Data privacy has been a huge topic in recent years; who has access to your information, where is your information being used, who your information is being shared with – all of these are legitimate concerns and questions that users and consumers have.

Apple iOS 14 Data Privacy Policy

Most recently, Apple has addressed consumer data privacy concerns in their iOS 14 update with their Ads Tracking Transparency feature. Before the launch of iOS 14, Apple users were able to Limit Ad Tracking (LAT) and opt out of app tracking. In the new iOS 14 update, users now have the power to allow/opt-in to ad tracking before apps can track personalized data. This new policy is called App Tracking Transparency (ATT).

Effects On Ads Tracking

As eCommerce stores rely on this data to understand their consumers, this new policy affects the future of ad marketing.  Features such as ad targeting, campaign measurements like click through rates and conversation rates become affected without access to this user data. As such, the efficacy of Facebook Ads, Google Display Ads and all other kinds of banner ads will be heavily disrupted as they can no longer be personalized on iOS devices. For more in-depth information this iOS 14 update, and what it means, we’ve found resources that explain the changes and how to prepare. 

What Can You Do?

Based on growing data privacy concerns, it seems more and more likely that remarketing will prove to be more difficult as time goes on. To combat and overcome this, we suggest exploring other forms of marketing and customer experience to alleviate the focus and pressures of ad marketing.

SEO Content

In light of this update, content marketing now plays a much more important role than ever before. There’s no better time to invest budget and dollars on keyword searches than now to rank higher on Google. Rather than relying on data to try and fish out potential users to visit your sites, investing dollars on SEO to have users who are already looking for particular items organically find you may prove to be a better approach. From this initial touchpoint, you can consider other methods to keep users browsing your site. 

Email Marketing 

Once users are on your site, you’ll want to find ways to have them join your email list. Building a large customer database is a valuable marketing asset as this allows you to track their behaviours on site for things such as checkout rate, bounce rates, and abandon cart rates. This allows you to segment your users to retarget your marketing campaigns for certain segmented customers. With a large customer database, you’ll also want to retain customers and increase their overall lifetime value (LTV) with incentives and special campaigns which can be done via loyalty programs. 

Live Chat/Chatbot

Having on site assistance and enhancing your customers experience will also be helpful with sales conversions. Being able to address immediate questions and issues from customers can help to retain their interest and redirect their focus on continuing their buying journey on your site. Focus can be put on gathering a customer service team to answer live chats as well as creating chatbot flows that can assess a customers query and automatically redirect them to what they need.