Show Notes:
The Apple iOS 14 privacy update is HUGE news for Facebook and has everyone up in arms about the effects this will have on their advertising.
It’s essentially hindering our ability as entrepreneurs to deliver personalized ads, which has a lot of us questioning the future of Facebook paid ads.
You may have questions like:
- How will this affect targeting?
- How will this affect retargeting?
- How will this affect lookalike audiences?
- How will this affect tracking?
- How will this affect attribution?
- How will this affect lead and sales costs?
Don’t panic! I’m diving into what the iOS 14 update means, the initial effects, and what you need to do today to ensure your campaigns continue tracking and performing for you successfully.
Share-worthy Quotes:
“Think about marketing from 20 years ago to 10 years ago to 5 years ago to last year – everything has changed. We’re constantly seeing changes that occur that we all have to adapt to. We all have to figure out how to work around it.”
“Facebook’s a huge part of your marketing and part of your strategy, but you still need to gather those leads yourself and do organic lead gathering as well.”
“We’re always trying to stay up to date with what’s going on, making sure our clients are complying and are able to continue to advertise with success.”
Get the Transcript here:
Episode 16 – Apple’s iOS 14 Update & What You Need To Know & Do
Hey everybody. Welcome back. Today, I’m going to talk about the dreaded iOS privacy update that everyone has a ton of questions on, and I’m hoping I can shed some answers for you or at least insight from what we have gathered. A lot of people are going out there and talking about their assumptions and how they are analyzing the information that’s being given to us from Facebook. We’ve spoken to our reps, obviously all the articles that are being published, so we did a lot of research and I want it to come together and answer some questions for you guys that I know a lot of us are having. I know when GDPR came out, it was a massive fiasco when people were freaking out and I wanted to just let everyone breathe in and breathe out for a second and know that nothing that happens is going to change the way your ads are working.
I shouldn’t say there are some things that are changing the way your ads are working right now, but it won’t drastically impact how your ads are really working that quickly. So I just don’t want anyone to freak out. I am communicating some of this information to our clients and I want to do that here for you guys as well. So I’m really just going to first start off by summarizing what’s going on. So for those of you who don’t know, just really briefly, Apple’s implementing a privacy change that will basically prompt users on whether they’re willing to allow the app developers to track their personal usage of the app via their ATT framework, which is called App Tracking Transparency.
Really what this means is Apple with the new iOS 14 update is going to provide people the opportunity to opt out of tracking. We don’t know what this is going to look like. I mean, we know what it’s going to look like, it’s going to come up on your phone, it’s going to be an app. They’ve already shown pictures and screenshots of what it looks like and literally lets people know, asking them, do you want to be continued to be tracked by this business, and they can opt out of being tracked. That being said, it’s something that’s rolling out slowly across as people are updating and so we don’t know how quickly it looks like. It’s probably going to take a good six to nine months for this to fully roll out. So that is why I’m telling you not to worry about any massive changes happening right this second. In addition, I wanted to go over who this is going to be impacting.
This is really impacting data that’s being collected inside of the Facebook app itself, so meaning if you use lead forms, which we have one of our clients that uses lead forms heavily, or if you use an app where all of the actions that a user is taking is happening inside of the Facebook app, then the data will be affected with users opting out of being attract. This will also affect audience networks, so if you use an audience network, as far as in any of your placements because it’s a third-party app, it’s going to definitely affect that. We don’t use that, and as far as our agency goes, we tend to remove the audience network from all of our advertising placements.
I don’t see it really doing well for our clients and so the handful that we have left that use it we’re going to go ahead and remove, so that it doesn’t impact them as much. WIll this affect pixel tracking? This is a huge one. Most people like you, probably had your pixel on your landing pages, on your confirmation pages for your opt-ins, confirmation pages for your purchases, for your programs, for your products. If you, as of now guys and I want to preface this whole thing, this information that we have right now and as more information comes out and asks to shift, the data’s going to change, the information is going to change. Fingers crossed, I shouldn’t even say fingers crossed, Facebook has usually been really good about finding a way to go around anything that’s thrown at them. They are usually able to find loopholes and ways to figure this out, so I have no doubt in my mind that they’re going to do that.
But as of right now, you will still be able to track using your pixel on your website. Doing this doesn’t require a third-party app, this is data that’s collected right from your website, right from your pixel straight to Facebook. And for us at the JW Agency, 99% of our clients will still be able to fully track data because they use landing pages for webinars and challenges and video series and their opt-ins and purchases, et cetera. So if you use mainly pixel tracking and you send people off to a landing page as a pixel on there, this isn’t going to affect the tracking of the data there. So the big question though, that people say is, is it gonna affect targeting and retargeting?
