iOS 14 and its impact on eCommerce

The e-commerce ecosystem is so complex that we often experience "butterfly effects", where a seemingly marginal change in one of the players can unleash a veritable hurricane with infinite ramifications and consequences.

 

If that butterfly is one of the world's leading cell phone manufacturers, with a proprietary operating system, and we have such a mobile first environment as the one we live in... it turns out that Apple's decision to alter privacy options of iOS 14 and successive ones prepares a major chaos on some platforms, especially Facebook, as we will see below.

In the introduction we have already laid the groundwork for the explanation, but let's be a little more specific in terms of numbers to have a more approximate dimension of what we are talking about.

 

Let's start from the premise that Apple is not a company that stands out thanks to its transparency in certain aspects. In fact, they are quite opaque when it comes to sales figures beyond what is public. But they have recently reported that they have over 1.8 billion iOS devices running worldwide.

 

This figure at first glance is already shocking, even though it includes everything from smartphones to watches to desktop computers, and obviously not all of them have a recent version of the operating system. In fact, Apple does not make a breakdown by devices, but as the well-known website Macrumors points out in this review, in 2021 the company already stated that they had exceeded the amount of 1 billion active iPhones.

The potential number of customers is more than enough to not take any issue related to them as a joke, because it will directly affect our financial results.

 

Anyway, if you have a web analytics tool in your online store or website, it is easy to access a traffic report by device and operating system. This way you will know exactly how many real visits you have from iOS 14 or higher.

Well, it is clear then that something is happening with this traffic. Now, we will go into detail on what.

 

Apple is very proud to be a company committed to the privacy of its users. So much so that it has even made it one of its sales arguments in various advertising campaigns and official communications.

 

Giving that, when it launches its 14th operating system update, in addition to adding functions and correcting errors, it adds important changes to its privacy policies.

 

On the one hand, it makes it mandatory to report in detail from the App Store itself the use that applications make of our data (including that of third-party cookies). In addition, under the company's transparency protocol, it is also specified that the user can manage the use that will be made of their data. What is more: the applications inform us of this situation when we access them, and not only that, they also oblige the user to accept or refuse the tracking of their activity.

As you may have already thought, online advertising is the first thing that iOS 14 and onwards affect:

All this results in less data with which to configure our campaigns, and much less accurate reports. In short: the strategy is greatly impoverished.

All of this is discussed in what they have called aggregate event measurement. In order to set this up, the first step is to verify your domains. Then, configure the eight events that the system allows.

 

It is not optimal, but it is what it is. It is also something that will go to more because Google has also made a firm commitment to a future without third-party cookies, so there is no choice but to adapt.