iOS 14 + Facebook Ads: What’s Happening?

By now, you’ve probably seen articles alluding to Apple’s iOS 14 Privacy Updates and the effect on Facebook advertising.

Don't worry! At Victory Points Social, we have been working to update all of our clients' accounts, and we will continue to adapt and adjust as required to continue to bring you great results from your advertising.

Here’s what we understand so far:

• As the update rolls out, Apple Users will need to “opt-in” to tracking for the first time they open any app that collects user data. This includes the Facebook app.

• If a user opts out, Facebook will not be able to collect the usual data on users such as all in-app activity or matching conversion events to your ads (such as link clicks, visits to your website, purchases etc).

Here’s how we have noticed our clients’ Facebook Ads are being impacted

Retargeting

One of the noticeable effects of this change will be to the size of custom audiences for retargeting (e.g. when you target an ad at people who have visited your website already). Depending on the number of people who opt out of tracking, these audiences may be quite small. But there's hope! Hang on and I'll tell you what we're doing to fix it.

Reporting

The data available to businesses will decrease. Some tracking of conversion events will remain, but not all. Businesses using Facebook ads will only be able to see one conversion event per user, within 7 days of interacting with their ad (unlike the original 28-day window). This will show as a decrease in reported data, but not necessarily in effectiveness.

Fortunately, businesses will be able to assign priorities to conversion events to allow for those that are most important to them to be reported on. This is really affecting brands with super complex attribution models, but ultimately if you use a platform like Shopify, you should be ok tracking the highest priority conversion event.

It is also likely that data showing in Ads Manager may experience lags of up to 1-2 days for conversion event tracking.

What businesses can do to prepare:

• ASAP!! Go to Facebook Business Manager and ensure your domains are verified to avoid your campaigns getting unnecessarily paused. Reach out if you need a hand with this.

• Set up Conversions API to help you track and measure customer actions. This is not a perfect fix, but will allow some conversion event attribution.

• Review your specific conversion events and decide on which events you want prioritized for reporting.

• You will be able to list 8 events per domain for campaign optimization.

• Make sure you configure your events for the new aggregated event measurement (more info here)

Find out more in Facebook’s Business Center.

The team at Victory Points Social are here to help you with your Facebook Ads now, and into the future - whatever that may look like.

I'm opening up a few free spots on my calendar to help you get this figured out.

Book a free 15 minute check in HERE.

OR if you want even more help running your ads yourself, you should definitely take advantage of my Facebook Ads Basics Course (it’s only $197)!

Here’s to your Victory in Business!

Xx Tracey