Apple ITP 2.1 (Intelligent Tracking Prevention) beta rolled on March 26th and is currently live this month. With consumer privacy continually in mind, Apple’s latest update will remove first party cookies after seven days. In this post we will discuss the changes and how this may impact your affiliate program. Before I go on, here is a link to a video where I explained Apple ITP 2.0.
The consensus on Apple ITP 2.1 is that it will have a minimal impact since the majority of Safari sales occur within 7 days, however below are a couple ways this update may potentially impact your site.
Compliance with ITP 2.1
Unique visits – first-party cookies used to track a website visitor’s on-site behavior can only be stored for seven days. As a result, you may begin to notice a spike in unique visits to your site, but this data could be heavily skewed by this update.
Decrease in affiliate transactions – while the impact is not expected to be as large as it was for ITP 2.0, since the majority of Safari sales occur within seven days, this is something to watch out for.
Loss of affiliate commissions – make sure your affiliate program is set up to track in line with the changes to ITP 2.1 to prevent a loss in affiliate commissions, which could also lead to publishers leaving your network. As a result this update may not be as high of a priority on your dev’s teams list of projects, however it should be solved for as soon as possible.
Resources
As the industry continues to evolve and consumer privacy stays top of mind, it is crucial to make sure your affiliate program is staying on pace with the industry trends.
Below I will lay out a couple of proposed solutions from a few networks leading the way in terms of proactively providing solutions to this update.
Pepperjam’s recommended solutions include instructions for the container tag OR Ecommerce platform extensions currently available on Salesforce Commerce Cloud, Magento, and Shopify. Find out more about Pepperjam’s solutions.
Awin’s full tracking solution will not only prevent loss of transactions from ITP, but it will also help future-proof affiliate programs from browser-based tracking methods down the road.
As more updates from other networks become available, we will be updating this post.
If you are not sure whether or not your affiliate program is ITP 2.1 compliant, reach out to us, we would be happy to help.
