How do you manage your ads with iOS 14, Apple’s new iPhone update?

What’s for sure is that it’s a big shakeup for Facebook and Instagram advertisers.

How can an update on iOS impact ads on social networks? And how can you, the advertiser, startup, web entrepreneur… be heavily impacted in terms of your revenue because of this update?

That’s what I’ll tell you in the rest of this article, as well as some solutions to remedy the situation.

Hold on to your hats! You’re going to be shaken up!

iOS 14 update: what to expect for data tracking and ads?
Apple wants to strengthen the privacy of users’ data in its App Store apps.

To do this it requires, starting with the iOS 14.5 update, that every app present on its App Store asks their users for permission to track certain usage data such as information about how they use it as well as harvesting their personal data.

All applications that do not respect this privacy rule will have to leave the platform.

Technically how does this work?

Apple identifies each iPhone with a unique identifier called IDFA. It is used to collect each of your actions on your iPhone.

Since the iOS 14.3 update, Apple has introduced a new framework called “AppTrackingTransparency”. It is the latter that allows you to filter and identify the applications that respect or not the request for consent to track the data of their users.

Specifically, applications in the App Store are required to ask their users for permission to collect and share some of their data. This request is sent via the AppTrackingTransparency. Once the request is sent, users can choose whether or not to accept this tracking. They will be able to choose the details via their device settings.

What consequences for the use of ads with iOS 14?
Of course it’s all of the 1.82 million apps in the App Store that are directly involved. But among them, there are some whose impact of this decision will affect millions of advertisers: applications that offer ads such as Facebook and Instagram.

Why?

Because it is likely that many users of the mobile application Facebook and Instagram will refuse en masse the tracking of their personal data in view of the sulphurous reputation of the company in this matter. And that this will impact the performance of the algorithm and the Facebook pixel.

Also all companies doing Facebook and Instagram ads will experience a significant drop in the performance of their ads on these social networks which will most likely translate into drops in their sales.

Since the results of Facebook ads are based solely on the quality of the data collected, an alteration of the data automatically affects the sales of the SMEs using them.

The companies that will be most severely affected by this decision will be those that use Facebook Pixel conversion events as well as those whose business consists of mobile app promotion and conversion within them.

You might say that this only affects iPhone users and not others. It can’t be that bad for advertisers. They should do well with Android phone users in addition to computer users.

Yes. Of course you are right. This is only for iPhone users. That is to say 14.2% of people using Facebook (Source: Zen Academy statistics – “Global statistics on mobile in 2021”) or more than 157 million people worldwide and more than 2 million people in France. That’s a lot of people!

This means that the data collected by Facebook is only from 39% of iPhone users. In other words, 61% of the data collected previously is missing: browsing habits on different sites, application usage times, user profile such as age, gender, hobbies… So much fundamental data to target Facebook and Instagram ads.

This means that ads will be 61% less effective for advertisers on Facebook and Instagram. And so this potentially represents at least 61% less revenue for the companies that use them. And these are mostly SMBs that are already struggling tremendously as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic.

If there is less data collection, then ad targeting will be less relevant. Reports on web conversions or app usage will be truncated. Campaign results will look worse because they are incomplete. Therefore, their results cannot be trusted. Facebook will record fewer conversions. Therefore, campaigns will be less optimized. Pre-purchase signals will be less tracked. This implies less efficient retargeting.