Stats Snapshot: Is Apple a Threat to Cookies?

March 16, 2011 | By Carla Rover

Third-party cookie-based marketing suffers in the Apple world. According to to a recent study by Marin Software, “website conversions on Apple’s iOS devices were not included in paid search metrics 80 percent of the time a third-party cookie was used for tracking.” That’s a huge swath of untapped data, and enough to destroy the accuracy of any brand’s marketing strategy.

“Mobile advertising is seeing tremendous growth right now, with the ads served on iPhones and iPads accounting for a significant chunk of that growth,” said Matt Lawson, vp of marketing and alliances at Marin. “Poor analytics due to cookie blocking could lead to undercounting mobile advertising revenues, and ultimately to under-investing in mobile.”

Coupled with possible legislative attacks on cookie-based tracking, the old ways of traditional ad buys and tracking are going the way of the betamax. The study also found that the Apple iOS conversion rates were on average 23 percent higher than those of Windows users, when adjusted for iOS undercounting. That means that Apple users are active consumers ripe for targeting, but they’re escaping the radar.

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