Apple Privacy Changes Have Affected Your Email and Advertising Results!

When Apple updated their IOS software in April and September of 2021, they prompted users to decide if they want to share their data with advertisers and email marketers to personalize their experience. Apple users, overwhelmingly decided they did not want to share their data and that created a tracking problem for email marketing and app companies like Facebook, Snap and more. Now for 82% of apple users, email open stats and app user data has become a lot more difficult to quantify.

Here are a few examples of how the changes may affect your email open rates and advertising tracking results:

1. Email marketing opens are less reliable as the tracking of who actually opened your email or who was exposed to your email messages is not longer reliable.
2. Apps like Facebook, Snap, Instagram and more can no longer identify when a purchase is made from an ad in their app for iphone users who opted out of the data sharing.
3. A Click To Open Rate(CTOR) is the number of unique clicks your email receives divided by the number of unique opens. Apple’s new privacy changes cause your CTOR to plummet downwards artificially.
4. Search engines that were tracking user data for Apple users lost access to that history data.
5. Apple can continue to track that data for their users making them the only folks who can.
6. Applications like Facebook, Snap, Instagram, Peloton and more are scrambling to determine how to increase their app use since their ads are seen by fewer users. They are working to identify other ways to adapt. Advertisers are missing data they have used in the past to evaluate successful advertising tools.
7. Here’s some of the individualized subscriber data we expect to become less accessible for all marketers:
   • Time an email was opened
   • Device used to open an email
   • Location from which an email was opened

So what can you do about tracking your digital marketing results to improve your online marketing and advertising results?

1. Start by reviewing past data to identify what percent of your email clients are Apple users.
2. Recognize that Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection does not have an impact on your total clicks. Clicks remains a reliable way to measure the success of your email because it simply shows the total number of email recipients who clicked a link in your email. Comparing total clicks with a similar number of recipients is a better way to assess which campaigns are most engaging.
3. Creating segments for “most engaged subscribers” based on how often they open your emails is no longer recommended. Instead, you’ll want to identify your most- and least-engaged subscribers by how often they click links within your emails.
4. For Email Marketing tracking consider measuring the following instead of relying exclusively on Email Opens:
   1. Conversion rate—The percentage of email recipients who take a specific action, like making a purchase
   2. List Growth Rate— How fast you’re adding new email subscribers versus losing people clicking “unsubscribe”
   3. Overall ROI—The amount of revenue you generate for every dollar you invest in email marketing
   4. Click rate— The percentage of your email recipients who click a link in your email
   5. Forwarding/Email Sharing—How often your subscribers forward and share your emails with their own contacts, expanding the reach of your email campaign

One effective ways to track your results is to compare them with your historical data to measure if you are seeing more people click on specific website, blog or landing pages which can be set up to be clicked on in your content and ad campaigns. Consider setting up a specific landing pages that provide answers to the most common questions of your target market. Use links  in your email and in your digital ads that take interested parties to a dedicated website or landing page, with a measurable action you can track in the advertising tool area as well as your google analytics.

Keep in mind that while Facebook, Instagram, Snap and others are seeing some of their market share access be reduced due to this change, they are all actively looking for work arounds to get the data they need to grow their market share. Look for updates on this topic as those efficient marketing tools solve these issues.

If you need help tracking or improving your marketing efforts, contact Liz Harsch by email or call Tailor-Made Advertising at 310-791-6300 to keep your organization thriving in 2022. Join her next webinar on 3/3 Drip Marketing Campaigns—Automate and Maximize Your Lists!

Liz Harsch is the owner of Tailor-Made Advertising in Torrance, CA. Her firm provides marketing, training and consulting to identify marketing and media alternatives for business owners. As an experienced Marketing Director, Media Planner, Liz has trained small business owners for Constant Contact, SCORE, SBDC, SBA, Cities and MWD and County outreach partners, APICS plus many Chambers of Commerce for over 20 years. She can be reached at her Torrance, CA, office at 310-791-6300 or by email at liz@adteamla.com. You can also see her upcoming training workshops calendar at http://bit.ly/workshopscal .