ITP
ITP has come in several versions - ITP 1.0 came in 2017, ITP 2.0 and ITP 2.2 came in 2019 and they've been a bit awful for us online marketers
ITP stands for intelligent tracking prevention and was introduced by Apple in 2017. They wanted to "protect their users" from surveillance and targeted advertising, so they started deleting all 3rd party cookies by default within a week and later a day.
So what does this mean?
Well - you see, 3rd party cookies are used by Google Ads, for example. When a user clicks on your Google Ads and lands on your site, Google Analytics will place a cookie on your user's computer. This cookie has information about how the user entered the site.
If the user doesn't buy anything in your webshop, but simply clicks around, then that click has been a waste of money. But we know that many return later. Let's say three days go by and the user is now ready to visit your webshop and make a purchase. Before ITP, Google Analytics would say "Hey... this user came from Google Ads three days ago. I can see that in the cookie". But with ITP 2.2, Safari has automatically deleted this cookie and Google Analytics will attribute the sale to a "direct visit" (that is, if the user just typed your URL into the browser).
Therefore, you will lose a lot of accuracy in your attribution. In the case above, it will look like the money for Google Ads is wasted, but this is far from the case.
Also bad for affiliates
Affiliate marketers are also affected. Imagine you have a site that sends a lot of traffic to your webshop. They have an affiliate link, so they should get a piece of the pie when they make a sale. But often, these affiliate links will also use 3rd party cookies and thus your affiliate marketer will not get the commission they should be getting.
So for those of us working in online marketing, ITP has been a real blow to attribution and web analytics.
We know online marketing in Shoporama
We've been working with online marketing ourselves for decades. As the only shop system in the country, we have spoken multiple times at conferences such as Marketingcamp, SEOday, Shopcamp, Digital Marketing, E-commerce Manager, Ecommerce Day, Web Analytics Wednesday and many more.