Private Click Attribution
Apple's Private Click Attribution is designed to provide less accurate, incomplete and time-delayed data to marketers about the events associated with their advertising. Apple acknowledges that for "ad click attribution to happen, some bits of data about what happened across two websites need to be sent."[1]
Impact
By removing accurate, complete and real-time feedback to marketers, their ability to adjust the pricing and budget associated with advertising will be impaired. As the value marketers receive from advertising declines, so to will publisher revenues.
Apple's proposal suggests marketers need only to measure a limited set of 64 campaigns, which is not practical to most marketers who run hundreds of campaigns or relying on sponsored search relying on thousands of keywords.
Apple's proposed Private Click Attribution relies on marketers sending the value of their conversion data to the publisher. However, Apple proposes that the data sent be a range rather than a specific value, which thus impairs the accuracy of the attribution algorithm. Moreover, W3C members have criticized this proposal on not improving privacy as well as forcing buyers to disclose proprietary data to sellers:
- “ad click destination may not want to share any details with ad click source besides the fact that conversion happened.”[2]
- “It also doesn't seem more transparent than sending a request to a third party. The data being sent is already in aggregate and contains very little identifiable information so it's not clear what threat is being avoided.” [3]
Open Questions
- How will marketers value view-through attribution or multi-touch attribution?