Apple Changing How AdWords Does Conversion Tracking

Updated March 4, 2025

This month Apple are going to be making some changes in an attempt to protect users of their Safari browser. In September they’re going to launch a new feature called Intelligent Tracking Prevention. Because of these changes to online event tracking Google have decided to change the way their AdWords conversion tracking works, to ensure that users don’t miss any conversions from Apple users.

Winning Trust Back

Apple feel that user trust in the internet has broken down and that a good way to help rebuild this trust is by making it more difficult for unscrupulous companies to monitor and track users online presence. While this is great news for users that want more online privacy it does pose some threats to advertisers who are used to having detailed knowledge of where their customers are coming from.

Fixing Conversion Tracking

With these changes in mind, Google want to maintain AdWords functionality as well as possible. Conversion tracking is vital to doing good online marketing, so bringing AdWords in line with Apple’s new recommendations for attribution is an urgent task.

So, what is Google going to do to minimize the disruption from these changes?

1. If you have auto-tagging set up and a Google Analytics tag on your website, Google will create a new Analytics cookie on that domain, which will keep information about the ad click that brought a user to your website. If you have linked both your AdWords and Google Analytics accounts, the AdWords conversion tracking tag will be able to read the click information from your Analytics account.
2. AdWords will continue to monitor users logged into, or using Google services, as before. So what data they can mine from their own services will still help to create a picture of what a user is doing, even if they cannot be tracked as easily through their browser.
3. For the users that Google cannot track using Safari they will attempt to use statistical modelling to estimate conversion rates, and then add those to your reporting.

Do You Need to Change Your Conversion Tracking?

There isn’t anything that you as an AdWords user needs to do, apart from being aware of these changes and checking your conversion statistics closely for the next couple of months. If you notice a drop off in your statistics, make sure you check your statistics from before the change, to see if there was a corresponding amount of Safari users in August and July.