How apple’s iOS 14 updates will change your Facebook advertising campaigns….

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Facebook has released a statement to most Facebook advertising accounts to say that once Apple has released its iOS 14 updates, the use of ‘aggregated event measurement protocol’ will be used to process events for people that opt-out of sharing their data with Facebook.

But what does this mean?

Apple has stepped up its privacy and policy security for all its iOS users and is giving users the freedom to opt-out of having their data tracked and collected (good news for those that prefer tracking-free browsing).

Simply put, when an Apple user opts out, Facebook will no longer be able to see what actions or events they take after clicking on an ad. These events can be anything from a page view to a button click or purchase.

Why is this bad for advertisers?

On average, retargeting ads are 76% more likely to be clicked on than a regular ad. The Facebook pixel is a key tool for tracking and targeting these audiences from a website, but this update from Apple threatens the ability to track these events and conversion actions.

If your business relies on highly targeted remarketing ads and tracking conversions, then this could be bad news.

However, there is some good news too. As announced, Facebook is now using ‘aggregated event measurement pixel tracking’ to process events or actions from people that have opted out of data sharing from the iOS 14 update. As an advertiser, you now need to take one of three steps to verify your domain in order to comply with this new update. Here is a statement about this from Facebook:

Complete domain verification. We recommend that you verify your website domain. All businesses should verify their domain as a best practice. However, it’s important to prioritise verifying your domains if your domains integrate pixels that are owned by multiple businesses or personal ad accounts. Please note that domain verification is not a new process and businesses can complete it from their Business Manager. The key difference is that domain verification needs to be done at the effective top-level domain plus one (eTLD+1), but the process is otherwise the same.

So what is the Facebook ‘aggregated event measurement protocol’?

Until now, Facebook hasn’t restricted the number of events that you could set in your Facebook Business Manager. Now, Facebook restricts you to only identify eight conversion events per domain – those that are most important to critical business outcomes. You can arrange your eight conversion events in priority order in Events Manager.

Now only the highest priority event will be sent through to your campaigns. Even if a customer actions multiple events during a session, all other events may report numbers that are lower than expected, even if they are within the eight.

If all this has left you uncertain about how to respond to this change from Apple, if you need help verifying your domain with Facebook  or if you’re just looking to maximise your output from Facebook ad advertising then please get in touch with Marshall, our PPC and SEO Campaign Manager