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Author: Yann A. Skaalen

Founder and CEO Yann Skaalen has been involved in digital marketing since 1997. His latest venture was MyBank, a challenger bank which he co-founded Digger has been a pet project for Yann since 1998, with only a limited number of customers until recently when realizing the immense potential for the technology given the increasing difficulties for tracking

Surviving and Thriving in a Post‑iOS 26 World: The Marketer’s Guide

Posted on by Yann A. Skaalen

We’ve been tracking Apple’s privacy updates closely ever since iOS 14.5 turned Facebook Ads upside down. When iOS 15, 16, and 17 rolled out, we were already helping clients prepare. Now, with iOS 26 about to land, we’ve been digging deep into what’s changing — long before Apple unveils iOS 28.

Why? Because every new release pushes marketers further into the dark. Link tracking gets stripped. Fingerprinting is blocked. Cookies are already dead. And with each update, more of your conversions vanish from your reports.

The result is simple: without a future-proof solution, advertisers lose visibility, waste budget, and miss growth opportunities. However, there is a way to stay ahead. In fact, it’s already available.

iOS 26’s Privacy Crackdown: What Changed?

Apple has made it clear that tracking users across apps and websites will only get harder. Specifically, two major updates stand out:

  1. Advanced Fingerprinting Protection. Safari now blocks many fingerprinting techniques by default. This applies in both normal and private modes. Device clues like screen resolution, fonts, and CPU cores get scrambled. As a result, they are unreliable for tracking. In short, fingerprinting is going extinct.
  2. Link Tracking Protection. Safari strips tracking parameters from URLs. This happens in Mail, Messages, and Private Browsing. Parameters like gclid, fbclid, and utm_* may never reach your site. Consequently, you lose visibility into the campaign that drove the visit. In turn, this weakens your ability to optimize.

Together, these updates take away the last remnants of traditional tracking. In other words, they close every loophole advertisers once relied on.

Why This Triggers an Attribution Crisis

The impact on marketers is huge:

  1. Conversions go dark. Many brands already lost 20–30% of conversions with iOS 14.5. Now, even more will disappear. For example, up to 40% of your iPhone conversions may be untracked. As a consequence, reports become dangerously misleading.
  2. Ad spend is wasted. As a result, when attribution breaks, marketers often cut campaigns that are actually profitable. False negatives cause budgets to shift away from what’s working. Ultimately, this reduces growth instead of supporting it.
  3. Algorithms weaken. Google Ads and Meta Ads rely on conversion data to optimize. Without enough signals, CPAs rise and ROAS falls. Moreover, algorithms can no longer target your best customers effectively.
  4. Illusion of decline. Campaigns may look weaker simply because reporting is incomplete. In reality, sales still happen, but you can’t see them. In turn, this creates the illusion of poor performance.

Therefore, marketers are left flying blind. Above all, they risk making decisions on broken data.

Legacy Tracking is Dead

Traditional methods no longer work:

  1. Cookies: Safari and Firefox already block third-party cookies. Chrome is phasing them out too. Moreover, even first-party cookies get capped, which shortens attribution windows dramatically.
  2. Click IDs: Apple strips out gclid, fbclid, and similar IDs. As a result, Google Ads and Meta attribution pipelines break. In other words, your ad spend goes uncredited.
  3. Fingerprinting: Safari randomizes device details. Consequently, fingerprinting is no longer a viable workaround.
  4. Device IDs: App Tracking Transparency already killed IDFA for most users. Instead, marketers were pushed toward server-side APIs and SKAdNetwork.

In summary, Apple is dismantling every workaround that tries to follow users without consent. Therefore, a new approach is essential.

How Digger Solves the iOS 26 Challenge

Instead of patching broken systems, Digtective’s Digger takes a new approach.

  1. Server-side tracking. Events are captured directly on your server. This means they bypass browser restrictions and ad blockers. As a result, no conversion gets lost.
  2. No cookies or fingerprints. Digger is 100% privacy-first and GDPR-compliant. Therefore, there is nothing for Safari to block. In addition, compliance teams can sign off with confidence.
  3. Deterministic attribution. Click data is stored server-side, then matched to conversions. As a result, you see exactly which campaign drove the sale. Importantly, this happens without fragile browser IDs.
  4. Platform integrations. Digger pushes conversions back to Google, Meta, and others via server-side APIs. Consequently, algorithms get the full data picture again. In turn, campaign performance improves.
  5. Future-proof. Built for a cookieless world. In fact, it’s ready for iOS 26 and whatever comes next.

