Many news organizations including BleepingComputer and Engadget and recently covered the latest release / update of the Firefox browser that allows users to remove certain URL tracking parameters from URLs by default. In our blog post I hope to provide more information about how this may impact your analytics and tracking efforts and what you can do about it.
If you are using URL parameters as part of your tracking deployment for Facebook, HubSpot, Marketo, Vero, Drip, or Olytics, this will have an impact on your visibility into campaign performance, as there will be some Firefox users who opt to strip the query parameters by default. However, this is likely to be a limited base of your users as outlined in more detail below.
To start, it’s important to put this into perspective. On one hand, this may not be that impactful as Firefox only has ~ 3.99% of worldwide browser market share and ~3.48% of US browser market share, and I would bet that only a small percentage of Firefox users will enable this enhanced tracking protection feature in Firefox. However, this is part of a broader and growing trend of increased privacy protection for users by browsers and is only likely to continue to become more and more pervasive. For example, the Safari browser has significant limitations on cookie storage with almost all 3rd party cookie access restricted and sets most 1st party cookies to expire in 7 days (as opposed to no forced expiration for 1st party cookies in Google Chrome.
So, ultimately, this change itself is not likely to be significantly impactful to your tracking efforts, but is part of a growing trend (increased privacy restrictions limiting tracking data) that is likely already impactful or will be at some point soon.
Long term, there are many different strategies that should be leveraged to set your organization up for success, but two that are important include:
If you are looking for help with improving your organizations tracking and analytics capabilities, please reach out to info@morevisibility.com.
