Apple Kills Online Advertising (Nearly)

Naughty Apple!

The online advertising industry has over-reached, got fat and lazy, and Apple has put a bit of a stop to it with these latest OS & browser updates.

Or at least put the brakes on it somewhat. For a short time.

In fact, it’ll probably be back to normal by the time I’ve finished my breakfast.

Read the Key Issues, Key Actions and Key Insights in this extract from TWIS SEO News & Updates 6th October 2017.

#SEO #SEONews #Apple #AdStrategy

Key Issues Summary:

• Apple rolled out iOS 11 and Safari v11 recently with changes in the way the browser stores cookies.
• This change impacts the way advertising information is handled and stored by browsers, reducing the time held and the way off-domain cookies are held.
• If you listened to the wailing and gnashing of teeth from the digital spamming advertising industry, you would be convinced the world had ended.
• It hasn’t. Google has already implemented change on Adwords, and the advertising companies should be able to come up with a whizzy solution shortly.

Key Actions List:

1. If you are a publisher, you need to monitor revenue from advertising. It may be impacted by this change from Apple – especially if you have a lot of iOS / Safari users from the US.
2. If you are an advertiser, you need to review Google’s Adwords changes including modifying your Google analytics tracking scripts.
3. As an advertiser, you also need to assess impact for retargeting campaigns which may be running and set with ++30 day time boundaries.
4. You also need to be aware of “digital fingerprinting” which reduces the need for cookies.
5. Click here to contact me to discuss the ways this change might impact your website and how to deal with it.

Insights & Discussion:

Some advertising is a scourge. Retargeting when you’ve already bought something. Following you round the internet. Or using cross-domain cookies to build detailed profiles on you for bigger, better advertising.

I don’t always think that web advertising is a bad thing. It is if people do not do it well, and just spray. The most annoying thing I think is wasted budget when I get re-advertised on a product I have already bought (from that supplier, or elsewhere), or already decided not to purchase. It is a waste of the advertiser’s time and a waste of the user’s bandwidth and screen real estate. The only beneficiary is the advertising company, who may already know that user has purchased, or made a decision. That is poor practice in my book and in my perfect world it would not exist.

Quite a few years ago the death of the cookie was widely forecast. It still hasn’t happened, but it needs to. The data companies at the time trumpeted about “browser fingerprinting”, but it seems that has not yet come to pass. I wonder what happened to it.

More Information:

• Apple Launches Intelligent Tracking Prevention
• Kissmetrics Blog

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I recently wrote about how Google’s Mobile First is Not Mobile Friendly. Read it now.

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• Big bad Apple has done something decent for consumers.
• It’s changed the way its OS & browsers deal with cookies, dealing a mortal blow to the online advertising industry.
• Who after much moaning, will be back spamming with avengance next week.
• Read The State of SEO in mid-2017.
• Read about how Google’s Mobile First Index is not Mobile Friendly.
• Finally, get your content ranking well on Google by starting to understand Find Crawl Index.

Thanks for reading. If you would like to discuss what these changes mean for your web property, or would like to know how to implement them, please feel free to contact me.

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