In early 2021, Apple will be rolling out an update requiring all App Store apps to follow its AppTrackingTransparency (ATT) framework. What will happen is that this update will require each app to show a prompt to all iOS 14 users at the initial login, which will be asking users for permission to use their data. Apple has announced this update is forthcoming, but they haven’t shared the final date when this update will take effect.
Facebook has expressed that this update may come at some point in Q1 and anticipate that most users will opt-out of this prompt.
Although this new update will improve user privacy controls, it will have an impact on targeting, tracking, delivery, measurement, and reporting for advertisers moving forward.
What will be affected for Advertisers (Facebook)?
Tracking
- 72-Hour Delay In Delivery: When an event is changed, it will trigger a 72 hour “paused” period before campaigns can deliver using changed events.
- Partial Reporting: Facebook is planning for advertisers to receive partial reporting in Ads Manager and Events Manager for additional events outside the priority 8 events.
- Limit on Pixel Events: Advertisers will be limited to using 8 conversion events per domain, including both standard events and custom conversions, for optimization.
- Facebook will initially decide the “strongest” conversion events they believe are the most relevant to the business. If necessary, Agencies will then be able to update the configuration via a soon-to-be-launched section in Events Manager.
- Conversions Based on Spend: The 8 conversion events will be based on campaign spend within the last 28 days.
- Lookalike Audiences: While the lookalike audiences may see size decreases, the actual size of a lookalike audience will not be impacted. Despite the audience size decrease, advertisers are unlikely to experience a noticeable impact to performance of ad sets using these audiences.
Targeting and delivery
- Default Attribution Windows: We will now be seeing a 7-day click-through and 1-day view-through to 7-day click-through only for all conversions and catalog sales objective campaigns.
- Advertisers and anyone who is running ads should expect delivery to be less efficient compared to historical performance.
- Audience Size Decrease: Website Custom Audience sizes will decrease due to the loss of some events from iOS 14 users, which is ~50% of the US OS market share, typically a higher amount amongst affluent users.
- Dynamic Ads Impact: Although these formats will continue to work, they may not report some events from iOS 14 users and may see performance decrease drastically. There is a greater impact for Dynamic Ads based Retargeting rather than Dynamic Ads for Broad Audiences, since Dynamic Ads for Broad Audiences relies more heavily on onsite signals.
Measurement and reporting
- Conversion events will be reported only based on the time the conversions and not the time of the ad impressions.
- There may be a 24-48 hour delay when an offsite conversion is reported from iOS users.
- Facebook will no longer support 28-day click-through, 28-day view-through, and 7-day view-through attribution windows.
- Delivery and action breakdowns will not be supported for offsite conversion events. This includes demographic breakdowns such as age, gender, and region
Facebook Response:
In response, Facebook will introduce its own prompt before the Apple prompt, further explaining how Facebook uses data.
Apple has created a new protocol for web attribution called Private Click Management (PCM). PCM does not support app-to-web conversion measurement or cross-domain measurement. In response, Facebook is building out an Aggregated Event Measurement (AEM) to address these gaps, including app-web attribution. Additional details on event configuration will be provided in early 2021. There is no plan to build separate ads managers/systems for Android/iOS operating systems, so Facebook may continue to make updates throughout 2021 to accommodate the iOS14 requirements.
Next Steps for Clients To Take:
- Verify website domain within Facebook business manager
- Define the priority of events that are most important to the brand.
Example of the event priority list:
- Initiate Checkout
- Page View
- Purchase
- Add to Cart
- Expect changes to attribution windows
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- Attribution window changes can affect measurement and overall reported performance.
- Identify campaign optimization strategies that may require testing such as alternative audience options or different bidding strategies
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- Benchmarks may need to be revisited as platform-reported metrics involving pixel events will likely take a hit.
The above pertains primarily to FB properties, but the iOS changes will ultimately affect advertisers across all Social platforms.
Google’s Response
Google is also expecting to see a loss in ad revenue due to reduced visibility into performance metrics and measurement including conversion modeling. Advertisers will also see fluctuations in delivery and performance for ad campaigns that run on IOS. Google has provided an updated SDK for IOS tracking through Apple’s SKadnetwork for analytics, which may provide some visibility into app tracking. Google’s own apps which track data will no longer use ATT (Apple’s IDFA identifier) to track information once the update goes live. Google press release: here
Facebook will continue to work with industry bodies — including within the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), the Partnership for Responsible Addressable Media (PRAM) and World Federation of Advertisers (WFA) — to develop and implement new standards that further protect people’s privacy, but do so in a way that keeps content free for people and enables businesses to grow. Facebook is hoping Apple will collaborate in these efforts with the industry and leave regulations to governments. Facebook is committed to standing with small businesses and their use of personalized ads to bring people free content.
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