Each month our experts aim to arm you with the latest news and trends around the digital marketing world. This month’s edition involves a few updates related to tracking.
There seems to be some confusion out there around what can and can’t be tracked lately, so we thought we’d put together a little fact vs. fiction post to clarify what exactly is going on.
We’ll start with email …
Fact: Google change ruins open-rate tracking for email
Yes, it’s true. Google recently announced changes to its Spam Policy that will effectively eliminate email open tracking.
When emails go out through automated platforms, they often include a pixel that tracks whether the recipient opens the email. According to BTB Venture Group, Gmail will now flag emails that have these pixels, mark them as “suspicious or spam” and move them into a spam folder.
At RKD, we don’t do pixels, and we stopped using email opens as a key metric for email long ago. We recommend you do the same. Not only are the numbers unreliable, but now you risk being reported as spam and hurting your reputation and deliverability.
Not worth it.
In the meantime, check with your email platform to see how they're dealing with this. They should have—at minimum—a blog post or help desk article that addresses it. It shouldn't be something you need to manually adjust, but it’s always good to check with your email service provider to ensure they have a plan to do so.
Fiction: Apple’s iOS ruins UTM tracking for email
We’ve seen numerous outlets—including some in the nonprofit space—continue to report that Apple iOS 17 allows users to block UTM tracking. As we’ve noted previously in this space, this is simply not true.
Apple’s operating system strips out personal identifiers and “fingerprinting” in URLs. It does not remove UTM parameters for source, medium, etc.—not even in private Safari sessions.
There are a whole bunch of tracking parameters that have been impacted by Apple’s privacy features, including ones from HubSpot, Facebook, Google, Adobe Marketo and more (check this list here). However, UTMs are still a go.
No definitive word yet on whether that changes as iOS 18 rolls out this week, but early reviews seem to indicate no changes in this area. We will keep a close eye on this to see if anything changes and how it may impact reporting, personalization and marketing in general.
Fact: GA4 has benchmarks similar to Universal Analytics
One feature that many people liked about Universal Analytics was its benchmarking data. You could compare your website stats against others in your industry to see how well you were doing.
Well, the good news is that this feature is coming back in Google Analytics 4, as reported by Search Engine Roundtable. An eagle-eyed user noticed the feature a couple of weeks ago, and it appears to be rolling out in waves.
Click here for Google’s walkthrough on how to enable this feature.
Fiction: AI will have little effect on website visitors
You’ve probably done a Google search recently and seen the AI Overview at the top of the search results. If you have, there’s a good chance you read it … and stopped your search there.
As a user, this can be a great way to get concise answers to your questions (although they’re not always accurate). But as a marketer, this can affect how many people are visiting your website.
These searches are referred to as “zero-click searches,” and new research shows that they make up 58.5% of all searches in the U.S. so far this year (see below).
Not sure what to do about that for your organization’s website? Here are a few tips we’ve gathered to help.
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