I’ve heard a lot of people talk about this affecting targeting and retargeting because the less data, Facebook is collecting less data from iOS 14 users, those who are saying: No, please don’t follow me anymore. Don’t track me. So we’re going to assume that a good chunk of them are going to opt out of being tracked, which will in turn affect how they use this data, how Facebook uses the data for targeting and uses the data for a lookalike audiences, which in turn could affect the quality of targeting and retargeting. Now, we don’t know the full extent of this, and I assume again, we won’t see much of a change for another six to nine months as it will take time for the iOS 14 users to get the prompt and opt out and filter through to actually create a large enough effect.
But yes, could this make a change later on? Yes. Could this increased leap cost a little bit? Yes, but we’re not going to know that effect until later on. So I wouldn’t put too much worry about it right now. I think what people need to really focus on is their holistic approach. Yes, Facebook ads, but their holistic approach as well, which is a whole nother topic, but make sure you’re still doing your emails, make sure you’re still buying your leads and you’re getting them off Facebook. Make sure you’re still doing all the things, don’t just rely on Facebook. I mean, Facebook’s a huge part of your marketing and part of your strategy, but you still need to gather those leads yourself and do organic as well.
Few more things that this is affecting and that you need to be aware of and maybe take action on, it is affecting events and custom conversions. So going forward, you will be limited to the use of eight conversion events per domain, and then each event needs to be prioritized. As an agency, we are actually looking through all of our client funnels, seeing what events we have on there and then optimizing based on those, and obviously putting them in priority. If someone in your funnel adds to cart, views a page, adds to cart and then purchases, if I had to choose one, which one would be the priority? Well, obviously I’d want to choose Purchase if it was going to track one thing.
I’d want it to track purchase, and then secondary add to cart. And then third maybe view content. So making sure that you understand that you’re going to be down to eight, so if you’re using a lot of custom conversions like on everything throughout your pages, or if using a lot of custom events which is basically just hard coding a custom event to your page guys. So right now you have standard events, like a lead that goes on the pixel on your page and instead you might say, this is my XYZ lead and you created a customer. Then if you’re doing a lot of those, this is going to really affect you. So I recommend staying with the standard events and do tracking other ways, for instance, in our agency, what we already do with a lot of our clients, just a handful of our clients, we don’t, and now we’re going to make sure we do it with them, which is making sure we track via Google analytics.
So making sure you have a Google analytics code on your site and you’re tracking inside of Google analytics, watching the trends, setting events, conversion events in there so you can track leads, you can track purchases and it just creates an extra layer of better tracking along the way. In my experience, having a lead pixel, especially with some of our clients who have eight different funnels running, you might have a lead pixel on a couple of different things, a couple different funnels, and that can skew your data. At the end of the day, we’re always looking at the backend data in their CRM to see what’s actually accurate. How many leads did you actually get? How many purchases did you actually get? But having Google analytics in place is going to help us see the holistic picture. Where did somebody click initially? Where did they go? Where did they end up on? And we can actually track, which is kind of the next thing I want to talk about is UTMs.
Maybe take a step back and we’re talking about data attribution because it’s going to lead into UTM. So data attribution guys, so Facebook has already rolled out a new column. If you haven’t seen it yet, it will be in there for you. It threw me for a loop, the other day when it came into my dashboard view, because what they did was they added a new column and ads manager switching from 28- day click to a 7- day click attribution. What does that mean? It’s going to track attribution within a 7- day timeframe and not a 28- day timeframe? So this means a shorter timeframe to attribute a lead or a sale, and this can definitely have a huge effect since one, some buyers need more time before deciding to purchase. We have some clients who take close to a month before they’re ready to purchase.
And so now we’re only able to track up to 7 days instead of a 28- day timeframe. Funnels, for example, like a challenge, let’s say we run ads seven days prior to the challenge, that right there is the attribution period. Then the challenge is five days and then open a cart, open enrollment is for five days, it’s gonna be really hard to have attribution for that long of a timeframe because it’s only a 7- day timeframe. So Facebook isn’t going to track those purchases who opted in more than seven days ago from when we run the ads.
The open cart ads are from when the open cart actually happens at the end of the challenge. So this can definitely have an effect guy, so what we do internally is we have UTMs setup on all of our campaigns. If you don’t know what UTM is, just go ahead and look up. It’s a parameter at the end of your URL.
