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Big Blow For Businesses and Digital Marketing Platforms

Big Blow For Businesses And Digital Marketing Platforms Jagadeesh Chundru

Apple is changing tracking privacy in IOS 14 updating. So, It’ll affect businesses. It’s a huge change that will affect 25% to 50% Ad revenues of Facebook, Google, and others.

Businesses will affect 25% to 75% revenue who are depending on Ad platforms like Facebook, Google, and more.

Globally mobile users are 50% from Apple and 50% from Android.

So, Businesses lose 50% of users from Apple

In Digital Marketing Perspective What’s Happening:

Apple’s new iOS 14 update may have a negative impact on the way you track conversions from your visitors on your website.

There’s scarce information on this at the moment and we’ll try to lay it all out here for you, in a way you can consume it and take the available action at this time.

This seems to only apply to traffic coming from Apple iOS 14 devices only but that isn’t clear at all and it may happen that Facebook decides to apply changes fully or partially to all devices.

It’s hard to know the full impact until the changes roll out. We will have more definitive information and action items closer or after the update’s release date.

What to expect:

Specific users opt-in:

Users will be prompted to opt in to track when they open Facebook and Instagram apps for the first time after the update. This will happen in early 2021 (date to be confirmed)

Targeting:

We cannot target a specific audience and cannot retarget specific users

Custom audiences size decrease:

As a result of people opting out of tracking, you may see a decrease in Custom audiences sizes.

Conversion events limitation:

You will only be allowed to use 8 conversion events per domain (i.e. store). Most of you will be using Page Views, View Content, Add to Cart, Initiate Checkout, Add Payment Information and Purchase. That’s 6 events total so you could still have 2 more. If you track conversions per product separately (i.e. Custom Conversions), you may need to restructure your tracking model.

Conversion events planning:

You will most likely be prompted to choose which events you will have active in early 2021, in Facebook Events Manager.

If you have ad-sets being optimized for events that are not included in the 8 events you pick, they will be paused automatically.

Conversion events priorities:

The 8 events per domain will be ranked based on priority.

This means that if user-triggered multiple events (i.e. “add to cart” and “purchase”) only the higher prioritized event will be reported.

This means that we may stop seeing View Content, Add to Cart and Initiate Checkout events for people who buy on our stores (i.e. we’ll only have the Purchase event being reported on our dashboard as that will, most likely be the highest priority event for us).

This will make reporting simpler but funnel troubleshooting a lot harder.

Prioritizing events will be key to have good reporting. We still have no details on how this will happen.

There are a lot of changes coming to Value Optimization but we’re not sure how this will be affected yet. We’ll update this document as more information becomes available.

Delayed reporting:

Real-time reporting will not be supported and data may be delayed up to three days. Events will be reported based on the time the conversions occur and not the time of the associated ad impressions.

No support for breakdowns:

Delivery and action breakdowns, such as age, gender, region and placement will not be supported.

Actions to take

Verify your domain in Business Manager:

You’ll need to verify each root domain (i.e. verify domain.com instead of www.domain.com or shop.domain.com) used by your stores in their respective Business Managers. You will need to know where your domain was registered as that’s where your DNS is most likely configured. Then follow the steps here – https://developers.facebook.com/docs/sharing/domain-verification/verifying-your-domain/

Plan for 8 conversion events per domain and prioritize them:

If you only use the standard eCommerce events, your priority would be Purchase, Add Payment Info, Initiate Checkout, Add to Cart, View Content, Page View. If you have more events then you’ll need to plan and prioritize accordingly.

We have to adopt other digital marketing channels to sell products and services