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How iOS 14 Adjustments Will Influence Your Digital Advertising and marketing

Andrew Zimmer

Andrew Zimmer

There’s been a big shift in privacy on digital platforms, first with Google’s announcement that it will end its tracking of cookies in 2022, and now with an upcoming update to Apple’s iOS 14. While this push on privacy is a net good, however, it will be creating a lot of disruption (as well as some opportunity) for marketers in the near future.

The impact on Facebook advertising will be significant. The iOS14.5 update affects everything from monitoring and optimization to reporting certain goals and actions on your website.

Here’s a quick rundown of how the update works: Apple prompts users to choose whether or not to turn off personalized ads when they visit a website. If users choose to opt out, Facebook’s tool suite may be less effective in targeting and optimizing for that person. Since Apple’s operating system has the largest market share, it will significantly affect the ability of Facebook’s advertising tools to create large, interest-based audiences and similar audiences, and display ads based on actions such as buying or subscribing to your email list.

While the real impact of Apple’s changes and the greater cultural shift toward privacy is currently unknown, we do know a few specific things about how this will transform Facebook marketing and what we can do to prepare.

What we know:

  • We cannot track more than eight actions on your website at the same time. Brands need to prioritize their event triggers. Fortunately, there are some basic metrics that are not affected, such as: B. Landing Page Views.
  • Once you’ve set your top eight conversion events, it’s time to change them. However, in this case all of your ads will be paused and you will have to restart them when the priority is reset.
  • The campaign results are strongly influenced. Analytics is now filled inconsistently over a 72 hour window, so there is no longer any way to track actions in real time.
  • You can create two separate ad accounts with two separate sets of encoding – one for iOS users and one for Android users.
  • Lead forms are not affected, so lead generation on the platform is even more important than it has been in the past.

The most important opportunity for businesses is to take a look at their digital priorities and make sure that coding, marketing, monitoring, and reporting are really driving their business goals.

How your digital marketing could be affected

funnel

You need to classify your priority actions. Since Facebook can only report the last priority action that took place due to the new way in which actions are tracked, you need to re-examine the way you track and report your customer journeys. If you’ve made the purchase your priority action, but you’ve also monitored how displaying content on your blog affects the purchase, then you need to review your approach as Facebook doesn’t report the purchase event until the end of the journey.

Retargeting

Similar to the funnel impact, your retargeting and audience development strategy needs to be re-examined. For example, if you’re running a branding campaign aimed at retargeting people who viewed a video on your site, you will no longer be able to target people who viewed that video AND made a purchase (or some other higher-level action) .

While this creates a new hurdle for smaller skilled audiences for brand loyalty and development campaigns, the good side is that with pure ecommerce funnel campaigns, you no longer have to exclude people who haven’t completed the purchase funnel. You can easily realign the target based on the last priority action taken.

doppelganger

The bottom line is that action-based target groups of the same type become less effective. Facebook has discussed opportunities for a smaller but more precise audience in the future, but nothing is set in stone yet. The best counterbalance is to double the first-party community development and additional strategies like email campaigns.

Takeaways

While this will undoubtedly be a rocky road for Facebook and Instagram marketers in the next few months, there will be a new normal. We see this change as an opportunity to streamline your existing processes and rethink your goals and priorities for your existing campaigns and marketing as a whole.

How you can prepare

Check out Facebook’s resources for preparation, which are briefly summarized below:

  • Check your website’s domain
  • Configure eight preferred web conversion events per domain using the aggregated event measurement tool
  • Make sure to update all of your Facebook ad and developer tools
  • Familiarize yourself with new delivery statuses that can be viewed in your ad account
  • Customize your reporting to take into account the likely possibility of a delay of up to three days

What should you focus on next?

Unfortunately, there is no concrete roadmap for what will happen next in digital marketing (or anywhere else), but there are three things you should focus on in order to at least stay one step ahead of the competition.

  • Stay nimble. Do not create internal structures, strategies and processes that cannot withstand change. Understanding that the platforms you use are required immediately and are not under your control can help you solve creative problems.
  • Create channels for first party data such as: B. e-mails or events. In general, focus your marketing on building connections and relationships with your audience. It always has been and still is.
  • Realign your brand and your brand’s story. Tell people in a creative way through your own and deserved content like videos, traditional PR, photography, blogs and design. If you tell an interesting story, people will listen.

***.

Andrew Zimmer, vice president of digital strategy at Marino