Recover Lost Conversions and Maximize ROAS

With Digger, marketers:

  1. Capture 100% of conversions. Even the 30–40% that go dark with iOS are recovered. As a result, you regain full visibility.
  2. Trust their data. Every sale and lead is tied back to the right campaign. Therefore, reporting becomes accurate again.
  3. Optimize with confidence. Budgets go to the campaigns that truly deliver ROI. In addition, wasted spend is cut dramatically.
  4. Feed the algorithms. Google and Meta’s bidding models improve with better data. As a consequence, CPAs drop and ROAS climbs.
  5. Stay compliant. Privacy and performance go hand in hand. Above all, you remain future-proof.

Brands using Digger have cut CPA by up to 80% while scaling leads and revenue. For instance, some saw conversion costs fall by nearly 79% in just three months.

Conclusion: Don’t Let iOS 26 Leave You in the Dark

Apple’s privacy moves are here to stay. Therefore, the only way forward is cookieless, server-side, first-party tracking. That’s exactly what Digger delivers.

👉 Ready to illuminate your “dark” conversions and supercharge ROAS?

Book a demo with Digtective today.

Sources

Boost Your Meta Ads Performance with Digtective’s New Conversion API Integration

Posted on by Yann A. Skaalen

Boost Your Meta Ads Performance with Digtective’s New Conversion API Integration

We’re excited to introduce a powerful new feature in Digtective: native support for the Meta Conversion API!

This update allows you to send high-quality conversion events directly from your server to Meta (Facebook), improving attribution accuracy and ad performance—especially in the age of increasing tracking restrictions and iOS privacy changes.

Why This Matters

Traditional browser-based tracking (like the Facebook Pixel) is no longer enough. Browser events can be blocked, delayed, or distorted by ad blockers and privacy settings. With Meta’s Conversion API (CAPI), you can now bypass these limitations by sending conversion data server-side—making it more reliable and more complete.

If you’d like to dig deeper into how iOS updates disrupted Facebook ads tracking—and how Digtective stepped in to help—check out our previous post:

How iOS 14.5 Broke Facebook Ads (and How We Fixed It)

By combining browser-based tracking and server-to-server event transmission, our new CAPI integration helps you:

• Recover lost conversions due to browser tracking issues

• Improve signal quality for Meta’s ad algorithms

• Optimize campaign performance with more accurate data

• Reduce CPA by giving Meta better data to work with

Who Is It For?

This feature is ideal for ecommerce sites using WooCommerce, Shopify, or custom solutions—especially if you’re already using Digtective for tracking and attribution. Now, with just a few extra steps, you can enable CAPI without complex coding or relying on bulky plugins that slow down your load times.

How to Set It Up

We’ve made it simple. Just follow our step-by-step guide:

How to Add Meta Conversion API to Digger

All you’ll need is your Meta Pixel ID and an access token from Meta Events Manager. Once configured, Digtective will send key events like purchases, leads, or other conversions directly to Meta—server-side—while still retaining browser-side tracking for completeness.

Start Getting Better Results Today

Adding Meta’s Conversion API is one of the best ways to increase ROAS and stay competitive in today’s privacy-first ad landscape. And now, it’s easier than ever—thanks to Digtective.

Have questions or want help setting it up? Contact us, and we’ll walk you through every step.

Book a 15-minute Demo & Free Audit

See exactly where your tracking gaps are—and how to fix them.

How iOS 14.5 Broke Facebook Ads and How We Fixed It

Posted on by Yann A. Skaalen

What Did iOS 14.5 Change – and Why Does It Matter for Marketers?

 

With the release of iOS 14.5, Apple introduced App Tracking Transparency (ATT) – a major privacy update that forced all iOS apps to ask for user permission before tracking behaviour across apps and websites, making iOS 14.5 Facebook tracking nearly impossible. When given a choice, most users choose to decline being tracked, which results in:

 

 

• Blocked access to the Identifier for Advertisers (IDFA)
• Breakage of traditional attribution methods for platforms like Facebook Ads
• Harder optimization of ad campaigns based on real results
 

Thus, marketers lose visibility into conversions, especially on iPhones, creating a loss of valuable data. This loss of data can be equivalent to as much as around 40% of the conversions, and one’s advertising is only as good as the data it relies upon. It is therefore crucial to regain this lost data in order to accurately optimize one’s advertisement and ad spend to increase conversions and growth.

