Apple iOS 14.4 update impacts Facebook Ads.

Apple’s new iOS 14.4 update is rolling out in the next few weeks and includes privacy settings that allow users to choose which apps have permission to track their behaviour across all the apps on their phone–including Facebook! You can decide whether your browsing history, contacts, location data, and more are used when advertising is shown to you.

With the recent changes in Facebook, any other business relying on Facebook’s tools to optimise and target web conversions is sure to have an impact. Mobile app advertisers are also impacted as well.

Apple’s newest iOS update, 14.4, would be a disaster for Facebook advertisers. With the latest update, creating a personalised ad experience is more challenging, and there are many uncertainties about how consumers will interact with it. It all depends on whether or not a user opts into what information they can get from Facebook.

The changes Facebook is making in response to the iOS 14.4 update include:

• Removal of the 28-day attribution model. Instead, advertisers will only be able to attribute clicks over seven days. This will likely lead to a reduction in reported conversions.
• Slashing the number of allowed pixel events per account from 100 to 8. As a result, advertisers that rely on several conversion events, especially eCommerce and multinational advertisers, will be the most impacted.
• Recording only one Facebook Pixel event per website visit.
• Longer wait times for campaign results to fully populate (up to 72 hours). As a result of this change, reports cannot run until approximately 72 hours after the last ad or boosted post has run.
• Pixel events are now being tied to a domain.

The iOS change also means significant differences when it comes to targeting. Custom audiences within Facebook will be significantly reduced, so campaigns utilising custom audiences like those that go after website visitors, email lists, users who have added to a shopping cart, purchased, and others will be limited. Advertisers may also see more overlap between these audiences.

Interest-based targeting will also be impacted, and user demographic data will no longer be available for pixel conversion events.

Facebook urges advertisers to be proactive about their Facebook pixels and ads because of the anticipated changes in iOS 14.4, which will happen sometime in early 2021.

The release date for Apple’s intended iOS14.4 update is currently unknown, but they have mentioned that it would happen in early 2021. Because of the unknown date and anticipated changes, Facebook is stressing that advertisers make changes to Facebook pixels and ads to reduce the impact of the 14.4 updates before it happens. So they don’t lose any potential revenue due to decreasing impressions on News Feeds or fewer clicks from users scrolling through pages with less visibility than usual.

It is essential to know how unavailable events may affect your campaign before it happens, as they will affect the campaign. As a first step, you will need to perform a thorough audit of all campaigns that are set up for optimisation events that are no longer available and could be impacted by this change. Then, you can begin planning strategies like utilising different campaign goals, audience definitions, bidding strategies, and more to maximise performance on any remaining optimisation events.

Narrow the company’s Pixel events down to eight and prioritise which pixel events are most important for their business. Advertisers should also plan to verify their website domains in Facebook Business Manager.

In Summary

To summarise, the changes Apple has introduced have potentially created a “grey area” for advertisers in the short term and may lower advertising rates. However, they do not entirely inhibit Facebook advertisers from success on the Facebook platform.

These changes could reduce the number of advertisers on Facebook to a much smaller group and, as a result, could reduce the cost of advertising on Facebook.