iOS 10 to Feature Stronger “Limit Ad Tracking” Control
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A large part of the reason Google has been pushing to search while signed in over the past few years has been related to cross-device tracking and attribution.
For those that are not familiar with the problem advertisers face here... In short, if someone sees/clicks an ad on one device, and then converts on another, most of the time that tracking is lost unless you have the right tech setup and are passing some sort of unique identifier. This can have the effect of causing mobile or tablet traffic to look like it doesn't perform, just as an example. That in turn impacts budgeting and optimization decisions that could cause an advertiser to shoot themselves in the foot due to reporting limitations. Frequency capping is also important. Advertisers don't want to show more ads than they need to, and without the ability to identify a device, they can't set that limit, so you might see the same ad for the same advertiser nonstop.
Not arguing whether more tracking and ads are good or not as everyone has their own opinions there, but the technical challenge from an advertising and analytics standpoint is a tough and interesting one.
Thing is, we try to track every damn thing, when there's still effective audio and visual advertising that, while not necessarily driving a measured online conversion, may still have you reach for a Pepsi over a Coke at a Wawa while getting gas. So where naive advertisers might make such a correlation and believe their organic traffic is spectacular, I would think season advertisers would know an ad campaign's effectiveness isn't always in an immediate and wholly measurable conversion. I could be wrong.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effective_frequency?wprov=sfsi...
View-through and assist conversions try to help with this, but then you get into the valuation question of "what is the value of a view-through or assist conversion?" Similarly, "what is the value of a Like?"
Ultimately a company needs to build a model to back things out against their targets, and so unless you have solid incremental lift testing data, or other MMM-type data, you're faced with the really hard task of trying to justify this stuff that isn't always showing measurable performance.
There's a surprising number of devils in the analytics details depending on a given site's setup (including things like payment processors showing up as referrals unless you exclude them) that can mess with things. Thankfully a lot of the big ones are "known unknowns" now that you can try to deal with or account for.
Are there any workable approaches that don't involve trying to get the user to login on both the mobile and then the desktop in order to correlate?
There are other things that can be done though. Google Analytics supports User Id's, so you can do a better job at attributing to specific users across multiple devices. GA has traditionally discouraged passing this PII into it's platform but is now supporting this limited ID information. Other analytics packages have allowed this type of identification information for a lot longer.
Specific to advertising, there are also other tactics you can use to value your impressions that don't involve individually identifying people.
Even if most of their users are unsavvy and don't understand/care about the implications, Apple is making an example that other companies can now follow.
Specifically, Google and Apple are competitors in the mobile space. Apple is creating a product differentiator by including strong privacy controls. Google as an advertising company risks its revenue base if it were to include string privacy controls. So, it's smart business by Apple to compete in an area where their competitor cannot.
A good lesson for startups to reflect on.
Beginning in iOS 10, when a user enables “Limit Ad Tracking,” the OS will send
along the advertising identifier with a new value of
“00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000.”
Every time you submit an update to the app store for review you have to check a box that says that you acknowledge that you are using the advertising identifier in some capacity in your app, and another that says that you are faithfully abiding by the user's "limit tracking" iOS setting. If they catch you lying about these things they say they will remove and ban your app (no future updates either) from the store.
Why?
I think the random id would be preferable from a user pov. But this may represent Apple's attempt to play nice with mobile ad companies and app pubs that rely on ads in at least making it easy for them to identify no-track users. (Then again, they could accomplish that in a more direct way by just having a flag here, which they may also do?)
Also Apple's guidelines re: permissions is that the app must degrade in the absence of permissions gracefully, and any kind of "punishing the user" for denying perms is absolutely prohibited.
For all the bad things about the walled garden, this is one perk that is real.
As for Apple walking back on these things - anything is possible, but considering how hard they've been beating on the user privacy drum I doubt this will change in the foreseeable future
IMO the "zero" ID is preferable to a random ID. This way if anyone has legitimate reason to detect for this condition they can, but Apple has enough control over the platform to ban anyone doing so abusively. It's also more in line with Apple's permission systems (e.g., you can detect if you have Contacts permissions, rather than it returning, say, fake/empty contacts).
And to be more specific on my question, I get that they don't allow apps to punish users explicitly for OS-enabled choices. But what about rewarding users? Ie you can play/use the app however you want. But we'll give you 50 coins/10 loyalty points/whatever if you enable location tracking?
I mean to follow this all the way through... it should mean that apps can't choose to show, say, rewarded video ads (presently a $1B+ revenue/yr industry on iOS) only to users who have do not restrict ad tracking. Because then by definition only users who don't restrict ad tracking could get the reward from viewing the video. Will this be the case? It's an important question and a lot of startup value could be effected depending on the answer.
AFAIK incentivizing permissions is allowed, so yeah, "50 coins for your location" is permissible. Though keep in mind that Apple will reject apps for requesting permissions without any functional need - so if your app isn't actually using the location data (and collecting it purely for ad targeting) it's likely your app will be rejected from the store.
You will have to invent some veneer of an excuse for collecting this user data, though how thin your excuse can be varies depending on Apple's mood.
This will cause some hacks in the industry, though. We might see a resurgence of device fingerprinting within apps, and it might lead to an increase brand-like advertising vs pure performance marketing. Also, users that have ad tracking enabled might be considered more valuable and unless the practice is banned by AAPL (or maybe it already is), I could see apps that rely on ad revenue to a large degree incentivizing users to enable ad tracking.
I wonder if the default setting will be to limit ad tracking or not. I assume not, but this could have a really large impact if it's on by default.
This may sound tinfoily, but we really should not trust anyone. Maybe some banks in some countries handle security reasonably, I think all the rest has just out of pure luck not been hacked yet.
This is exactly what I thought of when I saw the all zeros ID. Make it random per device app install, and apps can't say "Want to see this awesome cat video? Enable ad tracking first".
The "choices" the typical consumer has if they want to make themselves somewhat anonymous to advertisers are frankly awful. At the moment the only kind of official controls are very limited and not respected or even fully functional with all companies.
The self regulation of the industry is appalling and should be replaced with an international committee of advertising that finds a balance between people's privacy and the right of advertising companies and developers to make money. At the moment, this three way relationship is skewed very heavily towards the advertising companies, meaning the two people who are really the most important - the consumer and the developer - are getting a rotten deal.
Oh, capitalism, how I love you.
A flag?! What kind of insanity is that?