Browser changes are here.
Be prepared to thrive.

Here’s what is happening

In early 2019, Safari rolled out an upgraded version of its Intelligent Tracking Prevention (ITP). Now, in Fall 2021, Apple released its yearly upgrades for iOS 15, iPadOS 15 and Safari 15.

This means that ITP now affects all browsers in Apple’s mobile Ecosystem, which makes tracking those visitors increasingly difficult. When you can’t identify visitors, you can’t optimize marketing spend, utilize personalization, or get representative A/B testing insights.

Additionally, Safari 15—via its new IP Obfuscation feature—now cross-references requests with a DuckDuckGo tracker list, and, upon finding a match, hides the user’s real IP Address from the service. Historically, companies have erred on the side of tracking everything, but this change means that sites will need a much more strategic plan for what to track, in order to best serve customers and to keep concerned customers from opting out.

And more browser changes are forthcoming.

What’s the impact?

Traditionally, cookies—small text files that a web browser sets on a user’s computer—have persisted for years and have allowed sites to remember that they have seen a particular browser/device combination before. Using cookies as a proxy for unique users, technology has been developed to facilitate concepts such as campaign tracking, return on media spend, personalized ad targeting, and remarketing. The Webkit rendering engine has changes that dramatically lower the lifespan of these files—in some cases, reducing storage time from two years to as little as 24 hours—when they are set in ways that are common to advertising technology. Lacking identifiers, any existing user could be classified as ‘new’ upon a return visit, and any previous history might be lost.

Audience segmentation becomes inaccurate

Customer journey mapping is limited

Ad spend changes due to broken attribution models

Content and campign performance data is unreliable

Personalization becomes difficult

Technical functionality can break or stop working

Data may cease being collected entirely

Loss of effectiveness in marketing tactics, such as remarketing

Losing tags and cookies doesn’t just affect your data, it impacts your entire business. Search Discovery can make your cookies last longer, improve your marketing investments, and help you deliver better customer experiences.

How we can help

We can help you identify the impact and provide solutions that help you stay ahead of browser updates.

IDENTIFY IMPACT

Sites are like snowflakes: no company, no site, no tracking is the same. In order to properly ensure your data is tracking/meeting business goals we need to assess the impact the browser updates have both from a strategic and technical level. From there, we can design a service that works for the site.

FREE AUDITS

Here’s how they work:

You provide us with a URL that you want scanned for browser change impacts on tracking.
We provide you with a report detailing technical challenges by browser and identification of affected cookies/external domains.
We will also provide high level suggestions for next steps.

VENDOR SOLUTIONS

It’s our business to remain adaptable to the ever-changing browsing landscape, so you don’t have to stress about it. We work within a company’s existing tag infrastructure to identify problem areas for analysis, optimization, and advertising, and we work with you to mitigate or solve found issues. We execute efficiently and effectively to help you implement existing platform solutions, including:

Google Server Side: Current available solution in Beta for GTM customers to shift data server side.
Tealium EventStream: Current available solution which can allow many tags blocked by browsers to fire server side.
Adobe Launch Server Side: Currently released and is in active development.