For years, digital marketers relied on a simple equation: user visits website = cookie is dropped = user is added to remarketing audience. This was the foundation for personalized ads and a core part of the marketing playbook. But then came Safari and its radical privacy feature, Intelligent Tracking Prevention (ITP).

ITP is designed to protect user privacy by aggressively limiting cross-site tracking. The most significant way it does this is by capping the lifespan of first-party cookies that are set via JavaScript to a mere 7 days. Even if you set a cookie to last for two years, Safari's ITP will override that and delete it after one week of inactivity.

This has a devastating impact on your marketing efforts, particularly on your remarketing and lookalike audiences.

The Problem:

• Shrinking Audiences: A user who visits your site on Safari and doesn't return within a week is immediately removed from your remarketing pool. That's a huge portion of your potential audience, especially for businesses with longer sales cycles.
• Inaccurate Attribution: If a user clicks on an ad, leaves, and then converts more than 7 days later, your analytics and ad platforms will often fail to attribute the conversion to the original campaign. This skews your data and can lead you to misallocate your marketing budget.
• Wasted Ad Spend: You spend money to drive traffic to your site, only to lose the ability to remarket to a large segment of that traffic after just 7 days. This is like filling a bucket with a hole in the bottom.

So, how do you plug the hole and regain control of your data?

OATS: Reclaiming Your Data from Safari's ITP

The answer lies in server-side tracking. By shifting the cookie-setting process from the user's browser to your own server, you can bypass Safari's aggressive cookie caps.

OATS is a full-featured server-side tracking solution that's specifically engineered to overcome these challenges. Here’s how OATS restores your tracking capabilities and keeps your remarketing audiences healthy:

1. True First-Party Cookies

   Safari's ITP targets cookies set by JavaScript on the client side. The OATS solution, on the other hand, sets cookies directly from your server. Because these cookies are set from your domain and via the Set-Cookie HTTP header, Safari recognizes them as true first-party cookies, which are not subject to the 7-day expiration cap. This means your cookies can last for months or even years, ensuring you can remarket to users over a much longer period.

2. Persistent UTM and Click IDs

   As mentioned in our other articles, OATS has a proprietary script that stores crucial campaign parameters like gclid and fbclid in a persistent way. When a user returns to your site, even after 7 days, this information is retrieved and sent to your server. This ensures your ad platforms receive the necessary data for accurate conversion attribution, allowing you to correctly measure the performance of your campaigns and build more effective lookalike audiences.

3. Bot Detection for Cleaner Audiences

   Another issue with client-side tracking is that it's highly susceptible to bot traffic. You might be building remarketing audiences full of bots, which dilutes their effectiveness and wastes your ad spend. OATS’s built-in bot detection feature automatically filters out non-human traffic, so your marketing platforms receive only clean, high-quality data. This means your remarketing audiences are made up of real, potential customers.

By migrating to OATS, you're not just moving your tracking—you're future-proofing your entire marketing strategy. You're regaining control of your data, ensuring your remarketing audiences are persistent and accurate, and maximizing the return on your ad spend.