What Apple changed
Three separate changes affect iOS tracking on Shopify. They're often mixed up, so it helps to keep them apart:
- App Tracking Transparency (iOS 14.5): apps like Facebook and Instagram must ask before tracking people across other companies' apps and websites. Many people say no. That limits what Meta can see on its side, inside its apps.
- Intelligent Tracking Prevention in Safari: cookies set by scripts on your site live much shorter than they used to, so a visitor who comes back after some days can look like a new visitor to a browser pixel.
- Link Tracking Protection (iOS 17 and later): in some situations, such as Private Browsing and links opened from Mail and Messages, Safari removes known click ids like fbclid and gclid from links.
What it means for your Shopify reports
On a typical Shopify store selling through Instagram and TikTok, a large share of buyers are on iPhones. When their purchase events are lost or can't be matched, Ads Manager under-reports, the algorithm learns from fewer buyers, and retargeting audiences get smaller.
You'll often see it as a growing gap between Shopify's orders and what Meta or TikTok report, worst on campaigns where people take a few days to decide.
It hits retargeting too. Visitors who browsed on Safari a week ago may no longer be recognised by a browser pixel when they return, so they drop out of your audiences, and ads meant to bring them back reach fewer of the right people.
What server-side tracking fixes
A good part of the iOS gap is technical, not a privacy choice: Safari dropping a cookie after a few days, an in-app browser session ending, a buyer closing the tab after Apple Pay. Server-side tracking recovers those.
Settl saves the ad click on your own store the moment the visitor lands and keeps it for 90 days, on our side rather than in a short-lived browser cookie. When the buyer pays, even days later, Shopify tells Settl, and the purchase goes to Meta, TikTok, Google (GA4 and Google Ads), Snapchat, Pinterest, X, Microsoft Ads and Reddit from our server with the saved click and hashed email and phone. Returning buyers are recognised even on a new device.
What no tool can fix
If a buyer told Instagram not to track them, Meta respects that on its side, and so should you. If Safari stripped the click id before the visitor reached your store, there's no click to save; hashed email and phone can still help the platform recognise the buyer, but not always.
Be wary of any tool that promises to undo iOS privacy settings. The honest goal is to get every paid order to the platforms with the data the buyer allowed, so nothing is lost for technical reasons.
Practical steps for iPhone-heavy stores
A few habits help, whatever tool you use:
- Send purchases server-side for every ad platform you use, not just Meta.
- Make sure email is collected at checkout so hashed matching has something to work with.
- Judge ads on a longer window and on blended results, not on one day of Ads Manager numbers.
- Compare spend and real sales per ad, for example in Settl's dashboard, before switching an ad off.
Reading your ads with incomplete data
Even with good tracking, some iPhone sales will stay unattributed. That's the new normal, and it's workable. Look at your total sales against your total ad spend over a week or a month, next to what each platform reports. If total sales rise when you raise spend on a campaign, it's working, even if the platform credits it with fewer purchases than you'd expect.
Per ad, the most useful view combines the spend from your ad accounts with the paid orders your store actually received and the click each buyer came in with. That's what Settl's dashboard shows. It won't see buyers who arrived without a click, but it isn't limited by what the platform managed to match, and it gives you a second opinion before you cut an ad that iOS made look weak.