Digital Marketing

How The Apple iOS 14 Release Could Affect Your Facebook Ads

September 15, 2021Joel Mehler

Your business depends on Facebook ads to drive traffic to your website. Any disruption, even a small one, could impact your revenues from this channel. But as technology continues to improve, residual impacts will undoubtedly occur. Double Up is here to help you understand those effects and how we can continue to increase your website’s traffic without much effect.

The Apple iOS 14 Release

Apple announced some changes in iOS 14 that affect how people receive and manage conversion events using the Facebook pixel. For most of us, advertising on mobile is critical since 99% of people worldwide access social media on their mobile devices.

How we target, optimize, report on conversions may change.

In compliance with EU privacy guidelines and increasing concern over how much digital tracking happens online, the App Store will require Apps (like FB) that track to announce the fact via prompt. It will also prohibit certain types of tracking unless people opt-in.

Apple iOS 14 Update Impacts Businesses

Even though about 81% of people say they would trade their data to increase personalization online, there is still a large number of users that would agree to this.

Opting into something makes it more of a decision, while opting out is the default. A lot of undecided people will just stay opted out. Reporting and user experience will be impacted. Advertising has the potential to become less personalized and likely less relevant to many consumers. That means it’s harder to reach your target audience.

There is a good chance that this will push more businesses into a subscription-based model, which does allow for greater tracking and personalization.

It’s important to note that there’s been a lot of talk over the years about privacy rules eventually wiping out businesses’ ability to use tracking through means like Facebook pixels. But here we are years later, seeing ad revenues rise. According to The New York Times, online ad revenues increased about 56% in the second quarter of 2021 Q2. That said, this isn’t the time to be complacent.

Facebook is taking this seriously and so should you.

How Facebook Is Responding

Facebook will begin processing pixel conversions using Aggregated Event Measurement, a tool that limits domain conversions to 8 events that Facebook will prioritize for optimization.

This will balance privacy with conversion optimization.

Facebook has also released a set of steps for those using Facebook pixels for mobile conversions.

How Can You Get Yourself Ready for iOS 14?

  1. Update to Facebook’s SDK for iOS 14 version 8.1. This will help personalize the user experience despite these changes and let you keep receiving conversion events.
  2. Be sure to verify your domain, or you may stop receiving conversion data.
  3. Go ahead and update your events manager to limit it to 8 conversion events. This will allow Facebook to optimize those events within the new parameters.
  4. Exclude iOS when you set a conversion goal for the campaign.
  5. Start planning now how you can measure the effectiveness of campaigns without these conversions. This may require some outside the box thinking.

If you’re wondering how you’ll adapt your Facebook Ads to these iOS 14 changes, connect with the experts at Double Up Digital. We can help you manage the transition without massive disruption.

Joel Mehler

A graduate of the University of Alabama, Joel was first introduced to digital marketing and SEO while participating in an international internship program in Barcelona, Spain. Joel maintains consistent oversight on strategy performance, client relations and day-to-day operations. Joel is an avid traveler and spends much of his free time in search of Atlanta’s next fun trend.