 

How iOS 14.5 Impacts Facebook Ads Attribution

 

Facebook (now Meta) relied heavily on IDFA to attribute app installs, purchases, and other conversions. With ATT in place, this becomes almost impossible on iOS devices as most users choose to opt out. As a consequence of this:

 
• Conversions from iOS users go untracked or misattributed
• Attribution windows shrink (e.g. from 28-day to 7-day click)
• Reporting is delayed, aggregated, and often inaccurate
• Retargeting audiences shrink, impacting performance
 

Furthermore, a common misconception is that the Facebook pixel will remedy this loss of data and become a good solution for “iOS 14.5 Facebook tracking”, which is not the case. The Facebook pixel struggles to:

 
• Track users accurately on Safari and iOS
• Pass first-party cookies consistently
• Attribute events to the correct campaigns
 

Thus, your return on ad spend (ROAS) may appear lower than it actually is – leading to inaccurate bad optimization as it is done on inaccurate data.

 

Digger: A Modern Attribution Tool for a Post – iOS 14.5+ World

 

At Digtective, we built the conversion tracking tool called Digger to solve the exact attribution problems caused by new privacy regulations and solutions such as iOS 14.5+, Safari restrictions and GDPR.

 
 

How Digger Works:

 

✅ Server-Side Tracking which is GDPR Compliant

 

Instead of relying on browser-based pixels, Digger sends conversion data directly from your server to ad platforms like Meta. This bypasses client-side blocks and ensures conversions are captured. Digger is also cookieless and GDPR compliant, removing the stress of heavy fines and social scrutiny.

 

✅ First-Party Attribution

 

Digger uses other privacy-compliant identifiers to match conversions – even when IDFA or cookies aren’t available.

 

✅ Real iOS Visibility

 

You’ll finally know what’s working on iOS again. Digger shows which campaigns drive real purchases – including those invisible to pixel tracking.

 

✅ Easy Meta Ads Integration

 

Digger integrates natively with the Meta Conversions API, so you can restore tracking accuracy without developer headaches.

 

With the use of Digger, marketers can finally regain the ability to accurately track conversions and optimize their ad spend. Identify the ads that are profitable and the ones that aren’t. Cut the unprofitable ads and reallocate the ad spend to the ads that do work to increase your growth and scale faster. Your ads are only as good as the data that they are based upon!

 

Who Needs Digger?

 

Digger is a tracking tool suitable for all marketers eager to scale and increase their growth. In terms of iOS, If you’re doing any of the following, you’ll benefit from Digger’s iOS tracking solution:

 
• Running Facebook or Instagram Ads to drive sales
• Managing a WooCommerce or Shopify store
• Losing conversion visibility from iOS or Safari users
• Using tools like PixelYourSite, but still seeing gaps
 

To conclude – This is How to Fix Your iOS Tracking and Get Attribution Back

 

Here’s what you should do today:

  1. Stop relying only on browser-based pixels
  2. Implement server-side tracking with Digger
  3. Verify your events in Meta Events Manager
  4. Monitor iOS conversions and ROAS again with confidence
 

Apple’s privacy updates have changed digital marketing forever, and they’re here to stay! However, this doesn’t mean that you have to fly blind! With Digger, you can reclaim visibility into your ad performance, optimize your ad spend and scale with confidence, all while simultaneously staying cookieless and GDPR compliant.

Book a 15-minute Demo & Free Audit

See exactly where your tracking gaps are—and how to fix them.

 

Only 6.34% of ads generate profit

Posted on by Yann A. Skaalen

Most of your ads are not profitable.

Over the last few years, Digtective has tracked over a million conversions using our server-side, cookieless tool. Our clients range across several industries but concentrate on financial services and real estate. To celebrate hitting the magic million number, we’ve deep-dived into the data to see what we – and therefore you – can learn from it.
Most of our clients operate businesses with longer and more complex sales cycles than your typical online store, such as loan intermediation, real estate agencies, or consultancy businesses. This means that tracking conversion is more complicated than just seeing who clicked on an advert. After the customer has submitted an application form for a loan, for example, the application has to be forwarded to the appropriate bank, the bank has to consider the application, and only if the loan is approved and the customer accepts the terms, does the intermediary get paid. While this can be a matter of minutes, it can also be a matter of months. Digtective’s tracking of these offline conversions is essential to direct your advertising spend to the right ads.

Most of your conversions don’t make you any money.

 

You already know that no one clicks on most of your ads – click-through rates are usually low for most channels. Once they’ve clicked on your ad and come to your goal page, though, how many actually turn into revenue? Our numbers indicate that this varies between and within customer segments, but the average is 6.4%. The range is from 2,7% to 11,3%.

