It looks like Apple and maybe Samsung have shut down the provision of information from their customers' mobile devices from my hometown for location of their phones to advertisers.
I can no longer see users from Perth in my Google location stats on my website. They are all coming through as Canberra or Melbourne.
What that means is people can no longer use Facebook ads to target you based on location.
I will monitor my Google stats for my website, but what this may achieve for iPhone users is when you visit Facebook and Google Ad environments, the ads won't target you based on your:
- Location
- Apple account information (M/F etc).
Google still shares certain aspects of your details based on your device info plus Google login such as:
- Sex
- Age Bracket
- Device Brand and Model
- Internet Provider
- Country
- City of Residence
- Time spent on a website page
- Purchasing behaviour
- Returning visitor to a website
- Bounce rate on a landing page
- Etc etc etc.
The list is not small.
So the change concerns your exact location and phone use behaviour live and negates Facebook more than any other platform.
It's a good move.
To see if this is having any effect live on your phone or PC/MAC, try this. I have written a script in Google Tag Manager on this link on my home page:
https://vintageelectric.com.au/In the first paragraph, it says:
"If you are looking to collect or invest in vintage guitars, we offer Australia’s finest collectible instruments. Our company ships vintage guitars, basses and amps to customers in <CITY>, <STATE> and globally."The CITY and STATE tags are extracted from a reverse lookup of your IP Address before the HTML is rendered on the page.
Does the City and State in that last sentence match your real City and State?
Mine does not, and Google matches this exact error live in the backed Google Analytics.
So both my reverse lookup script and the Google Stats have been altered somewhere beforehand. That is, the mobile phone company or network provider.