We put this on every single client we have. Look it up. It’s super easy to do. And from there, you can track that inside of your CRM, you can track that inside of Google analytics. I’m not going to go into too much depth of craziness on the tracking and Google analytics and stuff but I would recommend putting that on. It just adds that extra layer of tracking. I don’t know about you, but I like to have as many layers as possible to see which one is the most accurate, and that’s what we follow.
Another piece of this guys is, these are some of the to do’s that we’re having for our clients, so I just want you to take note of this. Get your pen and paper out. I’m going to put links in the show notes for you guys. If there’s any, I’m going to share at least one link, if not two. So one thing is domain verification, basically you need to verify your website’s domain to help avoid a future disruption of your website campaigns of your tracking.
As of right now, if you don’t verify your domain which is basically the domain that you’re using in your ads, this could be affecting your custom conversion tracking because Facebook is moving to aggregated event measurements. You can look that up on your own and read more into that but the first thing you need to do is verify your domain. I’m going to put a link in the show notes here to make sure you get that done and it actually has a video in the link that just shows you step-by-step how to do it. I’m a visual person, as there it literally shows you step by step and walks you through it. It’s only a couple of minutes long video, that’s it.
When you have that done, then you can go ahead and set up your event tracking, your prioritization. I want purchase to be the priority, I want lead to be second, et cetera. So we have our setup as purchase being priority, lead being second, complete registration third, add to cart fourth, submit application fifth, and then so on. It’s really kind of based on your backend and what you guys track but that’s how we’re doing it internally. And then again, just make sure you’ve got, I would highly recommend if you don’t have Google analytics installed it on your site, that you do that. I think that’s a really important thing to do, going forward to track, not only pay traffic, but organically, like the whole holistic approach.
So I think it’s really important that you guys do that. And here’s the thing guys, as with marketing. I mean, think about marketing from 20 years ago to 10 years ago to 5 years ago to last year, everything has changed. We’re constantly seeing changes that occur that we all have to adapt to. We all have to figure out how to work around it. Will tracking become a little more difficult, could cost increase a little bit? Sure. But we don’t really know the full impact people are going to have and internally for us, we don’t think there’s going to be as much just because a lot of our clients are sending traffic straight to a landing page.
But there will still be changes in retargeting and gathering, the interest that Facebook is trying to get, Facebook gathers data on interest. And if people say, I don’t want to be followed anymore, how are they getting that Intel? So yes, there are going to be changes but I feel like people are maybe blowing this up just a little bit more than they need to. It is a big deal. I’m not saying it’s not a big deal, but what I’m saying is look, I just remember GDPR and I remember I even went to a spastic craziness for a minute because people were freaking me out.
And then you just saw how it just rolled over and it wasn’t as big of a deal. So I just want to make sure that we don’t freak out. Like we as an agency, we’re always trying to stay up to date with what’s going on, ensuring that our clients are compliant, that they’re able to continue to advertise with success, and I want to make sure you guys are able to do the same.
So hopefully you guys, what I just shared puts you at ease a little bit, gives you some to-do’s to get done that’s going to help with this transition because Facebook is actively making these changes. We are seeing new stuff happen. All of the custom conversions that we create now is saying: Hey you need to configure, verify your domain, configure and prioritize your events. It’s already happening. We already see the new column in ads manager, and the reason why I said earlier that that new column for attribution is throwing me for a loop is because once that happened, any ad sets that were in there that were old or that are not active, it’ll stay at the 28- day view, but the active ad sets in that campaign are changed into 7- day click, which then because they’re different, it’s not giving us totals at the bottom of our campaign. So we had to like manually add everything up every day right now until we start new campaigns from scratch. Facebook making changes is not only hard on you guys, it’s a pain for all of us, it really is. Like I said, we have to adapt and just make do with it.
So follow these steps in here, I’ll put any links to anything I discussed in the show notes. And just breathe in, breathe out and I’ll keep you guys updated with anything else that we hear. And if you want help, this is a lot, I don’t expect people to stay up to date with this stuff all the time, especially this is not your full-time job. You’re doing what you love. We do what we love, which is Facebook ads, which is digital marketing. And if you want help with it and you want help implementing these changes, and you want help just moving forward with your account, don’t hesitate to reach out to us. See if you’re a good fit to work with our agency. You can go to gpsmyads.com.
Again, that’s gpsmyads.com. Talk with me personally, as of right now at least. And we’ll see if we are a good fit and if we can help you out. All right, until next time guys have a fantastic week. Bye.
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