You may have noticed a few updates within the ads manager. As a team, we’ve been collating articles, attending webinars to provide a summary in regards to the potential impact, how you/ AdInvestor users can best prepare for these new updates.
So what is actually happening?
In June 2020, Apple announced an upcoming change to their (at the time) new iOS14 iPhone and iPad operating system. Apple would prompt users on whether they were willing to allow the app developer to track their personal usage of the app via their ‘AppTrackingTransparency’ (ATT) framework (explained further below).
Will this impact your account?
This update will impact ALL ad accounts. But not just on Facebook, it will impact ALL apps so this includes TikTok, Snapchat, Amazon (any other app that relies on collecting user data in order to build advertising and/or personalisation services).
Google as far we know will not be as impacted as Facebook since most customers do not use apps to access a browser like Chrome. This update does not change how we track Desktop and non-mobile traffic.
What will be impacted?
1. Tracking
You can only prioritise 8-pixel events across 1 domain. For lead generation businesses, this would most likely be a lead submission, whereas eCommerce customers these would be (view content, add to cart, initiate checkout and purchase)
2. % of Sales and Leads attributed to Facebook or any other mobile marketing app
This update will limit your visibility of the customer journey and the impact of the FB channel on the customer journey. If a customer opts out, you will no longer be able to see how they interact with your website once they leave the app.
Facebook has also changed the default reporting tracking to 7 days click 1-day view in ads manager for NEW ad sets, replacing the 28-day click, 1-day view attribution setting. This impacts the tracking of overall or totals within the ads manager. If the status of a campaign or ad set were paused during this change, then the attribution window would not have automatically changed meaning that there are now ‘multiple attribution settings’ across campaigns which prevent the system from calculating totals.
Not to worry, within your Adinvestor portal you should be able to see totals (Sales, Conversions) for each day and by campaign
3. Audience Data
As you’ll lose out on signals and data, your custom audiences will shrink over time, and in return, it will impact your prospecting audiences too.
With this in mind, we recommend:
- Adjust audience sizes and increase the duration of retargeting.
- Retest some of our prospecting audiences if they stop working
- Rely more than ever on email customer lists and use these to build out Facebook’s understanding of the customer.
To get a good understanding of how this might impact your business, we recommend reviewing your % of revenue and % leads beyond the 7 day attribution period so you can provide an estimate of how much revenue we should expect to lose out on. This can be managed via AdInvestor portal. Just to clarify – this will not impact your overall revenue you are tracking as a business BUT you will not have clarity on Facebook’s contribution to this revenue.
In Summary
If you’ve made it this far then I want you to take a few things away:
- Apple has made the change to iOS14 and rolled out the ATT framework
- We’re yet to know the full extent this will have on advertising despite this document and others providing our best responses
- There is a world of advertising, traffic sources and growth potential beyond Facebook to explore such as Google & Bing.
- That said, Facebook may have taken an uppercut but it’s far from down. Don’t lose focus on your immediate goals and actions for your business.
Facebook will continue to contribute to your business growth by driving new customers to your site, this will not change. We understand that there is a lot of information on this topic, and a lot is very technical so we highly recommend reading through this comprehensive guide put together by Deepesh Manadalia and his team.
Please feel free to reach out to the AdInvestor team on WhatsApp or email, if you have any questions, and rest assured that the team is here to help you prepare in every way so you can mitigate the risk!