The Association of National Advertisers has recently declared the marketing word of the year. We might not be shocked to hear that the choice for 2020 is now a familiar word—pivot. While we have all been pivoting our marketing plans for 2020, Facebook has also been busy pivoting plans for their ad tech based on changes in software from our favorite fruit in the industry, Apple.
Facebook making changes to their ads manager is not new. Earlier this year, they made changes to their attribution windows in response to iOS updates.
The most recent announcement from Apple could potentially have a larger effect on your conversion-based Facebook campaigns, depending on the timing of the official rollout. In 2021, Apple will be requiring apps in their App Store to leverage their AppTrackingTransparency framework.
What is AppTrackingTransparency?
According to Apple, this is when an app provider must implement it.
Use the AppTrackingTransparency framework if your app collects data about end users and shares it with other companies for purposes of tracking across apps and websites. The AppTrackingTransparency framework presents an app-tracking authorization request to the user and provides the tracking authorization status.
This means, Apple users need to opt-in to having their data shared with companies like Facebook. Because of this, we’re likely to see a reduction in data tracking to our campaigns, including the ability to attribute conversions to sales made on an Apple device. This could also affect ad personalization in terms of targeting capabilities, and ad creation. According to Facebook, this disruption will affect advertisers using pixel, Conversions API, or any other Facebook Business Tools that optimize, target or report on events from a web domain.
What is going to change?
Once the new iOS rolls out, Facebook will be changing the ads manager to track and report only on 8 default events. We don’t yet know what these default events will be, or how Facebook will choose them. However, it appears that we may not have control over what we can track, as Facebook will automatically pause pixel events that fall outside of their 8 default event choices.
This is likely going to result in a reduction in reported ROAS for your campaigns. We expect that Facebook will likely come out with a modeling solution to help compensate for this, but there is no understanding of what that could look like just yet.
There are also going to be additional steps rolling out for pixel-sharing. If a Facebook pixel installed on your website is shared with multiple businesses or ad accounts, there will be an additional admin step requiring domain verification for each business using the pixel. This should be a simple step completed in Business Manager, however there is the possibility that depending on when it is rolled out, there could be a temporary loss in reporting until the step is completed.
Here are summary of the changes and impacts we know about:
- Facebook will choose 8 default events to be utilized in campaigns, which may require an overhaul of how your pixel is set up today.
- Facebook updates will likely yield gaps in reporting availability and may require a new reporting format for clients.
- Pixels shared with partners will require an extra ‘domain authentication’ step to get certified and be able to be used by partners.
- Lack of data will yield lower reported performance and reported ROAS.
- Lack of data will also affect personalization opportunities and could lessen the impact of Dynamic Ads.
- iOS user in-app attribution problems affect App-based campaigns and events.
If you have questions about how these changes might affect your business, or want to discuss the changes in tech, give us a shout. We’re always here to help!
Image Credit: Jirapong – stock.adobe.com