How can agencies help prepare companies affected by Apple’s new iOS 14 app?

December 17th 

How to Prepare Your Business For the Huge Facebook Ad Privacy Changes Coming in 2021

Matt Johnston

The video that went viral

“Apple's new iOS 14 iPhone operating system has a feature rolling out in 2021 that is going to give users the upfront option to opt-out of tracking on all apps. This could have a devastating impact on many small businesses who use Facebook Ads to drive their revenue. Here is how to prepare for the shift.”

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Echoing Facebook, he says that “this could actually destroy small businesses if they are not prepared”.

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Paraphrasing Facebook’s own documentation, he goes on to spell out the implications: 

“If you're spending $50 and you usually get 5 sales from this, you may spend $50 and get two sales from it, for example. And while this might not seem like a big thing, think about this at scale, the difference between two sales on that $50 and 5 sales on that $50 is going to be the difference in breaking even or not breaking even, probably. It won't just hurt your ROI. So that means that you're likely going to have to spend even more on Facebook. But luckily there are some things that we can do and so there's a few steps that I want you to take right now. This is for business owners and any marketers out there who are implementing things for clients, although I highly recommend (is what we're doing with our client) wrapping your client into the process to make sure that everybody is on the same page about what's going on here.”

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“If you’re an agency, you're going to find that you're going to have a little bit of trouble here because you need to be the Admin on the Business Manager of your client. So what I would recommend is: you get together with your client and screen share with them and take them through actually connecting their profile through that Shopify account or through that WooCommerce. Because if you ever part ways then it won't be like the Shopify store and the Facebook data, it all sits with you. As an agency, you want it to be with your client, so you give it to your client. Also, chances are most agencies are not Admins on the Business Manager of their clients so this will fix that. So that's the number one thing you need to do.”

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“You want to start investigating Facebook and Instagram shops. Now I've never been too big on Facebook and Instagram shop because simply you can't control the experience. So much of where you send people after an ad matters, what that experience is like. And even though it's native in Facebook, at the same time, you don't get as much of an opportunity to sell there. You don’t get the opportunity to do a lot of marketing after the click, and doing marketing after the click is really important. So you’re at the behest of that. But, at the same time, if you've got Facebook and Instagram shop setup and you do this with Shopify through this Facebook plugin, then you're in a good position to be able to track because everything is happening within the Facebook ecosystem. Obviously, we don't want to be putting all of our eggs in the Facebook basket but listen if you're a small business that is making millions of dollars a year, as many are, just on Facebook ads, you're going to be screwed if you don't start thinking about this stuff now.”

Upset the Applecart

Not better or worse, just different 

Capitulation to Apple’s domain is not inevitable 

So what do I do now?

Matt Johnston (Founder and CEO of Guide Social Marketing Agency, based in Allentown, Pennsylvania) writes in his “iOS 14 Survival Guide” that the 1st thing you should do to “Beat the iOS 14 Privacy Lock Down” is:  

1) 

“Install CAPI (Facebook Conversion API) to beam back as much data as possible.

It’s a product from Facebook that beams back valuable purchase and lead information from websites to Facebook ads

For WordPress you need to use a plugin from Facebook”.

(Just in case: API, for the uninitiated, stands for Application Programming Interface

What's that?  

A computing interface that defines interactions between multiple software intermediaries, defining what kinds of calls or requests are made, how to make them, which data formats should be used, conventions to follow blah blah blah…)

“The Conversions API allows advertisers to send web events from their servers directly to Facebook. Server events are linked to a pixel and are processed like browser pixel events. This means that server events are used in measurement, reporting, and optimization in the same way as browser pixel events.” Facebook for Developers 

“The Facebook pixel is a snippet of JavaScript code that allows you to track visitor activity on your website. It works by loading a small library of functions which you can use whenever a site visitor takes an action (called an event) that you want to track (called a conversion). Tracked conversions appear in the Facebook Ads Manager and in the Facebook Analytics dashboard, where they can be used to measure the effectiveness of your ads, to define custom audiences for ad targeting, for dynamic ads campaigns, and to analyze the effectiveness of your website's conversion funnels.”)

2) 

“Verifying your domain helps Facebook trust your advertising and could lead to

better reporting 

Follow the steps in Business Manager

Go to Business Settings, then Brand Safety to set up and verify through your domain provider”.

3)

Video killed the image ads star

An image ad won’t be matched anymore with the right people, in the right place, at the right time, whereas at least a video lets you know how much they watched and, crucially, if they didn’t finish it when they bounced. If they did watch to the end, you could presume that some minimal rapport has been established between you and the viewer. I mean, it’s not as if viewers feel compelled to let a video finish talking (as they do with a person) before leaving them for dead and walking off. No cursed social constraint or pang of conscience is keeping them there to the bitter end, but rather interest and desire to know more; the ad worked it’s magic on them, unless they either endured it, were too lazy to skip it, or went off to do something else meanwhile. But considering how few video ads are watched till the denouement, when this minor miracle does occur, it might just suggest that you have a new web lead on your hands. So, in marketing terms, the behavioral retargeting of video ads will now be the biggest measure of that lead generation. In short, video advertising will give you the best clues going forward. 

“Since the AI is so powerful in Facebook ads, lame image ads could still work well because it

can find the perfect people at the perfect time

That optimization won't be as reliable now

Focus on video (because you can retarget video view percentage easily) and storytelling

Creative should center around pain points, problems, empathy, and ultimately, how

your product is the best possible solution”

4)  Return to the wild

(Return on Ad Spend is a marketing metric used to measure how much money your business makes for each $ spent on ads.)

“The ROAS (Return on Ad Spend) reporting metric in Facebook ads will be almost

entirely unreliable moving forward

Judge success by how much your revenue is growing overall compared to advertising spend

Use post-purchase surveys to ask customers where they heard about you to help with attribution”.

5) Do it yourself: Gather your data while you may

“Don't rely on the platforms to hold customer data - do your

best to gather it by having customers opt-in

Use lead magnets on your site and through ads to build your email list

Don't forget to gather SMS (mobile) numbers for text message marketing.”