*  Note that some clients have proprietary channels ranking in the top 10, which are therefore hidden in the table.

The segments with the highest ratio of conversion to income are those where the end customer’s sense of urgency is highest: one client is a chain of dentists, others are banks and loan brokers specializing in refinancing distressed borrowers. Searching for a dentist or an expensive last-resort-mortgage is clearly not something people do casually … the loan brokers with low conversion rates are those who are active in crowded markets such as credit cards and consumer loans. The variation within each category is also interesting, implying that the quality of your adverts, the target market you are addressing, or other factors are impacting it.

Another interesting finding is that, for most of our clients, the best source of leads is in fact direct. Table 2 (above) shows, for a selection of clients (all from the financial services sector), which lead sources have the highest net income per conversion (i.e. income from the transaction minus the cost of the advert or lead). No average has been calculated (since the clients all have different numbers of total lead sources) direct is clearly the top source. Table 3 shows this quite clearly when looking at the aggregate numbers across the whole sample of clients. This is true even for those whose brand names are not well known in their market, indicating that doing a good job on SEO is a very worthwhile effort.

 

From our perspective it is also interesting to see how much the ROI on advertising spend differs between clients. As for most SaaS companies, we know that there is great variability in how active our clients are in using our software. Unlike most SaaS companies, we can compare the frequency of logging in with the effectiveness of our product! Of the four clients whose data we have used for the two above tables, two are active users of the service, checking their ads daily and cutting those which are not profitable. The other two have been more passive, allowing us to track their conversions without actively going in to focus their spending on effective ads. This is clearly visible in what return they are getting on their advertising spend:

The numbers you see in your analytics aren’t the full picture

The growth of ad-blockers and “do not track” means that Google Ads is missing more and more of your traffic and conversions. In addition, the use of cookies is becoming more and more difficult. Because our tool counts form submissions server-side, we can track those customers whose browsers do not allow cookies (while still being GDPR and privacy-compliant by avoiding the association of the conversion to any personal data about the customer). Over time, we have seen a significant gap between form submissions as counted by Google Ads, versus the full picture which our tool gives:

This indicates that Google Ads misses a huge number of conversions. This is of course an issue for those wanting accurate data to guide their advertising, but is an even bigger problem for those trying to create machine learning algorithms to automate this process.

What’s even worse is that many clients set up their Google Ads to track many different actions as a conversion – which is fine if you want to measure the performance of your webpages, but not if you’re looking to maximise your revenue. Defining “Youtube channel subscription” as a conversion will help you grow your YouTube channel, but will give you a very noisy dataset. As Cassie Kozyrkov says, the essence of ML and AI is “Optimize [this goal] on [this dataset]” – if your dataset is missing 30% of the full picture, or if the goal is unclear, you’re likely to end up with a bad algorithm. This has been adjusted for in the above table for Client C, which has a very broad definition of conversions in their Google set-up.

 

How we are developing our tool in response

The core of Digtective’s offering has been the Digger tool to track ad spend and profitability, reducing cost per lead and allowing you to focus your spending on the ads which perform best. However, as the death of the cookie and the growth of no-track has progressed, we have seen that we can provide an important service also to clients who just want to have accurate data in their analytics solution. We have therefore developed a service which feeds our conversion tracking back into Google Ads, allowing you to see the full quality of Digtective data in the interface you are already using. This also allows better training of any algorithms you may have for optimizing your ad spending.

To enable the widest possible adoption of this, we provided this in a “Digger Lite” subscription, where a monthly fee of EUR 50, rather than the full Digger subscription fee from EUR 1000. We are confident that seeing the true numbers will also increase interest in the full service, allowing more customers to reduce their marketing spend.

Big thanks to Jakob Bronebakk, CFA for his analysis. Jakob is an independent strategy consultant with a focus on using technology and data science to improve financial services.

Jakob was a cofounder of MyBank ASA, and served as its CFO and then CEO. He has held CFO positions in other financial services companies, prior to which he worked as a derivatives specialist at investment banks in London. His preferred habitat is steep, mountainous terrain, but can also be found in front of large spreadsheets or building machine learning models. 

Learn more and reach out to Jakob on LinkedIn.

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Turn data into growth. Connect marketing and sales effortlessly and unlock insights that drive ROI.

What are you waiting for?
Track with precision, convert with confidence, and make every ad dollar count.

