Safari ITP 2.1 Impact on Adobe Experience Cloud and Experience Platform Customers

[#1]

What information can I gain from reading this article?

• Apple changed how cookies are persisted in Safari Browsers so that some cookies expire after 7 days.
• Despite the change to Safari, data sets from Adobe Experience Cloud cookies are still being collected.
• Lookback windows and return visitor counts may be reduced for Safari traffic until an Adobe update is made available, targeting end of April to May 2019.
• Along with everyone in the industry, Adobe is developing both short and long-term mitigations. The details in this post can change at any time. What does not change is our commitment to our customers and consumer privacy and choice.

What is ITP 2.1?

On Feb. 21, 2019, Apple announced its latest update to ITP (Intelligent Tracking Prevention). Unlike previous versions focused on third party cookies, this version details new tracking prevention measures for first party cookies. In upcoming releases of iOS 12.2 and Safari 12.1 browsers, first party persistent cookies set through the document.cookie API, often known as “client-side” cookies, have their expiration capped at 7 days. First party cookies set via HTTP response methods are not affected by the update. Third party cookies will continue to be blocked, as stated in previous versions of ITP.

Other statements from ITP 2.1 can be found in the original release from Apple here.

What is the impact for Adobe Experience Cloud customers?

Potential increase of unique visitor counts

Due to the shortened expiration window of seven days, customers may see an increase of unique visitors coming from Safari browsers. Visit and page view counts should not be impacted by the update.

Decreased lookback periods for Target tests

Visitor profiles for Target tests may have a decreased lookback period during decisioning.

Profile Merge Rule impacts in Audience Manager

For customers with high volumes of Safari traffic and high authentication rates, the Total Devices and Avg Number of Devices counts in the Profile Merge Rule reporting may increase as Safari device IDs are re-generated and synced more frequently. This will also impact the composition of customers Profile Link device graph which evaluates the 3 most recent devices linked to a Customer ID, potentially leading to skewed device clusters.

Visitor profiles for Audience Manager segmentation may have a decreased lookback history

Anonymous Safari web data will only be available for 7 days from the user’s last visit. This will impact the amount of historical data available for a single device at the time of segmentation which may impact addressable audience size.

Conversions which occur after 7 days from user’s last visit will be not be attributed in Advertising Cloud

Since the first-party cookies will have a 7-day expiry, if they do not revisit the site to refresh the cookie, any advertising conversion events will not be able to attribute to the advertising campaigns.

Finish reading the post here.

Author: erind87168428

[#2]

Has Adobe calculated the amount of traffic used by Safari for all their clients? or other browsers?

[#3]

I found the dedicated template in Adobe Analytics quite helpful to understand ITP impact. Will this template be updated with new browser limitations in the future? Will we maybe get a broader, more technical template that shows other limitations too?