Apple's App Tracking Transparency (ATT) in a mobile app

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The background: Impact of iOS 14.5 on online advertising
We look back at the year 2020. On June 22, Apple unveiled the then unknown iOS 14. The first "privacy" improvements were announced at the WWDC (Worldwide Developers Conference) 2020. What this was all about became clear at the latest during the beta test of iOS 14.5 in February 2021. The data protection optimizations included in the operating system update then had their big public rollout at the end of April 2021. What had Apple done?


With the so-called App Tracking Transparency (ATT), every mobile app under iOS 14.5 now had to integrate its own opt-in for data transfer. Every Apple user is now familiar with this pop-up window and is reminiscent of the cookie banners on desktop websites. However, since the majority of users do not opt ​​in, these germany whatsapp phone number people or their user ID can no longer be tracked. What does this mean for marketing? The big consequence has been significantly less data for online advertising since then. This means that the advertising algorithms of Meta, Google & Co. can work less well and remarketing also becomes a challenge. However, we have already presented you with the measures you can still use to collect as much data as possible from Meta in a previous article: iOS 14.5 - Effects on Facebook Ads .


WWDC 2023: iOS 17 will be presented
Now we are in 2023 and Apple has some news in store for this year's WWDC. On June 5th, new hardware was introduced with the new MacBook Air and the Vision Pro, but below we will focus on the hot topic of discussion in the marketing industry: iOS 17 - the new operating system from fall 2023.

As in previous years, Senior Vice President of Software Development Craig Federighi was in charge of introducing the new operating system. During his presentation, he also talked about new privacy improvements when browsing with Safari. When a large lock appeared in the background, everyone - including me - held their breath. What's next? Craig announced: Tracking added to URLs (a la URL extensions) will be removed when you surf the Internet.


One thing is clear: URL extensions are UTM tags that we advertisers use for our campaigns and subsequent evaluation.