What You Should Know About Apple’s iOS 14 Update and Facebook
Facebook for Business told advertisers in Q1 2021 that the forthcoming improvements in Apple’s iOS 14 update “will impact how we obtain and process conversion events from tools like the Facebook pixel.”
If you use the Facebook platform to monitor conversions from your social ads on your website or app, this update would have a significant impact on how your business’s Facebook Ads track conversions. Here’s what to expect.
SimpSocial’s Facebook Ads Manager Activity Preview
What Happened to Facebook and Apple’s iOS 14?
“You’ll be expected to ask users for their permission to monitor them through applications and websites operated by other companies,” according to Apple’s updated iOS 14 policy for apps.
This means that their newest operating system, iOS14, now allows users to choose whether or not an app can monitor their web and app activities. Since most Facebook and Instagram activity takes place in an app, and Apple devices account for a significant portion of their users’ devices, this has a disproportionate effect on them as compared to other advertisement channels.
Who Is Affected by This?
Advertisers who want to match their ads to customer behavior on their website or in their app (i.e., those running conversion campaigns in Apps and web-based properties for purposes of e-commerce and lead generation, among other marketing objectives.)
What Will Facebook Ads Look Like in 2021?
What effect will the iOS14 updates have on your company’s Facebook ad campaigns? Essentially, Apple iOS devices will exchange even less data with Facebook, and the data that is received will feed in less regularly and be more anonymized.
This translates to:
Less Reporting/Web Events Attribution Accuracy: In Facebook Events Manager, fewer conversions will be monitored (though they will still happen in real life), and audiences will be smaller.
Shorter Attribution Lookback Windows: We used to be able to attribute acts up to 28 days after clicking on an ad. The time limit has been shortened to seven days.
Advertisers will be less able to segment their audiences based on user behavior on websites because activities taken on Apple devices will be shared less. Exclusion groups will be less dependable, and those who have participated in an activity will have a smaller audience (ex: custom audiences created based on website activity).
Just 8 Conversions: If several advertisers are using the same website domain, they would only have to share the top 8 conversions, which will be prioritized in reporting. This is in response to an iOS14 update that only reports one action to Facebook, so they’re prioritizing which activities to report on.
Changes to Breakdown Reporting: When analyzing ad results, demographic breakdowns would be removed.
Changes to conversion events will be more difficult: Changing conversion events in a campaign will cause the advertising to be paused for several days until the new data is aligned.
Changes in Conversion Value: In e-commerce, value-based conversions will now be reported in tiers rather than individual costs.
In the new Facebook AEM settings, you can set conversion priorities.
What Does the Future Hold for Advertisers and Businesses?
Apple’s enforcement is expected to take effect in March 2021, and in the meantime, advertisers can verify domains and prioritize conversions in Facebook’s latest AEM (Aggregated Event Measurement) to prevent downtime when enforcement occurs.
A verified domain is indicated by a green dot in Facebook Ads Manager.
A verified domain is indicated by a green dot in Facebook Ads Manager.
What are SimpSocial’s Adaptive Strategies?
The safety of customers is crucial. People should have power over the information that big tech firms gather about them, and we should all respect that. Apple’s decision to step forward as a hardware vendor is a positive thing because it gives users more power of how their data is processed and exchanged. This follows the same pattern as what we’re seeing in browsers and “cookie-geddon.”
However, after listening to Facebook’s advice, it seems that this latest privacy policy ignores the manner in which many applications are already set up with in-app browsing of webpages, forcing advertisement platforms to struggle to adapt with little knowledge of how to achieve enforcement while also supplying advertisers with the insights they’re used to.
We assume that further adaptations will occur, and that Facebook is working on modeling solutions to ensure that marketers can still monitor ROI. We’ll also return to using Google Analytics to measure total target completions, but keep in mind that its last click attribution model is less forgiving than Facebook’s 7-day lookback window.
In preparation for the changes, SimpSocial has started verifying our client domains in Facebook Business Manager and restructuring ad account conversion events.
Not sure what to do next?
Is your company in need of a dependable Facebook Ads partner when these changes take effect? Let’s talk about it.
Back to Blog