How Will Apple's iOS 14 Update Impact Facebook Advertising

MGR eCommerce Edge Weekly | January 6, 2021
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How Will Apple’s iOS 14 Update Impact Facebook Advertising

Apple has officially rolled out its latest update that puts major restrictions on Facebook & other apps ability to gather data and track customer across the web. Here is what you need to know.

What will these Facebook Ads and Apple iOS 14 changes really mean for advertisers? The biggest effects for this change:

Tracking Pixel Actions from Facebook ads. Any tracking such as Add to Cart, Purchases, custom conversions, etc. with the Pixel will now be under-reported due to people opting out of tracking.
Optimizing your Ads for these actions. Because the pixel isn’t learning as well, the ads possibly won’t be optimized as well to people who are taking the actions.
Retargeting ads. When you create a Retargeting audience, anyone who visited your website from an iOS 14 device won’t see your retargeted ad.
Building Audiences. Because we won’t have data on who visited your site from iOS devices, they will not go into a Retargeting or Lookalike audience. But there may be Engagement audiences that they will be in.
App Installs. Facebook won’t be able to optimize around App Installs or other App related conversions for iOS devices if you have an App you are advertising.

This does not just affect Facebook, ALL advertisers are will be affected, including Google, YouTube, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Snapchat, etc.

This hurts because iOS customers are the most prolific buyers out of all segment groups. Advertisers will have to adapt and rethink the way they run ads.

What should you focus on? The two primary ways to replace retargeting will be by collecting emails and creating engagement audiences.

Email collection is now more important than ever because it will be the only way you can create a custom audience with Facebook of people who visited your site from an iOS device. If you can collect emails you can upload them to Facebook and have them match them to each person’s Facebook account creating a pseudo-retargeting audience.

Engagement audiences will become more important too. Engagement audiences track those who’ve interacted with your ads, posts, pages, etc. These are all actions done within Facebook so they are able to be tracked, and you can create custom audiences made of people who took these actions.

Beyond that, testing more broad interest based audiences and trying to work the Facebook algorithm will be the way to go. The truth is because this update is so new everybody in advertising is scrambling to come with solutions, and these are what we’ve found work best so far. This will be an ongoing battle to keeps ads functioning as best as possible.