How Advertisers are Navigating iOS 14’s Mobile Tracking Changes

It’s been several months since Apple’s iOS 14 update went into effect, and the dust has slowly settled. One of the main questions was “How are advertisers dealing with the changes in mobile tracking?”

Earlier this year we talked about how this change is changing could Impact on advertisers, but now let’s follow up. Have new strategies developed? What did advertisers do to reach their target audiences?

In this post, we’ll discuss how advertisers have dealt with the changes to iOS 14 mobile tracking and give you some tips on how to continue to be successful with social media and online advertising.

Wait, what happened to the iOS 14 update?

In summary, Apple released a new update in early 2021 that would affect how advertisers reach their audiences. With the iOS 14 update, users had to sign in or give permission to an app to track their activities outside of the platform.

So why were advertisers and marketers concerned? Well, a lot of ad campaigns target audiences based on their online behavior. If an app can’t track this information, then ads become less personalized and therefore can be less effective.

The concern of marketers was that they might not be able to deliver their ads to people based on certain activity, such as: B. if they had visited their website. This meant ads would likely have smaller audiences and less accurate reports.

In addition, with this update, advertisers are only allowed to use up to eight conversion events from a single website domain. That said, if you’re running a campaign and tracking several different types of conversions (like lead, landing page views, purchase), you’re now limited to eight at any one time.

Now you may be wondering “What did advertisers do?” Let’s discuss it below.

How Advertisers Navigate iOS 14 Mobile Tracking Changes

While the iOS 14 update still left advertisers skipping a few steps in setting up their ad campaigns (domain review and aggregated event management), the update ultimately wasn’t the death of retargeting or Facebook ads.

Of course there have been changes. So far, it looks like more than 90% of users have chosen not to track data. That’s more than industry experts predicted.

So what did advertisers do?

1. Diversification of advertising spending.

The main story of how advertisers navigate the latest iOS tracking update is the diversification of ad spend.

This means that companies have shifted some ad spend previously allocated to Facebook to other platforms like Google because of its remarketing capabilities and the ability to target users based on search intent.

2. Report Facebook success with Google Analytics.

While some of the money is still being used for advertising on Facebook, there are a number of ways of reporting.

Companies have started using UTM parameters in their website’s URLs to generate data that will be tracked by Facebook for Google Analytics. That means you can use Google Analytics to track some of the activity of your Facebook ad campaigns.

3. Use of own data for lookalike audiences and retargeting.

Strategies like using lookalike audiences or retargeting an email list have continued to produce results. As privacy updates become the norm for the big tech companies, marketers need to focus on their own data to keep their campaigns informed.

You can address lookalike target groups with your own data (e.g. an e-mail list) or address exactly these people again.

Remember, you can still use the old method of retargeting campaigns as not all of your target audience is on iOS devices. You can continue to use the channel as an inexpensive way to get some return on advertising spend (ROAS).

4. Use of other Facebook advertising opportunities.

In addition to these new approaches to approaching advertising campaigns, some advertisers are investing in other ways to reach their audiences on Facebook.

For example, you can use the messaging target to create a lead generation chatbot on Facebook Messenger. There are options to retarget users you contact on Messenger and start conversations with new leads who click on one of your ads.

Additionally, Facebook has another strategy that advertisers have been exploring: the Facebook lead ads (in-app lead form).

While using your own landing pages is definitely the preferred method, in a world without cookies, using lead forms on Facebook can help you generate leads and collect first-party data.

The changes to iOS 14’s mobile tracking have made Facebook ads less effective, but there are still ways for advertisers to target their audience and generate leads on the platform.