Facebook iOS Update

How the Apple iOS 14 update from Facebook will impact eCommerce advertisers and what measure you can take to minimise impact. 

Last week Facebook introduced their new iOS 14 update. It’s been the talk of the marketing town for months but what does it actually mean for your business and your advertising? Peaky Digital’s social media specialist Francesca cuts through the noise to help you understand:

1. What will be affected in Facebook ads
2. What does this mean for an eCommerce business
3. What can we do to mitigate the impact

Tell me more about the update…

It’s an update that Facebook is less than thrilled about, to say the least, and it comes off the back of the latest Apple update. As part of Apple’s update on user privacy, they will now give users the opportunity to opt out of their data being tracked, which overall prohibits data collection and sharing for app-owners, in this instance Facebook (and its family of apps). 

How will it work…

Users of the app will be prompted by the App Store to select their preference. This option is specifically for users on the latest iOS 14 devices.

For Facebook and its advertisers, this presents a problem and that’s because the Facebook family of apps currently use these tracking abilities to collect a whole range of data which ultimately helps Facebook to deliver your ads to the correct audiences and monitor their online activities.

So how does this affect an eCommerce advertiser?

• Audience sizes may see a decrease because they will not include people on iOS 14. We’ll lose the ability to set remarketing and lookalike audiences to iOS users who have opted out.
• Some campaign results will be counted differently as more people opt out of tracking on iOS 14 devices, statistical modelling may be used to account for some conversions that are completed on iOS 14 devices. With changes also occurring to the attribution settings we may also see a decrease in the number of reported conversions.
• New limit on web events (pixel tracking). Due to Apple’s changes with iOS 14, Facebook will implement its new Aggregated Event Measurement feature, which supports advertisers’ efforts to preserve user privacy while running effective campaigns. Within this, advertisers will be able to use 8 conversion events from a single web domain.
• Reporting and optimising will become trickier! Not only will real-time reporting not be supported (up to 3 days), clarity on what’s working is also going to be harder for advertisers. Campaign ‘breakdowns’ within the ad platform will soon be a thing of the past, so we’ll lose the ability to track performance by gender, age, placement etc. 

What can we do to minimise the impact on our campaigns?

Fear not, if you are a Peaky Digital client, you’re in safe hands. We’ll make sure the below tasks are completed on your behalf so we can continue running successful campaigns!

If you are an eCommerce business and currently running ads or plan to in the future, here’s what you need to do:

• Review your pixel events to ensure you have the correct events available to you, remember it’s only 8 events from a single domain now so get rid of any events that you don’t need!
• Verify your website domain via an admin in the business manager, brand safety section.
• If you rely heavily on website custom audiences for example remarketing and lookalike you’ll need to consider focusing on growing other remarketing lists such as video viewers, email subscribers and social followers engagers.

With the update now in place, there’s no doubt we’re going to see advertisers and businesses affected to various degrees. It’s worth noting that changes are fluid and often ambiguous when it comes to Facebook updates and it’s pretty much guaranteed that we’ll see other privacy-focused changes for eCommerce and digital advertisers in the future. A key thing to remember is that while these changes are disruptive and frustrating, Facebook is looking at ways to ensure advertisers and businesses still have the ability to run targeted and successful advertising campaigns on their platform and in the coming months we’ll see more of what they have to offer to counteract this update. 

Need a little more information? Looking for support to ensure your advertising efforts are not affected? Have a chat with the Peaky Digital team today and find out how you can still maximise the performance of your Paid Social campaigns.