Official Updates from iOS 14 Facebook Ad Changes

There’s been a lot of uncertain movement and head-scratching in the marketing world with Apple’s rollout of iOS 14. With information coming from a variety of sources and no one quite sure what’s what, we wanted to get some clear answers to help you continue marketing with confidence.

To briefly summarize our series on iOS 14 Facebook ad changes:

1. Apple now sends a prompt with every app download that allows users to opt-out of having their data tracked.
2. As users opt-out, it could affect the accuracy of your targeting data.
3. The biggest concern at this point is that businesses may no longer be able to trust the conversion numbers you get on Facebook.

Our team got in touch with a Facebook marketing expert who helped summarize and clarify key points regarding these changes. We’d like to share them with others, so that they can begin to strategize to accommodate this upheaval to marketing processes and procedures:

• The good news is that as of now, you are still able to track how many people made a purchase, opted in, downloaded an app, and the like. What you will lose, however, is access to data on the attributes of the person who is completing the action, such as whether they are male or female, their age range, etc. unless the person has explicitly opted-in for tracking through the iOS 14 Facebook app.
• Retargeting is (basically) dead. Because Facebook cannot technically know whether or not an individual took a particular action, like clicking an ad or visiting a website, you can no longer target based on an interaction with an asset.
• You can only correctly track events on a verified domain, and there is no guarantee that events tracked on an unverified domain are accurate. You can learn more about getting your domain verified in our blog post “How to Verify Your Web Domain with Facebook.”
• Certain events should be prioritized on your domain to work around the strict limitations of iOS 14 Facebook ad changes. When a user interacts with an asset, Facebook still technically stores that information– They’re just not allowed to do anything with it. BUT, once the user completes the event that you’ve set as your #1 priority, Facebook is allowed to let you market based on those interactions. For example, let’s say that your #1 priority is purchase and your #2 priority is landing page view. When someone clicks on an ad and views the landing page, you can’t do anything with that information or retarget that person. However, once they complete a purchase, you can then retarget them for their landing page activity. Essentially, they must do a “trackable” event first before you can access their “untrackable” event data.
• The Facebook marketing expert we spoke to gave us insider information on using this workaround effectively: They suggested that businesses run some ads that have “view content” as the top priority. Those businesses would define “view content” more specifically as a landing page view. Then, allow that event to run for thirty days, during which people will click on the ads and go to the landing page, thus completing our top priority event. Then, we would change our priority to purchase. Now, we can target all the people who “viewed content” in the last thirty days since that was our top priority event.
• Facebook’s targeting may lose efficacy as people opt out. Naturally, audiences for certain interests will become smaller. For those who opt out, Facebook is restricted to in-app activity for ascertaining their interests, demographics, and other data that is essential for marketing. Those who don’t or can’t opt out will not be affected. While Facebook has no idea how substantially this will affect things yet, it sounds like there is hope for adapting and revamping marketing models.
• Conversions API is becoming more important, as it allows advertisers to send web events from their servers directly to Facebook. The simplest fix is working with Facebook’s integration partners, like Shopify, WooCommerce, and WordPress. You can find the official Partner’s Integration Gallery for more information on sites that will help track data that Facebook pixel may miss and provides you greater access to that data. Otherwise, you’d need your own server to run Conversions API.

While we don’t know the full breadth of the situation yet, NATIV3 will continue to update you as it develops. We encourage you to follow us on social media for the latest news on iOS 14 updates and the impact they could have on your ability to precisely target key demographics for marketing.