iOS 17 strips marketing tracking parameters like fbclid, gclid, and UTM tags from links. Renaming them won't work because Apple updates its blacklist constantly. Switch to server-side tracking or Private Click Measurement, a privacy method that's secure but technically complex for most brands.
iOS 17's link tracking approach. So essentially this is what's happening. So Apple is specifically looking at and targeting kind of known marketing parameters. So if you have things kind of like the Facebook ID, so it's like the F-E-C-L-I-D, right? So the Facebook ID or things like the Google ID, which is like the G-C-L-I-D. There's a token of others, right? Like one's for email, one's for other top of the funnel, for TikTok, whatever. So if you use kind of traditional and standard UTMs, Apple, you know, potentially could be stripping them. And with these, right, like some people have tried renaming UTMs, but Apple at any point in time could just easily update their list. So it's a cat and mouse game. It's kind of hard to trick such a smart big player like that. Maybe temporarily you can, but over time, just know that they're going to probably catch on. You know, it kind of comes down to ultimately cannot rely on these link parameters for user-level tracking. So we need to pivot now to the server side or kind of an aggregated measurement.
Yeah, server-side tracking is pretty interesting when you think about what you can do and it's not always accurate. It might be a little bit better, but, you know, things like PCM, which is private click measurement, will let you track the conversion privacy safely. But it's complex. And reality is most brands will never get to that.
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