Apple Mail Privacy Protection

Subscribers who have the option checked to ‘Protect Mail activity’ on their Apple device, may see their Liveclicker campaigns impacted in the following 3 ways:

Apple will load all remote content in the background, causing open rates to inflate.

Apple will mask the subscriber's IP address so location-tracking will be less reliable.

Apple will strip the user agent, which is used to detect device information.

Apple will load all remote content in the background

Opens are tracked by embedding a one-pixel invisible image into the email message. When your recipient views the email and the image loads, that counts as an open. Since 2013 when Gmail announced on their official blog that all images will be displayed in messages automatically, email open rates began to inflate. However, unlike Gmail, in order to prevent senders from knowing when a subscriber has opened an email, Apple has started downloading remote content in the background by default, this is known as prefetching images.

Prefetching

Apple only prefetches images when a device is both connected to WiFi and on charge. As you might imagine, downloading images on the customer’s behalf consumes data and battery power and therefore would lead to a poor customer experience if the device wasn’t connected to WiFi and power.

How does this impact open rates?

Images that are prefetched, will cause open rates to inflate. Opens are useful for knowing whether a subscriber is active, however they are not the most reliable source for determining whether your email content is engaging or your campaign has been successful in achieving its objectives. Instead, marketers should switch their focus to measuring other more reliable metrics such as clickthrough rates, conversions, website traffic etc. Here are some other ways that Apple MPP may impact your Liveclicker account:

Workaround options

Email marketers should instead shift their A/B testing focus to clickthrough rates, and switch to measuring success based on engagement-level and revenue-generating metrics like average order value. If you want to collect order, revenue and conversion metrics, we recommend using our conversion tracking pixel or a third-party tool such as Google Analytics.

Concerns with caching images

When Apple prefetches images, images are requested in advance and stored on Apple's servers. A cached version of these images are served on each subsequent open. This would pose a problem if Liveclicker served images directly:

However, we use redirect URLs, which means that although some images may be requested in advance, the image gets requested again from our servers upon each subsequent open so you can be sure that your subscribers are still seeing the most up-to-date content:

Apple will mask the subscriber's IP address

Unlike Gmail and Yahoo!/AOL who report the opening location as California, Apple uses different proxy servers around the world e.g. London, New York, etc. so whilst we don't know the subscriber's precise location to serve them a local map or weather forecast, we can still determine their general location at the city-level to serve contextual content that relies on the opener's timezone such as countdown timers.

Zero and first-party data is available for all contextual elements (maps, forecasts, timers) and targeting rules that rely on geo-location (time, weather, location). The only impact is to our geographical reporting, which relies on IP addresses to determine the user’s location. This means that for the following metrics, which rely on IP address, the location will be reported as "Unknown":

• Country
• Region
• State
• City
• Zip code
• Mobile carrier

Apple will strip the user agent

A user agent string is a string of information that helps identify which device, browser etc. is being used. This string is used to determine what content to return, for example, targeting an image by language:

Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 14_8_1 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/605.1.15 (KHTML, like Gecko) Mobile/15E148
Accept-Language: en-us
Client-Ip: 98.51.224.134

As part of Apple's MPP update, we've found them to also be stripping the user agent, resulting in some device information getting obscured:

User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0
Client-Ip: 104.28.125.9

When a subscriber has Apple’s MPP selected on their device, this string would have the following adjustments:

Workaround options

For use cases that rely on device detection such as deep-links, we recommend using our separate content and click through targeting feature that overrides these limitations upon click. For language, we recommend using first party data such as preferred language.