click tracking
Peter Jakuš, Product Manager for omnichannel marketing automation platform Bloomreach Engagement has put together even more useful information on the upcoming iOS17 privacy protections that will modify links. Great details and examples. Thanks for sharing, Peter!
When I recently mentioned that new Apple privacy changes were coming in iOS17, it was nigh impossible to share exactly what was coming, as I did not have the opportunity to test it myself — and even if any of us tests it, it could end up working differently when the final version of Apple’s latest mobile operating system is finally released, later this year. So, I didn’t have much to share. Thankfully, somebody has to come to the rescue.Steve Atkins of Word to the Wise has done a most excellent job of exploring exactly how automatic removal of click-tracking parameters works in the current iOS17 beta. It is most definitely worth a read, to better understand how things are probably going to work in iOS17. Do keep in mind, functionality could still be subject to change. Even with that limitation, this is still great research and kudos to Steve
I’ve heard quite a bit of concern about what iOS 17’s automatic removal of click-tracking parameters means, but less discussion of what it actually does. Broadly it’s Apple trying to improve user-privacy by making it harder to do cross-site tracking at scale. Cross-site tracking is the basis of a lot of privacy-violating tracking technologies, and tracking parameters added to links evade Safari’s technologies that mitigate tracking via cross-site cookies or other forms of session storage. (As partial compensation, Apple is supporting Private Click Measurement. That’ll allow ad click measurements without sending PII to the advertisers.) But, what does it actually mean? I’ve not seen much in the way of documentation, so I built a test harness, installed an iOS 17 developer beta on a spare iPad and looked at what it does. The test setup is very, very simple. I have a custom webserver that accepts clicks and logs the
Over on one of the forums the other day, somebody asked about best practices for redirects and link tracking for marketing email sends. Here’s a few of my thoughts.First: avoid the open redirect. If you’re using a redirect tool or feature that lets you just specify the full destination URL in its redirect, that’s bad news. Why? Because bad guys look for these to exploit. What happens is, when they’re used in spam or phishing emails, the domain reputation of the redirect domain goes bad, affected the domain that was abused, but protecting the bad guy’s actual domain. Spammers know this and look for opportunities to do this. Read more about this risk here.Now that we’ve gotten that out of the way, here’s what I would call your best (safest) options for domain choice for link/click tracking:Your custom click-tracking domain hosted by your email service provider (ESP). Most ESP platforms…
Okay, they’re not really opens. They’re proxy-based, false positive pre-loaded opens. Don’t think of them as opens. Think of them as something you want to get out of the way so as to not inflate your campaign tracking. I know, I know… Apple is not the only one proxying opens today. But they’re the big one — over the past few weeks, Apple MPP “opens” have been 25-30% of my opens tracked for each Spam Resource newsletter. And if you’re a typical B2C sender, your percentage is likely even higher.So let’s say you run an email sending platform and you want to give users an option to suppress these opens from tracking. How do you do that?Look for any open that has the very generic referrer of “Mozilla/5.0” with nothing else. This is probably low effort, but keep in mind that it is imperfect. In my testing, 95% of the…