Did you know Apple introduced a new mechanism in Safari last year for advertisers to measure the effectiveness of their ads? If you hadn’t read our previous articles on the subject, you know it now. With Private Click Measurement (PCM), Apple intends to offer a new method of advertising measurement that respects privacy and works without third-party cookies, those small files that are doomed to disappear.
John Wilander, a security and privacy manager for WebKit, Safari’s engine, announced changes to PCM on iOS/iPadOS 15.4 and macOS Monterey 12.3. The system now includes a mechanism to prevent fraudulent clicks, the problem being for advertisers to be charged for clicks that are not “real” clicks.
With this update, PCM also includes a replacement solution for web beacons (pixels that just serve to link two sites), meaning there’s no need to call any third parties . Finally, PCM now manages the measurement of ads that are in cross-site iframes (the content of a site inserted on another site, to simplify).
These developments are important, because Apple is not the only one to offer a new advertising measurement system that is free of cookies. The Apple is engaged in a competition against Google on one side and the Mozilla-Meta duo on the other who also hope to impose their own cookieless advertising system as a new standard.
