How Can Advertisers Deal With IOS 14 Updates?

A traditional approach is to launch a prospective advertising campaign to first increase brand awareness, use the same audience that has interacted with your ads in some way and then retarget them. However, with this update, we will have fewer data to rely on. What this means is that the audience size for the retargeting campaigns will be much smaller.

It has been noticed that because of this smaller audience size, the ads frequency rates are much higher. The frequency rate is the number of times your ad has been served to an individual. This means that your ad is being shown to the same person multiple times and not to unique users. Now, if this frequency rate is too high, it could compromise the campaign’s performance.

Here is what you can do to tackle this. You can target people who have interacted with your Facebook or Instagram pages. This would potentially increase your audience size significantly and would keep the frequency rate low and steady.

Advertising agencies in Dubai and around the world recommend that you should mirror your actual audience using multiple options available on the Facebook platform. This has worked for many and still is a good enough starting point. Facebook gives enough options to choose and edit.

What’s important to note here is that you should not aim to go granular when setting your target audience. Yes, it has been a rule of thumb to not go too broad but now that Facebook has less data, it might impact your campaign performance.

That is why you should keep the audience a bit broad so that the algorithms have enough room to test and learn audiences. It would help you optimize your campaign later on as well by understanding what audiences are responding to.

One thing to always keep in mind is that you should not go into the yellow and red zones in the Audience Definition section when setting the audience. As long as you’re in the green section, you can go as broad as you can, surely a bit more than you would in normal circumstances.

If you are still not using Facebook Pixel, you’re definitely missing out on a lot of advantages, especially when it comes to campaign performance. Using Facebook Pixel can help you optimize your targeting and you, as an advertiser, should be making use of such an important tool.

We all know about Facebook Pixel but there is another tool that you can utilize. That is Facebook conversions API. It is allowed to be integrated with Facebook and it works alongside Facebook Pixel to maximize tracking and generating data.

You might ask if there is a difference between Facebook Pixel and Facebook conversions API. Yes, there is a difference. Facebook pixel is a browser-side tool and it tracks users through the browser. One downside of Facebook Pixel is that it can be blocked by cookie blockers.

Facebook conversions API is a server-side tool that does not rely on cookies to track data. It tracks data using server events and that is why it can’t be blocked as well.

Use these two tools wisely to track data and then use it to target an audience that is bound to act upon your advertisements.

If you have an active CRM, you can easily upload this CRM data into Facebook and create a lookalike audience there. This data includes info about people who have made a purchase or have subscribed, etc. This data can be uploaded to Facebook pretty easily. There is a catch though. The data you are trying to upload should have at least one of these eight indicators:

• Facebook app user ID
• Facebook Page user ID
• First name
• Address
• Phone number
• Mobile advertiser ID
• Surname
• Email

It is as simple as it can get. It should have the minimum required information but the more the info, the more the chances of finding that person on Facebook. Once it’s done, you can then create a lookalike audience and use it in your campaigns.

Now after the iOS 14 update, Facebook doesn’t have enough data for a conversion breakdown in terms of segments such as age, platform, gender, etc. You can surely see the breakdown in terms of impressions, clicks, etc. but detailed segmented data is not there anymore. This is a huge constraint when it comes to campaign optimization and growth hacking.

Now what you can do is to get this data using Google Analytics. If you have UTM tracking active on your campaigns, you can use it to access segmented information using the Google Analytics platform. This also includes gender, age, location as well.

Now, you should know that Google analyzes data differently and it would not match exactly to what you see on Google but you will get enough insights that you can use to optimize your Facebook advertising campaigns.

Always crosscheck the conversion data on Facebook by using external platforms such as your CRM. If according to Facebook your conversions have decreased, you should crosscheck it from your CRM If the data doesn’t match, that means Facebook has not tracked some of the conversions from paid campaigns.

To wrap it up, we understand that Facebook advertising has been so effective because of the detailed data that Facebook has about its users. Now after this iOS 14 update, that has taken a huge hit and it has definitely impacted Facebook’s targeting capabilities and eventually decreased the effectiveness of Facebook advertising campaigns.