggregate level.

The other iOS17 update is related to Safari's private browsing mode which is thankfully not enabled by default currently. If a user enables this feature, it would strip all tracking parameters - UTM's, GCLID's, FBCLID's, etc which would have a massive impact on tracking. Apple is pushing advertisers to use Private Click Measurement to cope with this loss of tracking data. Let's just hope this doesn't get enabled by default in future updates.

The silver lining is iOS17 isn't expected to get released until mid-September, so we still have a few months left of the “good old days.”

 

[DrewAment]

In related news, iOS17 also released a feature that strips UTM tracking parameters from ALL links. Luckily this feature is not enabled by default (for now at least). A sign of things to come...

Just use a URL shortener? You can use FOSS on your own server like YOURLS | YOURLS -- or -- private/white a short URL. We shorted p1.tt with bitly. -- or -- custom code your own.

A lot of options. All which would not strip the UTMs?

 

[Ryan Everson]

Just use a URL shortener? You can use FOSS on your own server like YOURLS | YOURLS -- or -- private/white a short URL. We shorted p1.tt with bitly. -- or -- custom code your own.

A lot of options. All which would not strip the UTMs?

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.