Safari ITP & Google Parallel Tracking

Jan Bischoff, October 21, 2018

On September 17th, 2018, Apple's Safari expanded its Intelligent Tracking Prevention with ITP 2.0. This means third-party cookies can no longer be read in the context of a foreign domain. For affiliates using public affiliate networks, this makes tracking more difficult. For advertisers, it means switching to first-party cookies or server-to-server tracking is now a priority.

Mozilla's Firefox followed suit on January 28th, 2019.

NetSlave clients have been using first-party tracking cookies for 18 years, with 90% already on this setup – so there's no migration needed for them.

Third-party cookies are those written not on the actual shop domain or its subdomains, but on domains like track.affiliate-network.tld. In our QUALITYCLICK installations, the partner program for www.shop.tld typically runs on a subdomain such as partner.shop.tld or pn.shop.tld. Cookies are written to ".shop.tld" – the main domain – and remain readable across all subdomains even after ITP 2.0.

If a third-party domain must be used, it needs to be ensured that the cookies for tracking sales are first-party cookies. QUALITYCLICK supports this via CDCM (Cross-Domain Cookie Management).

For QUALITYCLICK clients, no action is required – your tracking continues to work perfectly.

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