Apple recently released an update for iOS that will change the way that Facebook ads are served. The release of this new version, 14.5, is going to have a significant impact on how the social media platform views and targets audiences as well as affects conversion data from their platform. This article aims to go into detail about what these changes mean in order to give you insight into how it may affect your advertising strategy moving forward.
This update is rolling out to iPhones at the time of writing and how much it will really affect advertising won’t be known for a few weeks. Apple’s iOS update will block apps from tracking a user’s location without their permission. This includes advertisers and is going to be the default setting for all phones released in the future. While this may not change much for users, it can have significant implications on Facebook advertising data.
For users who are using Facebook Lead Gen forms for their campaigns, iOS 14.5 won’t have much if any of an affect on your campaigns directly. This is because Facebook Lead Gen forms are native to the Facebook platform and are not subject to the new Apple rules. That being said, we will see how cost per lead changes over the next few weeks as more advertisers move to native Facebook advertising to get around tracking issues. Internally we are monitoring all campaigns and closely watching costs. We will be adjusting our algorithms accordingly to continue to provide low cost leads to our users.
For users who are using landing pages and or websites, iOS 14.5 may hit your metrics hard. Websites will be limited to tracking only 8 objectives per domain name. Since 99.9% of our users are only tracking one or two objectives this shouldn’t affect too many of our users. However you do need to register and verify your domain name with Facebook. If you are not verified by Facebook iOS will block all your tracking. Additionally if users opt out of data collection (which is the new default on Apple devices) pixels will be rendered useless. Because of this Facebook has introduced “Aggregated Event Measurement”. This will allow you to measure the metrics of events that are happening on your website without having to track them individually.
So what can you do to get your marketing in line with iOS 14.5?
1) Start using Facebook Lead Gen Forms.
Facebook Lead Gen Forms are native Facebook products and all the tracking is done internally on the app. iOS rules do not apply to this Facebook product.
2) Register your name with Facebook
- In Business Manager, click on the Business Settings button in the upper right corner. In the Business Settings, select the Brand Safety tab, and select Domains from the left side navigation list. Click on the Add button, and enter your domain in the Add a Domain pop-up dialog. If you have more than one domain listed, select the domain for which you desire to confirm ownership. Choose the method you wish to use to verify your domain: DNS Verification, Meta Tags or the HTML File Upload.
- If you are using a Patient Stream domain name, you will need to create a new sub-domain (yourclinic.domain.com) and update all the URL’s in your ads to the new domain name. You can verify your subdomain.
3) Prioritize Your 8 Most Value Events
Once you know your top 8 events you will need to setup those web events in the Aggregated Event Measurement tool in the Facebook Business Manager. Patient Stream support staff can help with this process so long as you let us know your events.
What is Patient Stream doing?
1) Patient Stream has made all our domains available to users eTLD+1 compliant. This means you can add your own subdomain to one of our free to use domain addresses and then verify that domain with Facebook.
2) We will be creating workflows in your Patient Stream dashboard that will allow you to send conversion data from Patient Stream into Facebook for tracking.
3) We are updating our algorithms to address expected cost increases on the Facebook platform.
4) We will segment our targeting between iOS devices and Android devices. This will allow us to adjust algorithms based on the two platforms.
No doubt iOS 14.5 will be a difficult update for advertisers, but we at Patient Stream are working hard to make sure our users campaigns continue to perform well.
