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PPC & Paid Media
PPC Attribution in the Post-iOS 17 World
iOS 17 broke half of your conversion tracking. Here's how the smartest PPC teams are recovering signal.
Felix Diaz 2026-05-03 10 min
What Broke
iOS 17's "Link Tracking Protection" strips URL parameters from links opened in Messages and Mail. Result: a chunk of paid traffic now shows up as "direct" or with broken UTMs.
The Recovery Stack
1. Server-Side Tracking. Stape, Customify, or self-hosted GTM.
2. First-Party Surveys . "How did you hear about us?" on post-purchase + post-form pages.
3. MMM Lite, even a simple weekly time-series regression beats nothing.
4. Triple Whale / Northbeam, purpose-built attribution for DTC.
The Honest Truth
Attribution will never be 100% again. The winning teams accept that and triangulate from multiple signals. The losers keep insisting on platform-reported ROAS and quietly bleed margin.
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