If there’s one thing we know for sure is that the world is an ever-changing place. If you are a business owner or a marketer, adapting to new changes is something that will always happen.
Today we are going to talk about what are the new privacy changes that Apple will be rolling out later this month with iOS14. I’m going to explain how this will significantly impact Facebook and Instagram paid advertising for Course Creators and E-commerce businesses, and what you can do about it (even if you are not running ads for your business yet).
Apple is rolling out an App Tracking Transparency policy (ATT). This is a prompt that will pop when you open an app on your apple device. The prompt will ask you if you want to be tracked across your website activity. For Facebook and Instagram apps, the prompt will say something like “Allow Facebook to track your activity along other apps and websites”, and the user will have to manually opt-in or opt-out of being tracked.
So what is the difference between the current privacy policy and the new one?
With the current privacy policy, you automatically opt in to be tracked by advertisers when you use the app. And you manually have to go into the privacy settings of the app to opt-out.
With the new privacy policy, everyone will be asked if they want to opt in to be tracked by advertisers. Apple is saying that they are implementing the ATT policy because their users have the right to know if someone is tracking them.
How will this affect Facebook and Instagram paid advertising for Course Creators and E-Commerce businesses?
Facebook has estimated that only ⅓ of the users will be opting in to be tracked, which will massively impact the data that they collect for advertisers to use. Below is a list of what the impact will be for course creators and e-commerce businesses:
- Interest audiences: Since Facebook won’t be able to track behavior patterns for as many users, advertisers won’t be able to relay as much on interest audiences for cold targeting.
- Retargeting campaigns: Retargeting tools are going to be smaller since Facebook won’t be able to use the data collected once someone takes an action on the ad or landing page (if that person opted out of being tracked). Businesses will have to rely strongly on 1st party data sure as email lists, phone numbers, etc, for retargeting.
- Facebook reporting and optimization: Gender breakdown. Age breakdown and Region breakdown are going away. This will affect the way we currently optimize and scale advertising campaigns.
- Conversion window attribution is changing: Measurement windows are changing from 28 days clicks to 7 days click. This will highly impact conversions results in your monthly reports.
What can you do about it if you are a course creator or e-commerce business?
- Verify your domains inside Facebook Business Manager. Facebook has advised advertisers to verify their domains as soon as possible so their campaigns don’t get paused.
- First-party data is now more important than ever. By first-party data, I mean all the customer data that your business owns. Emails, phone numbers, conversion APIs, and more.
- Lead generation campaigns are going to be VERY IMPORTANT. This applies to course creators as well as e-commerce. If you don’t have a campaign where you are collecting your customers’ emails, you should start now.
- If you have a Shopify store, look into how you can implement Shopify’s conversion API. This will give Facebook conversion data that you can use for your ads
- Don’t panic. The world of advertising is always evolving and changing. Changes like this have happened many times before. As advertisers and business owners we’ll always have to adapt to changes.
- Facebook is working on finding different ways to continue capturing user data and they are spending billions of dollars on this so this is just the beginning of this phase
Ana Katz Digital 