During April 2021, Apple adjusted their iOS14 software so that users could specifically opt-in or opt-out of tracking when using Apps. For us as digital marketers that affected how we could process and receive events based on user interaction with those apps. Most significantly for us, this change has impacted how we work with the Facebook pixel for Paid Social advertising.
All businesses and agencies that optimise, target and report using the Facebook Pixel was affected. Now that we are 3 months on from the update, what does that really look like in our every day?
For the absolute breakdown on how iOS14 has impacted the world of Paid Social advertising, we would love to schedule a call. However, for those just looking for our bitesize highlights then read on below.
TARGETING
As more devices update to iOS14 and present users with the option of opting out of personalised advertising, the size of your audiences will vary. Particularly for remarketing audiences since we can no longer track that opted-out iOS14 user behaviour to create your audiences from.
BUT to give you the inside scoop, we have seen very little change over the last quarter to audience sizes. Albeit, as time goes on, more users may jump on the bandwagon but for now, that decline is marginal. Turns out people like our ads after all!
You can still target iOS14 users, even if they have opted out. However, the process in which you do so is more complex and learning from the results more tricksome than the old school one-campaign-can-capture-all methodology.
SET UP
You will need to verify one domain to be associated with your Ads account where before you could use multiple across your targeting. Whilst that may sound straightforward for some, larger organisations will utilise sub-domain or cross-domain user journeys who have had to revise their pixel set up.
We recommend you enable Advanced Matching – This allows us to leverage and utilise the information that customers have provided to a business/website. This can include but is not limited to, email addresses, gender, age, external IDs and their name. This data can then help us attribute conversions to a client’s Facebook ads whilst also increasing our reach for Remarketing.
REPORTING
How the update has impacted the way we report and view reports is fairly substantial. Facebook will give you the absolute breakdown or please feel free to get in touch below if you want us to give this is you in a more digestible format, without the jargon. However, we have picked out the highlights that we think are the most significant.
- No support for breakdowns: For both app and web conversions, delivery and action breakdowns, such as age, gender, region and placement will not be supported which means we cannot record and optimise to these metrics either. However, don’t forget about our old friend Google Analytics who will be able to give us insight into what your ideal audience looks like anyway!
- Delayed reporting: Real-time reporting will not be supported and data could take up to (but not specifically) 3 days. So that is rather ambiguous which needs to be considered if you use ad scheduling optimisations. Also, the conversions will be reported based on the time they are reported to FB from the SKAdNetwork API (The network that serves the ads to iOS users) rather than the time they actually occur.
- Attribution window: 1-day view window is dead! By default, all new or active ad campaigns will be set to a 7-day click attribution window. That means that when comparing performance over a timeframe that spans April 26th; your conversions will have seemingly dropped for the before and after update window on April 26th.
For any questions, please drop us a line through the form below. We love to talk about all things digital and the office dog is no longer pandering to our musings on where the war of Apple vs. Facebook is heading – so we’re looking for a new audience!
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