Apple’s Safari and Mobile Safari Browsers offers a Do Not Track (DNT) privacy setting that discourages advertisers from tracking online behavior by blocking third-party cookies when the setting is enabled.
For users this means better privacy, for advertisers, this means cookie-based tracking will be limited at best – supporting impression and click tracking, but not conversions from third-party cookies.
If you have a large segment of Safari or Mobile Safari traffic, you should be utilizing these conversion tracking best practices to circumvent the conversion tracking discrepancies.
Utilize CAKE’s Request Session ID on your Conversion/Event pixel.
This method is the most accurate in tracking conversions without browser-based cookies, but requires the ability to store a value until the user converts.
The Request Session ID (REQID) is a numeric value that CAKE generates on a click that represents a user’s session. This value will need to be stored until the user converts and then be passed back to CAKE in the Conversion/Event pixel.
The Request Session ID can be passed into the query string of the Landing Page when a CAKE Unique Tracking Link is used by appending the token, #reqid# to an available parameter within the Offer link.
- Query String: http://www.getcake.com?rid=#reqid#
The Request Session ID will need to be stored respective to the user until the conversion point is reached. When the Conversion/Event pixel fires, the Request Session ID needs to be passed back to CAKE in the r= parameter of the pixel, allowing CAKE to make an association from the click to the conversion pixel for attribution.
- Example iFrame Event/Conversion Pixel:
- <iframe src="http://domain.com/p.ashx?o=4&e=1&t=TRANSACTION_ID&r=REQUEST_SESSION_ID" height="1" width="1" frameborder="0"></iframe>
Utilize CAKE’s Session Regeneration Offer Attribution Setting
If you’re unable to capture or store the CAKE Request Session ID, an alternate method of conversion tracking called, Session Regeneration, is available to help remedy discrepancies with Safari traffic.
Session regeneration is a setting available to CAKE customers that will act as a fallback when cookies are not available for attributing Conversion/Event pixels to clicks. Session regeneration can be based off of values collected on the users click that closely resemble “finger printing.” Some of these values available are IP, IP + User Agent, IP + Device, etc. When using this setting, a look back window will be used to determine when a click with the matching criteria came through.
Though this setting is a helpful remedy for cookie-less tracking, it is not the preferred method because multiple users could have the same finger printing criteria, which could cause continued conversion tracking discrepancies. Because of this, the Request Session ID on Conversion/Event pixels is preferred.