Paid attribution after iOS: a survival guide
Server-side tracking, conversion APIs, and the new rules of measuring paid media without losing your mind.
The old attribution model is dead. Browser-side pixels lost 30–60% of conversion signal on iOS. Cookies are being deprecated. Marketers pretending otherwise are flying blind.
Server-side tracking is the new floor, not the ceiling. Google Tag Manager's server container, Meta's Conversion API, TikTok's Events API — these give you deterministic signal that survives iOS and Chrome's cookie phase-out.
The pattern:
1. Fire conversion events from your backend to each platform's API. 2. Send the same event_id to GA4 via server GTM and to ad platforms. 3. Deduplicate in-platform using event_id. 4. Send hashed PII (email, phone) for advanced matching.
This gives you 95%+ signal recovery. Most teams stop there. The teams that win go further: they build a single source of truth for revenue (a warehouse or even a SQLite table) and reconcile every platform's numbers against it weekly.
The platforms lie. Their numbers are always 5–20% optimistic. The warehouse is the only place you see reality.
Attribution is the moat. Most agencies can't build it. Most in-house teams don't have time. The few teams who can are the ones whose dashboards execs actually open.
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