What do agencies need to know about the upcoming iOS 14 update?

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

What can agencies do to ensure their clients’ businesses benefit from the impact of the latest iOS 14? 

Do you work for an agency but don’t know how to help the companies you work with deal with these changes? 

Fret no more! Help is at hand.

Straight from the horses’ marketing mouths

A tale of marketing agency experts from both sides of the Atlantic

Review

Diary Chronicle

Timeline of events

A roundup of what's been going on

Get up to speed with the iOS 14 update

Compendium of useful advice for agencies to help their clients

July 16th

An oldie but a goodie with some useful advice

Mobile marketing agencies - Apple killed the IDFA - what this means and what to do now:

Alex Glenn 

“Here’s what you can do next

Tell your clients who have mobile apps about this.

Form a plan to capture more emails, SMS, push notification opt-ins with their ad dollars.

Start shifting strategy and budget to acquiring more lead/customer contact info and more user push notification opt-ins.

If you have clients who do not yet have a complete iOS app, introduce them to Tapcart.com - and reach out to Sina about partnerships.

By the way: if you’re a Tapcart customer you wouldn’t have to worry about this since Tapcart is an owned marketing channel and you can reach shoppers directly via push notifications, in real-time.

Also, have you heard of App Clips (streaming apps)? Use a native mobile app without having to download it. This will be a game-changer as you can offer a native app experience without the friction of having to visit the app store or even install an app:” https://www.cnet.com/news/app-clips-apple-wwdc-2020-ios-14-theres-an-app-for-that-but-you-dont-have-to-download-it/ 

Jonah Katz (Marketing/Growth at Tapcart) summarizes an article from June 29, 2020, by Eric Benjamin Seufert: Apple killed the IDFA: A comprehensive guide to the future of mobile marketing 

2 (numbers refer to minute in the video)

As an agency, you should sit down and have a frank talk with clients, outside partners, vendors about a plan and solution to counteract what’s happening.

3

High percentage, high impact!

iOS 14 opt-in predictions range from 0-20-50% 

4

Desktop only campaigns are less affected, but if you want to measure cross-device, mobile data you can't inform desktop performance and vice versa. 

“How are you able to accurately link your ad campaign to a particular user to understand how those campaigns are performing?”

Campaign optimization solutions like fingerprinting allow you to pull in less personalized attributes like IP addresses, operating system, device, iPhone model

but it’s not as valuable as knowing the exact device and tracking where they go.

5-9 mins: especially worth a listen if you work for an agency:

Alex Glenn: “If I’m an e-commerce agency helping my mobile app clients (that have mobile app e-commerce stores) with advertising and I do mobile app user acquisition campaigns (not e-commerce) what should I start doing today?” 

Jonah Katz: A Gold first step (now and even more so long-term)

“That’s a really good question. I think that will vary from agency to agency and client to client, and how robust your specific mobile app install campaigns are, how robust the specific customer base is. 

I would say, if your agency is running mobile app install campaigns or you’re a brand that has their own app, make sure you’re able to capture as much data from consumers as possible (within reason, within privacy bounds). If you have a newsletter or an account they can create with an email address, that’s really valuable information, it’s going to be even more valuable in the long run; any kind of data you can grab from your consumers now to inform your future marketing efforts. If you have customer lists, you’ve got phone numbers, you have email addresses, try and extract that if you can, within reason, but that’s going to be almost gold, moving forward. I think that is the biggest thing I can say. 

You’ve got to use your own customer base to help inform your future performance because it’s going to be a lot harder to buildup in Facebook, like lookalike audiences, retargeting is going to be more difficult because it’s going to be harder for you to target people who add an item to a cart but didn’t make a purchase; most of that is based on your advertising identifier. So if you have things like email addresses, that’s going to give you a huge, significant advantage, but not every app has that, so I would start to look at your customer base and see, how large is it? Can you get any significant data from that? 

Things like Facebook and  Google [Gmail], they have their own custom email addresses when you sign up for an account (they even have phone numbers if you prefer to use that), so they’ll be OK, it will still take a hit on them from an attribution standpoint. But, in terms of your own specific app, try and take whatever you can or acquire any data you can from your existing customer base and try and drill down on some trends and see what you can do right there. I think that’s a very good first step.”

Alex Glenn: The advertising shift (in summary) 

Collect email addresses, opt-ins for SMS push notifications.

Try to get pre-download conversion

Capture a Facebook lead ad (instead of a direct to mobile install app)

It would cost more, so ship budgets to opt-in ads and email ads to get more contact data from these social users

Gather up a huge list to remarket to and directly message.

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7th Oct

How Apple is Transforming ADVERTISING with iOS14... (what to do next)

ANDREW ETHAN ZENG

4 

BTW, watch if you want a brief history of the app market.

“People with ad agencies are freaking out”

5 

Fun fact

The disable tag option has existed since iOS 10, 100s of thousands had it turned off but advertisers could still target effectively and make a profit.

6 

App advertisers have a problem

“Audience network is where ads appear in apps” so they’ll be impacted most. “If you’re a business that heavily relies on advertising in apps then this is a massive issue for you.”

The rest of you should be fine, to adapt to the changes Google and Facebook's response is to create ethical (non-tracking, privacy-respecting) inhouse 1st party data collection methods so they won’t be reliant on Apple.

Advice for advertisers and businesses:

Generate a custom targeting list, collecting target key customers’ emails, SMS

Create better ads, copywriting, ad psychology, creative, video

Better, broad ads

Don't rely on niched targeting.