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 begun to settle. One of the main questions has been, “How are advertisers handling the mobile tracking changes?”
Earlier this year, we talked about how this change could impact advertisers, but now, we want to follow up. Have any new strategies evolved? What have advertisers been doing to reach their target audiences?
In this post, we’ll discuss how advertisers have navigated the iOS 14 mobile tracking changes and give you a few tips on how to have continued success with social media and online advertising.
Wait, what happened with the iOS 14 update?
To summarize, at the beginning of 2021 Apple released a new update that would impact the way that advertisers reach their audience. With the iOS 14 update users needed to opt-in, or give permission, to an app to track their activity outside of the platform.
So, why were advertisers and marketers concerned? Well, a lot of ad campaigns target audiences based on their behavior online. If an app can’t track that information, ads will become less personalized, and in turn, could be less effective.
The concern for marketers was that they wouldn’t be able to deliver their ads to people based on certain activities, like if they’d visited their website, for example. This meant that ads would likely have smaller audience sizes and less accurate reporting.
Additionally, with this update advertisers are only allowed to use up to eight conversion events from a single website domain. This means if you run a campaign and track several different conversion types (like Lead, Landing Page Views, Purchase) you’ll now be capped at eight at any given time.
Now, you might be wondering, “What have advertisers been doing?” Let’s discuss it below.
How Advertisers are Navigating the iOS 14 Mobile Tracking Changes
While the iOS 14 update has made advertisers jump through some more hoops in setting up their ad campaigns (getting domain verification and aggregated event management), the update ultimately hasn’t been the death of retargeting or Facebook ads.
Of course, there have been changes. So far, it looks like more than 90% of users are opting out of data tracking. This is more than industry experts were predicting.
So, what have advertisers been doing?
1. Diversifying ad spend.
The main story of how advertisers are navigating the latest iOS tracking update is diversifying ad spend.
This means companies have shifted some ad spend that was previously allocated to Facebook to other platforms like Google because of the remarketing features and the ability to target users based on search intent.
2. Reporting Facebook success with Google Analytics.
While some money is still being used to advertise on Facebook, there are different ways of reporting.
Companies have begun using UTM parameters on their site’s URLs to generate data tracked by Facebook to Google Analytics. This means you can use Google Analytics to track some of the activity on your Facebook …read more
Source:: HubSpot Blog