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Guide on how to reduce cost per lead

Posted on by Yann A. Skaalen

Digtective's guide on how to reduce your cost per lead

So far, Digtective has tracked over seven hundred and twenty thousand leads! Therefore, we thought that it would be a good idea to share some of the many lessons that we have learned. This is our ultimate guide on how to reduce your cost per lead (CPL), or rather, cost per sale. It is time for you to stop wasting your money now!

Case Study

First, we would like to tell you about one of our clients, the loan broker Zen Finans. They used the “Digtective” method for April 2021 to April 2022 with extraordinary results. Here are some of the figures:

  • Increased the number of leads by 84%
  • Reduced price per lead by 86%
  • Reduced cost per paid-out loan by 86%

This could be you!

Here you can read the case study:
How Zen Finans Reduced Cost per Lead by 86% with Digtective
Let’s take a look at how you can achieve results just like these.

Insert the missing piece

Stop looking at cost per conversion, this is not the right metric!

Start looking at cost per sale by attributing this to the exact source, i.e, the ad or link that referred to the lead. Cost per click and click-through rate are both nice figures, but we are looking for high-quality leads! It is only then that you will accomplish extraordinary results!

Dedicate time to Analyzing your data

You need to spend time on your analytics tools. Most of you spend almost no time analyzing your data. You look at an ad campaign to see how much you spend and what you earn and then determine if the campaign is profitable.

However, what you should be doing is granulating the data down to each individual ad to determine whether the individual ad and its message are making money.

A Google Ads account contains anything from a couple of ads to several thousand. Is it enough to look at your Google Ads and say that it works based on how many leads you generate from them?

Most of our customers cut around 50% of their ads when they look at individual ads instead of looking at Google as one single source. They achieve the best results when they reallocate the ad spend to profitable ads, increasing the number of quality leads and, at the same time, reducing their CPL.

Next, start analyzing the ads that are working; can you find some text or message that works better than others? If that is the case, can you use it in other ads so that they also become profitable? Google is a fantastic source to gain insight into which messages your customers react to with the intent to buy.

Keep track of the ads that are losing money

Do you want to see data on the ads that are losing money? Well, then you have to connect your ads with your revenue metrics.

You probably have an analytics tool today (Google Analytics), but these tools are however rarely connected with your income metrics if you have what is called an offline conversion.

Maybe someone in the IT department can help you tie the data together? Just be careful so you don’t upload any personal data to Google or Facebook in the process. If you were to be so unlucky, you would be in breach of GDPR. Here is a link to Facebook around GDPR for you as an advertiser: Facebook on GDPR

In short, you are responsible for how you handle GDPR!

Offline conversion

An offline conversion is a delayed conversion for a product or service. A typical example is a form submission that has to be handled manually by a salesperson, account manager or similar.

Here is an example of a typical flow:

One of the biggest challenges with offline conversions can be that your systems are not connected to each other, which results in you not being able to compare actual revenue data with relevant marketing costs.

A submitted form most likely collects an offline conversion to your CRM system with manual handling. The sales process can be very long, meaning a sale can be registered several months later. This means that it can take everything from hours to months before any revenue is earned.

The problem for many companies is that in the long and manual sales process, the origin of the lead (the specific ad from which it originated) gets lost. This is very valuable data for you as a marketer to determine which specific ads and messages are most profitable. This is where Digtective comes in, connecting your leads to your sales so that you don’t lose this valuable data! Don’t stop at leads, track your cost per sale!

Track everything

Don’t just track paid advertising. Your SEO is also really important to track since you spend either a lot of money or time on it. Here is a report from one of our customers showing Google organic search with income:

Digtective also tracks the referrer from all your traffic so you can see all your income earned from free links!

The right way to track is to track everything!

This means that you should track all your digital marketing, all links and all organic posts on social media.

Want to take your tracking even further?

Get in touch!

Getting Started is Easy

Turn data into growth. Connect marketing and sales effortlessly and unlock insights that drive ROI.

What are you waiting for?
Track with precision, convert with confidence, and make every ad dollar count.

Book a Free Demo

Cookieless future

Posted on by Yann A. Skaalen

Cookieless Future

Third-party cookies are “unnecessary” for the user experience. However, on the other hand, they have been necessary for advertisers to be able to measure the effect of online advertising and optimize advertising costs. The more advertisers are able to optimize, the lower the price of products and services. Targeted advertising works the best!

