Up to 80% of paid search conversions may not be counted by devices using Apple iOS, according to a new report from marketing platform specialist Marin Software.
Devices like iPhones, iPads and iPods are more or less invisible to marketers using ad networks and ad monitoring tools that use third party tracking cookies to count conversions, clicks.
The report said that while marketers have historically assumed that a level of undercounting was more or less uniform across all browsers, Apple’s focus on consumer privacy meant that Apple Safari and iOS far outscored all the other main browsers for conversion undercounting, with 51% and 80% respectively.
Firefox and IE scored 28% and 37%, with Google Chrome propping up the table on 32%.
“On average, advertisers using third-party cookie based tracking systems are undercounting conversions by 38%, severely obfuscating their visibility into campaign performance,” said Marin.
But Marin also calculated that when untracked conversions were taken into account, using ad conversions to Windows computers as a baseline, Apple devices would actually outperform Windows by 23%.
Although iOS traffic currently only accounts for around 5% of conversion traffic, that figure is likely to increase rapidly given the three digit growth of the iPad alone. And with the undercounting problem not limited to just click conversion, but publisher tracking tools such as AdWords and Bing, the race is on to come up with a more effective way of measuring online conversion.
Download Marin’s report here: http://www.marinsoftware.com/resources/best-practices/apple-ipad-measurability-brief
