Safari and iOS have spent years tightening what advertisers can track. For a local service business — where a large share of visitors arrive on a phone — that quietly removed a big part of the attribution picture.
Safari limits how long script-set cookies survive — in many cases to 24 hours or 7 days. A visitor who clicks an ad on Tuesday and calls on Friday looks like a brand-new stranger by the time they convert.
Since iOS 14.5, apps must ask permission before tracking users across other companies' apps and sites. A large share of people decline, so the platform never observes those conversions and estimates them instead.
The whole industry has moved against cross-site cookies. Anything that depends on a cookie set by a domain other than yours is on a shrinking foundation regardless of browser.
If someone buys a $30 item on their phone within ten minutes, a 24-hour cookie is plenty. Local service businesses are the opposite: somebody sees an ad, thinks about it, mentions it to their spouse, gets two other quotes, and calls a week later.
That delay is where the attribution disappears. The click was real and the job was real, but the connection between them expired in between — so the campaign that produced a $12,000 job shows nothing, and the campaign that produced a same-day tyre-kicker looks like your best performer. Budget then moves toward the wrong one.
The bias is not random. Restrictive tracking does not lose a random sample of conversions — it disproportionately loses the slow, considered, high-value ones. The data that survives makes cheap fast leads look better than they are.
The restrictions above target third-party tracking — a domain other than the one the visitor is actually on. Tracking served from your own domain is treated as first-party, because it belongs to the site the visitor chose to visit.
AuriaTrack runs on a subdomain of your site rather than ours, and the visitor identifier is set server-side rather than by JavaScript. Both details matter: the first makes it first-party, the second puts it outside the script-set cookie limits that shorten lifetimes to a day.
The practical result is that a visitor who clicks on Tuesday and calls the following week is still recognisably the same person, and the job they book is credited to the campaign that earned it.
The tracking endpoint runs as a subdomain of your website, so browsers treat it as first-party.
The visitor cookie is issued by the server, which is not subject to the script-set cookie lifetime caps.
Attribution persists across the days or weeks a considered purchase actually takes.
Calls are tied to the same visitor record, so the channel most local businesses rely on is not a blind spot.
Book a demo and we'll look at how much of your traffic is on Safari and iOS, and what that is costing you in lost attribution.