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Without the 24- to 48-hour delay, the “add to shopping cart” conversion will be measured, but then there would be no way to measure if the person actually checked out and purchased the product. That would be problematic if multiple conversions are being tracked, such as one for when someone adds a product to their shopping cart and another for when they purchase the product. Well, Apple will have the browser delete the ad click information once the conversion report is sent. What could possibly be good about having to wait for one to two days for attribution measurement? But there is a silver lining to the reporting delay. Apple chose to do this because, if it reported conversions in real time, companies might be able to infer who the person was that converted. Apple will delay when it reports the conversion to sometime between 24 and 48 hours after the conversion happened the reporting delay will be longer if a device is not connected to the internet when the conversion is scheduled to be reported.

If it has an entry that includes Pretend Publisher and Imaginary Advertiser, then it will make a note that a conversion has occurred and report the conversion to the companies…eventually.Īpple’s ad attribution tool won’t report conversions when they happen? The browser will then check the ad click information that it has stored on the browser. The browser will see that the message is sent to that specific destination and take it as a sign that a conversion may have occurred. Sticking with the example above, when that person buys a product from Imaginary Advertiser’s site, a tracking pixel running on the advertiser’s site will send a message addressed to a specific destination on Pretend Publisher’s site that is only supposed to be called when a conversion has occurred. They have to rely on the browser to make the connection.

If companies can’t record the ad click information, how would they be able to measure if someone actually purchased a product from the advertiser’s site? However, instead of sharing that information with Pretend Publisher, Imaginary Advertiser or any ad tech intermediaries, that ad click information will be stored in the browser and locked to a person’s computer, phone or tablet. When the person clicks on the ad, the browser will make a note of that event by recording information including the domain of the publisher’s site where the ad click occurred, the domain of the advertiser’s site that the click directed them to and a numerical identifier for the campaign corresponding to the ad. Let’s say a person clicks an ad on Pretend Publisher’s site that directs them to Imaginary Advertiser’s site. How does Apple’s ad attribution tool work? Then last month Apple cut that window to only 24 hours. So earlier this year, Apple updated ITP to delete the first-party cookies that companies use to measure attribution after seven days of a person clicking on an ad. But a first-party cookie workaround that companies like Facebook and Google have implemented to attribute ads despite Safari’s third-party cookie limits could be used for cross-site tracking.

Since it introduced ITP in 2017, Apple has said that it doesn’t want to mess with ad attribution. Why did Apple need to come up with an ad attribution tool?īecause Apple has made it hard for existing ad attribution tools to work in Safari. So it has come up with its own ad attribution tool that tries to strike a balance between the two by recording when someone clicks on an ad and then converts on the advertiser’s site but without letting companies trace that conversion to a particular person. But it’s not wild about companies using ad attribution methods to track people around the web. Apple recognizes that companies need to be able to tie ads to business results, like someone purchasing a product on an advertiser’s site after clicking on an ad on a publisher’s site. WTF is Privacy Preserving Ad Click Attribution?Ī terrible name for Apple’s ad attribution tool, so let’s just call it Apple’s ad attribution tool. Now Apple is offering an olive branch of sorts: an ad attribution tool dubbed Privacy Preserving Ad Click Attribution.

Apple’s two latest updates to Safari’s anti-tracking feature, Intelligent Tracking Prevention, have created a headache for anyone looking to attribute an ad clicked on one site to a product purchase or other conversion that occurs on the advertiser’s site.

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