This raises two questions; 1) how to balance between privacy and effective advertising and 2) are there alternatives to third-party cookies that respect users’ implicit or explicit desire for privacy? The first question has already been answered by GDPR and ePrivacy. There is no balancing act, only “privacy first”. The answer to the second question is yes. We have managed it, and certainly many others.

Tracking sounds a little bit scary. Almost a bit like “stalking”. And in many ways, this is how tracking has worked until relatively recently. Dozens of third-party cookies that lasted forever have meant that both authorities and users have taken action in the name of privacy. “Privacy” has become an everyday expression. Authorities have given us, among other things, cookie consent, while users have used browsers that block third-party cookies. Last up was Apple, which through its OS updates helps users block “unnecessary” third-party cookies. Google has promised to phase out third-party cookies, but they seem to be somewhat delayed compared to their original schedule.

IF YOU HAVE CONSENT THEN IT IS LEGAL. HOWEVER, MOST PEOPLE DO NOT HAVE LEGAL CONSENT.

We see an industry that is slowly waking up to a new reality. Data that could previously be used to optimize advertising is disappearing. Not “slowly but surely” either, it is disappearing fast. It is understandable that you want to keep what you still have, and we actually have sympathy for adaptation through complicated cookie consent forms and lobbying. Other adaptations such as “fingerprinting” and “pixels” are worse cases that we fortunately see little of.

At the same time, one can be a little upset that the industry is not able to put this past them and move on. It is time to take for granted that users want privacy and adapt accordingly. How long should a car manufacturer optimize fossil engines before investing 100% in electricity?

For us, it has always been about a “privacy mindset”. The inspiration for Digger came at a web seminar in 2017, where a lawyer gave a talk on GDPR, privacy and cookies. We decided to create a tracking tool that does not use cookies and does not collect personal data. Believe it or not, it works like a dream. By the way, we would like to be able to call it “measurement” – it sounds nicer than “tracking” and agrees better with what we do.

Our tool is installed server-side and sets no cookies in order to deliver measurement of ad performance. We measure all data, and we give our customers a complete overview of the ads that work and those that do not. The latter is perhaps the most important. Installing a server-side is somewhat more complicated than continuing with cookie-based measurement, but what is really the alternative? Moreover, in a GDPR context, this exercise is perhaps the least laborious an organization must go through in order to become “compliant”.

It is difficult to predict, especially about the future. We still dare to make a prediction. It is not long before the “privacy mindset” becomes a “license to operate” in the same way as “sustainability”. We’re ready. Are you?

In our next reader post, we will write about the dangers of “posting” user data to Google Analytics in relation to GDPR. If no one comes to us in advance.

Getting Started is Easy

Turn data into growth. Connect marketing and sales effortlessly and unlock insights that drive ROI.

What are you waiting for?
Track with precision, convert with confidence, and make every ad dollar count.

Book a Free Demo

Offline conversion tracking for Google ads

Posted on by Yann A. Skaalen

What is an offline conversion?

An offline conversion is a transaction that does not happen instantly, some also call it a delayed transaction.

A couple of examples:

  • Applications – answer is given in a laters stage after det handler has approved or rejected the application.
  • Opticians – customer books at time for a sight test, some are no shows, others can keep their existing glasses, but a few actually need a new strength in their glasses.
  • Medical surgery – the application form is a booking to meet the nurse, after that a decision is made if surgery is needed or not

What all of the transactions above have incommon is that they all are posted mail or an API to a CRM or handling system the customer uses. For banks they are moved into their coresystem where tracking is almost impossible. Medical surgery have their own systems that are not online for the customers safety.

So what kind of figures do they track?

In most cases they are using Google analytics and look at the figures for form submissions.

Data quality

Then you have trouble with your statistics, they all show different numbers.

Google Ads have one number and Google Analytics has another then you check your CRM, a third set of numbers appear. Which numbers do you report to your leader?

Tracking systemNumber of conversions
Google Ads103,10
Google Analytics109
Digtective/CRM116

The end of third-party cookies

Now you have even more challenges, how do you get your conversions data?

Case for offline conversion tracking

This customer is a consumer finance broker, they receive an application from their form on their webpage and send it to 8 different banks through an API, this is where we can say they are creating an offline conversion.

Getting Started is Easy

Turn data into growth. Connect marketing and sales effortlessly and unlock insights that drive ROI.

What are you waiting for?
Track with precision, convert with confidence, and make every ad dollar count.

