The Attribution Stack: How to Make Budget Decisions in a Post-iOS14 World

https://www.reforge.com/blog/marketing-attribution-stack-after-ios14

by hammer_mt • 4 years ago

52 29 4 years ago

jeroenhd• 4 years ago

Good to see that Apple's anti tracking features are having a real world impact on the cyberstalking done by marketeers. Clearly the war isn't won yet, but if Apple can keep thinking up new privacy features to advertise their products with, things can only get better.

iinnPP• 4 years ago

One side effect I noted in working through the mentioned iOS upgrades was how it impacted various groups.

Our marketing efforts began seeing a skew towards groups more likely to own either an older iPhone or an Android device.

The product has died, thankfully.

hdjjhhvvhga• 4 years ago

It's hilarious how they call privacy features "apocalypse." Kudos for Apple for making the lives of these folks more difficult.

pete_nic4• 4 years ago

Perhaps a bit idealistic but I aspire for a world where companies can segment and target their market while consumers maintain a level of privacy.

Nextgrid4• 4 years ago

If we assume that privacy is 100% respected, "segmenting and targeting" is still not something that benefits consumers.

JKCalhoun• 4 years ago

You’ve probably had this experience: you spend some time on the whiteboard mapping out your marketing funnel and growth loops, and you’re really fired up ready to grow your business, but then the ultimate question hits you like a sledgehammer: “How are we going to track this?”.

No, I have not.

One wonders how Sony in the 1950's (as an example) "tracked".

trurl4• 4 years ago

And still folks think that if side loading is forced on Apple, that companies will not force us to start side loading their apps to escape this "apocalypse".

glowingly• 4 years ago

I agree. We only have to look 3 years ago to see exactly what happens when those same companies get sideload access. Facebook did something very similar, using their Apple App Store Developer certificate to enroll users as "employees," allowing them to defacto sideload their market research application.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19033451

I also fully expect the last browser holding against Google's browser monoculture - Safari - to die soon after.

I hate this state of affairs, where Apple's sheer greed is the main force stablizing this fragile environment.

bradknowles• 4 years ago

App-pocalypse?

pete_nic4• 4 years ago

The truth is we’re in a post-truth world, where more than one opinion is valid. You should never trust just one single source of information, without validating what it's telling you, and thinking about the potential motivations and incentives behind that conclusion.

Wisdom applicable beyond the topic of this article

throwmeariver1• 4 years ago

There was never a truth world it was always a world of trust and the trust got eroded in the last decades but it's still there. If you trust your business partner or your life partner you can make decisions without checking them. If you trust no one, your decision making is so hampered that even if you come to the right conclusion it's most certainly too late.

username223• 4 years ago

I always feel strange seeing these walls of pseudo-scientific marketroid babble. Their fundamental purpose is to make some fraction of people choose Crest over Colgate, or vice versa, but they've fallen so far down the rabbit-hole of this mundane task that they can come up with competing "models" and multi-thousand-word articles promoting and explaining them.

From an ordinary human's perspective, it's like shopping for groceries and getting side-tracked into a discussion of the natures of free will and the fundamental building blocks of matter. I just want to buy some decent-tasting apples, not grasp the neural correlates of my apparent "choice," or the string-theoretic basis of their multicolored skins.

That's not to say there aren't useful nuggets to be gleaned. For example, the fact that "third-party consumer data" and "customer matching" are the highest form of marketing surveillance tells me they're buying data from credit card companies and shady "data brokers," and correlating that using whatever identifiers they can. So I should probably keep entering fake phone numbers, zip codes, and email addresses when I can.

Nextgrid4• 4 years ago

Their fundamental purpose is to make some fraction of people choose Crest over Colgate

Their fundamental purpose is to convince their boss or client that they are indeed making consumers choose one over the other and make up data and/or theories to support that assertion so they can justify their fees/salaries/bonuses. They don't particularly care whether consumers are actually choosing the product.

The Attribution Stack: How to Make Budget Decisions in a Post-iOS14 World

Related Stories