How People’s Privacy Settings Will Affect Digital Marketing In 2022
Against the backdrop of governments worldwide reacting to global security scandals, more and more countries like the U.S. are rolling out new and stricter privacy laws in order to protect the personal identifying information (PII) of digital citizens.
Because of these security concerns, people’s privacy settings are changing. This means that the ways you are building your digital brand will have to change too. What’s more, these security concerns, along with platform outages, and constant algorithm modifications can make digital marketing even more daunting. The new, tighter privacy settings are making it more challenging to position your marketing content in front of your target audience.
As more strict privacy laws take hold in the digital arena, tech powerhouses such as Apple, Facebook, and Google are quickly adapting to the changing landscape. It is vital that you understand as a digital marketer how the tightening up of privacy settings will impact how you are able to connect with your target markets.
More Digital Privacy Affecting Digital Marketing
Just last April, Apple significantly impacted the digital marketing landscape with the App Tracking Transparency (ATT) launch. This feature was included in the iOS 14 update that permits users to easily block apps from receiving a unique Identifier for Advertisers (IDFA) embedded in their iPhone devices. By blocking the IDFA, it eliminates user activity tracking across apps. What does this mean? When your client is on their iPhone looking at your listing alerts, any activity tracking in place will be lost.
The iPhone has captured nearly half of the U.S. smartphone market, according to researcher eMarketer. Subsequent to Apple launching ATT, just 9 percent of iPhone users reportedly at first approved of the sharing of their data across apps. This figure gradually increased to approximately 15 percent after the iOS 14.5 launch, according to Flurry.com.
All of these changes mean that if you continue to exclusively rely on platform-specific analytics for your digital marketing decisions, you will be working with extremely unreliable and very inaccurate information.
More Digital Privacy Features
Last September, Apple introduced iOS 15 and this came with yet more digital privacy features. Among them is Mail Privacy Protection, which prevents senders from finding out if an email has been opened and it conceals IP addresses so senders are unable to learn a user’s location or remember their browsing activities.
Now the act of sending mass e-newsletters to your database and tracking open rates as a measurement of success vanishes.
Tech Giants Adapting to New Privacy Laws
Google recently announced that it will adhere to its own replacement for the tracking cookie, the Federated Learning of Cohorts (FloC). FloC enables Google to track large groups of people with similar browsing histories so they can anticipate which ads will ideally fit a person’s interests. This means there will be much less tracking of a consumer’s personal clicks.
Adapting Your Digital Marketing Campaigns
It is imperative that digital marketers take a fresh approach for every strategy and tactic in light of these heightened privacy settings. Areas of your brand marketing to examine include the following:
- Sponsored content on all digital platforms
- Google, Instagram, and Facebook ads
- Email newsletters and drip-email campaigns
Holistic Attribution
Holistic attribution systems have been a mainstay in digital marketing when it comes to making correct marketing decisions. The onslaught of new, more stringent privacy laws has made this model even more essential.
Holistic attribution involves understanding that even a partial contribution from a platform is an important part of the process. For example, your sale might have been converted through a Google ad, but that does not mean that the Facebook ad and other ads your customers viewed did not contribute.
Perhaps even a non-digital close like an in-store visit or a telephone call could have been instigated by one of your digital avenues. Keep in mind that if you just measure at the conversion end, you will not be privy to relevant data, causing you to miss out on sales.
These new privacy changes are truly underscoring the need for a holistic approach to attribution and marketing.
Spotted Fox Digital Marketing — Building Brands with Purpose and Passion
At Spotted Fox Digital Marketing, we partner with businesses like yours to provide a full range of in-house digital marketing services. Spotted Fox Digital is a top-rated Tri-Cities Marketing Agency that believes in relationships, transparency, and trust! We are a results-driven top-ranked marketing company that uses responsive websites, targeted advertising, social media management, video, SEO, and more!
Our work is backed by data, providing your brand with the marketing insights needed to scale! Spotted Fox Digital marketing experts help businesses understand, reach & engage with their audiences through our digital marketing services.
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