Book a Free Demo

Tracking marketing generated revenue… cookieless

Posted on by Yann A. Skaalen

Connecting revenue with advertising spend

The ability to see the revenue impact on our marketing activities and advertising spend, is necessary for any company, but it can be a challenge for those of us who have a “sales cycle” where the sales process happens offline between a prospect and our sales team. Why is connecting revenue with advertising spend important?

Not all leads end up as “sales” and not all leads are good leads.

We spend resources, time and money on lead generation, so knowing which part of the activities, campaigns, and ads, that delivers the growth in revenue and profit, is crucial, and will directly impact our profitable growth and speed of growth.

The conversion from lead to revenue will vary significantly from business to business, but let’s say it’s 10%. What if you knew which of the specific marketing activities that lead to your sales, and not just leads?

Knowing that would enable you to better answer the question of which part of your marketing budget actually contributes to growth, and it would help provide the path to scaling your business.

What our cookieless conversion tracking does for your revenue growth.

Digtective is cookieless which means that your tracking is no longer blocked by cookie consent banners, iOS 14.5 blocking cookies base tracking etc. It helps you associate a lead to any single advert or marketing activity.

The increasing measures for protecting data privacy, means that the current web analytics solutions are not able to provide us with data they are no longer receiving from the visitors device, as it’s blocked by iOS 14.5, cookie consent banners, privacy enhancing web browsers etc.

This means that the majority of our analytics data can not show us which ads deliver revenue and which are losing money … we have lost substantial control on our growth.

Track your revenue and profitability, not just leads

Tracking leads against your marketing activities and media spend is common, but if only e.g. 10% of leads generate a sale, it’s important to know which part is working.

Connecting your revenue data with your marketing data, via integration to your CRM system, helps you see, not just how many leads, but how much revenue your marketing activities and advertising generate.

This helps you to better control your marketing efficiency and deliver more revenue for your marketing budget.

Reduce your advertising cost and increase your revenue growth

Knowing which part of your marketing activities that deliver revenue and which does not, is a major step forward compared to measuring only against leads and it helps you

  • Reduce the wasted advertising cost of what doesn’t work
  • Reallocate the wasted advertising cost to those activities that deliver revenue
  • Save double digits in advertising spend, and increase your revenue growth.
See which ads drive your revenue and which lose money

Getting a comprehensive performance overview of your marketing efficiency is easy when you have connected your revenue with your advertising

digtective-server-side-tracking-dashboard
See which ads lose money

With cookieless conversion tracking that tracks both your leads and revenue you will be able to see which ads contribute to the growth of your business, and get a view of where to focus your marketing efforts most effectively.

Move your wasted ad spend to profitable ads

Knowing which of your marketing costs and resources, that doesn’t deliver leads or revenue, you can confidently reallocate to the activities that generate growth.

All your digital marketing data in one place for easy reporting

With all your digital marketing data in one place it is easy to set up your automated reporting in Excel, Google Data Studio, or import it to your reporting visualization tool, and once place to pull data to your ad hoc reporting. No more manual data collection and “glueing” together data from different sources.

Get in touch

Whether you are a SaaS or Financial loan broker / lender, wanting to implement reliable cookieless conversion tracking, to gain critical insight to your path for profitable growth, we would be happy to help you out.

To get more details about our cookieless conversion tracking, visit our Cookieless conversion tracking for SaaS, Lenders & Loan Brokers, or get in touch here.

 

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How IOS 15 affects email marketing

Posted on by Yann A. Skaalen

How iOS 15 “hide my email” affect email marketing

iOS 15 was released on September 20th and here is a brief overview of how it affects our email marketing for B2B and B2C alike.

The email privacy measures described only relate to Apple’s “Mail” app, and do not relate to other iOS mail apps.

There are two reasons why iOS 15 will affect our email marketing

1 – Both private and business emails can be set up in iOS “Mail” app.

I myself have my business emails set up in my iPhone “Mail” app, and most people have, unless they use a separate APP for business emails.

2 – Visitors use private and public email addresses interchangeably

Visitors use private and public email addresses interchangeably when downloading or accessing content online, including guides, eBooks, and templates. As the users know they will receive a string of follow up emails, they often shy away from using their business email when they are not sure of the relevance for their job and business.

Features that affect email marketing:

It stops “senders” from using pixels in emails

Pixels can be used to track “open rates”, “time” email was opened, “location”.

By preventing pixels in marketing, and any other email, to iOS “Mail” users, it impacts the metrics that a lot of email marketers have been using for ages.

  • Email open rate
  • Date and time
  • Location
  • Disposable email addresses
Email open rate

This is a metric often used to gauge open rates and whether the email “subject” is attractive enough to open the email.

