The Impact of iOS 14 Update on Your Facebook Ads
The expeditious growth and advancement of digital ads have driven platforms to make adjustments that cater to both the customer and business requirements. Apple’s latest iOS update — to iOS 14 — is one that broadly customises the way ads are created, tracked, and reached out with.
Facebook’s initial response to the latest iOS 14 policy was resistance, but it finally accepted the best course of action was to comply in order to bring support for its businesses and partners. Here’s what you need to know about the iOS 14 Update for Facebook ads.
iOS 14 Update
Apple is cautious about app tracking transparency (ATT) and the privacy of users. They need to protect the data of Apple customers, so they have changed from an opt-out to an opt-in principle.
With the iOS 14 update, Apple’s mobile gadgets will show a pop-up to Facebook users that will request approval for all tracking related activities. With this gatekeeping process, Facebook and other apps will have minimal data access/use, and will impact the result of marketing and advertising on these media.
Let’s check out the latest changes that are going to develop due to the iOS 14.5 update. Apple revealed that most likely from March 2021, it will cater to users with an opt-in prompt on each app. So here we can take a look at what impact Apple's new policies can make on Facebook advertisers and strategies to enable you to get through this latest update.
Changes in App Advertising
Two years ago, Apple recommended a concept called the ‘SKAdNetwork’ API. One of the preeminent reasons behind the launch of this concept was to strengthen the privacy of customers who installed mobile apps.
Going forward, the SKAdNetwork API will be handled by Facebook for app advertising on iOS 14 gadgets, and this will either confine, aggregate, or detain all app event data.
Moreover, lift measurement will be inaccessible for iOS 14 App Install and App Events campaigns. And last but not least, notifying the events will be detained for up to three days after an app is installed.
Changes in Mobile Web Advertising
The SKAdNetwork API is not the only new concept of Apple that will impact advertisers. Apple has also introduced the Private Click Measurement (PCM) protocol for web attribution. This protocol will greatly support restricting data that brands and platforms can access.
Tracking the location of users in various geographical locations will also be challenging. For instance, if a user in Australia is handled an ad for a US-based business, but is then redirected to the local website based on their region, the deal would not be perfectly tracked.
Rest assured, Facebook will introduce the Aggregated Event Management tool to offset this problem. This tool will benefit from an appropriate attribution of sales if an event related to the ones discussed above occurs.
Optimisation and Targeting
An eight-pixel event cap per domain is used in iOS 14.5 for optimisation. This implies that an advertiser can use only a maximum of eight conversion events per domain for optimisation.
So, if you are an advertiser, you will be required to prioritise the eight most relevant events. One thing to notice here is that the eight-event cap is only covering the sum of events you can optimise towards. Yet, you may still track more events for broadcasting and audience formulation.
In short, the latest iOS update may delay optimisation, specifically if there are not sufficient data points. This is apparently not a piece of acceptable news for small-scale advertisers who do not have a lot of data points as compared to the big competitors. Also, as more and more users update their OS to iOS 14.5, the size of retargeting audience groups will diminish over time.
Measurement
The latest attribution window will measure a bit complex as it will help to under-report on organic as well as paid media. You should also foresee a boost in dark social traffic. What’s “Dark Social”? This is when users privately share content on social media which causes it to be more complicated to track.
The ad reporting data will take a three-day delay on data presentation for the data that gets collected from iOS 14.5 users. This is due to Apple’s PCM protocol. This limitation in data could make little inconvenience while running ads to advertisers.
Business Manager Tool Setup
This part is brief and simple, yet very crucial. The Facebook Business Manager interface will have a modification in design. This is required because Facebook cannot have an autonomous interface for Android and iOS.
Like with all ever-continuing changes to different platforms, advertisers will get used to the latest adjustments in the Facebook Business Manager interface comfortably.
The latest update will make a shift in how advertisers can target their audiences and figure out the context of their conversions. How serious this impact will be going on is unknown. However, if we expect that a large percentage of app users accept the privacy path, smaller businesses will be likely the most distressed in terms of ads. This switch will impact their ability to reach their distinct audiences profitably. Big players will also be affected, but as they mostly have more extensive budgets to tackle the situation the impacts will be lessened.
