What is the Intelligent Tracking Prevention?

In this article, we explain what is the ITP. Intelligent Tracking Prevention is a new method to guarantee more privacy to users and is being adopted by Apple on Safari.

Basically, cookies will be preserved by Safari for a default period of 1 day, if the users don’t return to the site. Also, cookies able to do cross-site tracking will be deleted. You can find a more detailed explanation about ITP here.

Google, Amazon and Facebook have an advantage

Google already announced that implemented ways to guarantee that Intelligent Tracking Prevention will not affect Google Analytics, Doubleclick Bid Manager and Adwords attribution.

Many of these measures were already in place; the most innovative measure is the fact that Google Analytics is now dropping a first party cookie so that the browser retains the cookie for 30 days.

Like Curt Larson, VP of product at Sharethrough, said to Marketing Land, all the ad tech companies with logins associated to cookies will not have any issue with the Intelligent Tracking Prevention adopted by Apple, as the attribution no longer happens on the web browser, but on the server. However, the small Adtech companies will see a disruption, despite the fact that some do not admit it, like Sizmek. Sizmek says that ITP will not have an "impact with Sizmek (and thus, Rocket Fuel). Neither platform makes use of first-party cookies in third-party contexts. And as described above, ITP has no effect on third-party cookies."

Market Share of Safari and Intelligent Tracking Prevention

Safari has around 5% of market share on browser usage on a desktop, however on mobile devices that share can be 50% on mobile devices, with the strong adoption of iOS.

Why Ad Tech needs cookies?

Ad Tech companies need cookies in order to do attribution and to guarantee frequency caps and recency.