In recent years, data privacy has remained a controversial subject. Companies like Apple, Facebook, and Google responded to the growing appetite for data transparency by giving more control to the user. And, the latest iOS 15 update is an addition to the series of such attempts.
Apple, the tech giant, has thrown another curveball causing a great stir amongst the marketing agencies. Its recent iOS 15 roll-out has proved that the company is getting privacy-centric with every passing day.
After its release, everyone seems to ask, will this update hurt my advertising business? Well, our answer is “not completely.” Although this update brought some severe repercussions for advertisers by making the targeted advertising trickier, dynamicity can dilute the repel effect.
This new update made its official debut a few days ago. Since then, every marketing and advertising entity has seemed to share its two cents on the latest release. All the Apple fanatics know that the company is heavily focused on enhancing privacy. And it goes unsaid that this update is all about implementing a new suite of privacy measures.
The previous update with iOS 14 enabled the users to opt-out of tracking for third-party apps, namely Facebook. The latest release introduced a slew of new features that give users more control over their data utilization. Quite evidently, making the advertising more challenging!
In this blog, we have touched on the features of the update, its impact on digital marketing strategies, and everything in between. With the hope that this penciled narration will open new horizons to the thought-perspective, let’s spill the beans.
The latest OS will have all the flavors of the past updates (part of iOS 14.5) with added privacy features. This time the expanded privacy focused on App Store Optimization, Email marketing, and a host of other updates.
Let’s look at some of the prominent features.
MPP is undoubtedly a breakthrough that has complicated the process that advertisers use for tracking people via emails. Considering 93% of all mobile email opens are analogous to Apple products, this update has proven to be a death warrant for email open rates.
For advertisers, email open rates work as a success metric in email marketing campaigns. This feature will suppress those open rates and even stop some from showing up in personal inboxes. That means the in-email link will now become aggressively vital.
This update allows users to know the way firms are tracking their digital footprints across varying platforms. Once a user enables MPP in the Mail App, the marketers can’t send pixels (used to get information about the behavior) through emails.
In addition to MPP, the latest update also covers transparency features like PNL (Privacy Nutrition Labels). This is a new section in the iOS privacy settings that mentions the types of data your apps can access. The data may include the location and the particular domains where those applications direct data.
One of the outstanding variances between the latest and the previous iOS is the added privacy features for Apple’s iCloud + service members. These paid features incorporate:
This is a user-centric virtual private network that is responsible for encrypting web traffic and hiding browsing data.
This latest feature benefits those who want to have more control over email senders. Hide My Email enables users to produce a counterfeit email address that helps the sender see the fake address instead of your personal real email address.
Take note that this feature only works on Mail Apps and Safari that are activated on iCloud email.
Although the latest update has a very less significant impact on digital marketing advertisers, it doesn’t mean that we can afford to overlook it.
All these modifications signal the entire advertising ecosystem to think dynamically. It simply means they should abandon the legal approaches to marketing; the same way we had to use additional sources of data instead of the Facebook Pixel in response to the 14.5 iOS update.
Additionally, brand and ecosystems that support the marketers must change their perspective of treating measurement as a performance marketing tool. Each upgrade of Apple is a reminder that publishers need to establish close ties with their visitors. Moreover, advertisers need to join hands with advertising partners that provide strong publisher connections.
It is becoming increasingly important for digital ads platforms runners to observe the differing impacts of the pre and post-iOS releases for all Apple launches. By doing so, they can move forward towards a privacy-first future.
For all those who depend on IP (Internet Protocol) addresses for geotargeting or make use of CRM (Customer Relationship Management) data for search marketing, it’s high time you start paying attention to this specific update.
In a nutshell, we can say that the iOS 15 update is not an end to the marketing world. It’s just an addition to the series of third-party data tracking that drives advertisers to count on first-party data only.
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