What You Need to Know About Apple’s iOS 14 Release (and how it may affect your business)
By Intrigue
With Apple’s latest updates to iOS 14, there are changes that will affect businesses currently advertising on Facebook. Although it is still early days, we at Intrigue feel it is important to inform our clients of the possible ramifications these changes may have on their advertising strategy.
What Is Changing?
Reduced Tracking Ability
Users now have the option to opt in or out of tracking from Facebook in the form of a pop up. This reduces advertisers’ ability to track pixel events from these users, which affects overall campaign performance and optimization. It also has an impact on audience targeting.
Ad Creation Limitations
Facebook pixels may only optimize for a maximum of 8 conversion events for each domain. Further, ad sets that were optimizing for a pixel conversion event that is no longer active will be paused.
Reporting Limitations
Businesses will be limited in their ability to measure the performance of some web conversion events.
What Impact Will These Changes Have?
We will likely have less data available from users on iOS 14 devices as some will opt out when they see a prompt. This affects our ability to track conversions/data/pixel events for these users and improve optimization through personalized advertising (remarketing) and reporting. It will also affect audience targeting, as the users who opt out will no longer be categorized into interest groups.
In addition, the lookback window for conversion reporting is being scaled back from 28 days to 7 days. This means there will be less visibility to see conversions that come from Facebook (ie. if someone clicks on a Facebook ad and then converts on the website 8 days later, this conversion will not be counted as it’s outside of the 7-day lookback window).
When Will These Changes Roll Out?
An exact date is not yet known as of January 12th, but we can expect these changes to come into effect at some point in early 2021.
What’s Next?
The industry is ever-evolving. Similar updates have happened before and are bound to continue to happen. As a marketing company for 15 years, Intrigue has adapted to many changes in the past, and our campaigns tend to come out stronger as we learn to tweak our approach. One potential benefit is that as some advertisers leave the platform as a result of these changes, the cost per impressions may consequently decrease.
As always, we will continue to keep our clients posted as more information becomes available.
Where Can I Find Additional Resources?
If you are interested in learning more, check out these helpful resources:
Facebook: Prepping Our Partners for iOS 14
Facebook: How Apple’s iOS 14 Release May Affect Your Ads
Facebook: Use Facebook Pixel to Reach Devices on iOS 14
Lead Guru – Ben Heath – What Will Happen to Facebook Ads
