The Apple iOS 14.5 update is out. What is it and what can we expect?
If you work with Facebook Business Manager or use an iPhone you may have heard about the Apple iOS 14.5 update, and might even be affected by it now that it’s in effect.
Why is everyone so concerned with this update?
This update will include App Tracking Transparency under the privacy setting. Allowing you to control which apps you’d like to track your activity, which then will be converted to usable data for marketers. The update requires every app to ask you if tracking is authorized before turning it on.
For example, in the past, if you searched for “The best dog park toys” in Google you may start seeing similar dog-related merchandise on your social media for sale a few days later. That is because tracking was turned on for all your apps and Apple didn’t allow you to have control over any tracking.
The concern is that a lot of people, or most people, will just auto-click through the update, not reading and click no on tracking for all apps. Now because of this update, the conversion events are no longer reliable, we can’t count Apple users unless they have tracking on, and if they don’t we won't ever know they converted or not.
What is Apple’s hope with this new update and what to expect?
The hope is that privacy and personalization can coexist. Now that privacy has become a top priority for people, Apple is trying to make its customers feel secure with their Apple product. They want to protect people's privacy while not having to sacrifice showing relevant and meaningful content.
Apple will be investing in privacy-enhanced technology based on cryptographic and statistical techniques to minimize the data collected, processed, and shared to help protect data at different stages of the data life cycle. They are in the early stages of figuring this part out.
To go along with that Apple will be exploring aggregated advanced measurements to process aggregated data for advertising. This limits the access to the individual's information that is processed. That is called federated learning which is designed to keep the personal data on the user's phone while usable data is still collected.
What can we do now?
The first step going into the change is to verify your domain and then prepare for Aggregated Events Measurement. This means your domain's conversions event limit is eight if used for conversions.
For example, if a business has three pixels they would share the same domain, and if each pixel had a conversion event of its own that would count as three of the eight allowed. For small businesses this may not be too big of a problem.
The next step is to know your audience. As the change is made and people opt-out your numbers are sure to change and you may need to re-evaluate what your ideal customer looks like in order to keep your business at the top.
If you still intend to run conversion campaigns on Facebook Business Manager each ad must include the domain of the page where you intend for conversions to happen. Keep in mind if you use a conversion campaign it will still exclude those who opted out of tracking.
Facebook and other advertising platforms are planning on releasing new ad types and different solutions throughout the year. There are already plans to take down Facebook analytics June 30th and Facebook attributes this August. Instead of analytics, Facebook recommends Facebook Business Suite which will show detailed insights about your audience, content, and trends.
There is no need to worry; as Facebook and other social media platforms adjust new solutions will come out.
Contact us to talk about how we can help you scale your businesses with social media marketing.