Date & Time

Time and date of email opens is used in all email marketing reporting

Location

For email marketers that only collect name and email addresses on sign up or other opt-ins, IP addresses can be used to gauge what country, region or city a user lives in for various purposes such as best time to send emails for optimizing open rates.

In many cases this is less relevant for B2B as the country is often collected in forms at opt-in, as B2B often prefers a bit of “friction” to avoid too many irrelevant leads.

Disposable Email Addresses

iOS 15 users can now create random email addresses to hide their “real” email address.

These email addresses can be deleted and a new created, so the user is more in control of who can contact them. So if you used an email to opt-in for several newsletters and you now see a flooding inbox, it’s fantastic to be able to delete the email and solve the flooding inbox in one go. Unfortunately, you may not receive the €100.000 lottery winner email notification, the irresistible offer for the software you have been eyeballing over the last month, and now you will never know.

What it means for our email marketing is that we risk losing email connection with current leads or email subscribers, and instead receive a “hard bounce”.

Safari browser privacy protection is getting stronger

Apple’s browser Safari, will prevent any third party from accessing the users IP address.

Intelligent Tracking Prevention used by Safari will now be hiding the users IP address, which means that IP addresses can not be used as a unique identifier for tracking and identifying “returning visitors” to our website.

Considerations for email marketing

For now “only” 30-35% of the email provider market share, so emails via Gmail, Hotmail, Outlook, etc. will remain the same.

So until Google and Microsoft may implement data privacy measures in their email clients, then we still have 65-70% of users where our ability for email tracking is unchanged. Assume that users of Apple “Mail” client is reacting to email subjects and email content like others, when you optimize.

Email reporting will be inaccurate

Monitor changes in Open Rates

Going forward, email pixels for “30-35%” of your emails will be removed. Open rates for that share of emails will be inflated, and pollute your analytics data, for reporting purposes.

For optimization purposes, use data for all “devices” except iOS 15.

Click-through rates

We don’t know exactly what will happen with click-through rates and it depends on the tracking.

Pixels will be removed, so this may mean tracking click-through for a given email may disappear, unless UTM parameters are used in email links.

UTM tracking, which is not a pixel, nor a third-party cookie, but a URL parameter, will still work, but this “meta data”, and can not be attributed to a unique user.

So keep using UTM parameters in your email marketing, preferably a different parameter for each link in the email, in order to attribute conversions and sales to emails. Hubspot and marketing automation systems at large, is now considering the impact and changes that need to happen for their platform, to provide a meaningful solution to the current tracking metrics for marketing emails. Learn more on Hubspot.

Other cool iOS 15 features, not marketing relevant
  • Android and Windows PC users can now join Apple Facetime calls, which before was only working between Apple devices.
  • See connected Apple devices on “Find My” even if the device is not connected to wifi, or shut off (using another nearby Apple device connection).
  • Siri speech recognition requests, related to “set alarm”, “open app”, “music requests” etc. will be processed on our iOS device, and not require an internet connection … and not be transmitted over the internet to “big brother” 🙂

Getting Started is Easy

Turn data into growth. Connect marketing and sales effortlessly and unlock insights that drive ROI.

What are you waiting for?
Track with precision, convert with confidence, and make every ad dollar count.

Book a Free Demo

How IOS 14.5 ATT impacts Facebook Ads & attribution

Posted on by Yann A. Skaalen

Apple Release Of iOS 14.5 with App Tracking Transparency (ATT)

On Monday april 26th., 2021 Apple released an update to their operating system for mobile devices called iOS 14.5. It’s the first iOS version that will enforce Apple’s App Tracking Transparency (ATT) policies, which will do two major things:

  • Help Apple users be more in control of when and with whom they share their browsing data with
  • Significantly impact how marketers measure mobile ad performance moving forward.

Apple’s mail will block invisible email trackers

Apple Putting a Stop to Email Tracking Pixels With Mail Privacy Protection in iOS 15 and macOS Monterey.

When enabled, Mail Privacy Protection hides your IP address and loads all remote content privately in the background, routing it through multiple proxy services and randomly assigning an IP address.

…and Google May Follow in Apple’s Footsteps

A Google spokesperson confirmed that Google is indeed considering similar features for blocking IP addresses.

Getting Started is Easy

Turn data into growth. Connect marketing and sales effortlessly and unlock insights that drive ROI.

What are you waiting for?
Track with precision, convert with confidence, and make every ad dollar count.

Book a Free Demo
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