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iOS 14 changes and impact on Facebook Ads

Wow! Apple’s bold move to stop pixels and custom codes to track your users/prospects. This will deeply impact advertisers on Facebook. As they now can only track 8 events per domain. 

Let’s understand what does this mean & how it will affect your facebook ads. I am taking a classic example of Jasper’s market that Facebook takes. 

1# Jasper’s market is a cross-country eCommerce website which operates parallely in the USA, Canada, UK & Australia. Now if you have separate domains set-up for every country then you will be able to track eight events per domain. But if you have a subdomain like jaspersmarket.com/ca or ca.jaspersmarket.com then you can only track eight events only. You can’t further segregate events based on subdomains. That is a really serious problem for advertisers who have cross-country businesses. 

2# Jasper’s market is an agency which works cross-country, now they won’t be able to reach out to users’ in different countries. You need to have separate domains to reach out.

Understanding the scenario of 8 Events:

Advertisers now can only track their users for 8 events. Earlier as you had the option to create custom events & even track 100 different events. Now you can only track 8 main events that are most important to you guys. 

I believe this update not only will bring along negative impact on advertising but may also improve the whole advertising landscape.

iOS 14 update and its negative outcome:

Now that the default attribution window will also change, you will be able to optimize only for 7 days attribution. 1 day click or view is dead. That will put pressure on the advertisers to generate results. You can’t control the performance of your campaigns. 

Since you only will have eight events to work on. The size of custom audiences will reduce. Which ultimately means reducing the size and performance of lookalike audiences. The whole iOS 14 policy update can increase cost of acquisition. 

With the updates, platforms envision that there will be delay in reporting the events. There can be a problem to correctly track the events as iOS 14 blocks cookies. This will impact the results that you are optimizing for. The biggest challenge will be that there will be no breakdown in results for age, region, placement etc. Dynamic ads will face many challenges & you need to verify your domain in business manager to get ads running correctly.

iOS 14 update and its positive outcome (speculation):

This update might bring along some positive changes to the advertising landscape specifically on Facebook. As the advertisers will be limited to 8 main events to choose from, the elimination of the not so important events will reduce the cost for small businesses. 

As advertisers have to rely more on their marketing skills rather than data. There can be chances only the advertisers with marketing minds win. For eg: earlier you can simply create lookalike audiences if you have enough data, which will help you generate more revenue. Now that this will be impacted advertisers have to rely more on understanding customer personas. 

Another advantage can be that now with eight main events, advertisers have the opportunity to optimize for events that are not targeting. This may reduce the cost of advertising on Facebook, if Facebook is able to better their algorithm with time. Advertisers also have an opportunity to better their Facebook marketing skills. More effort will go into researching the audience and only the good advertisers will win. 

The game is about to change from money can buy it all, towards good marketing can only help people buy.