Starting in early 2021, Apple began enforcing its AppTrackingTransparency framework (the Apple prompt) in all apps in the App Store. As a result, advertisers running campaigns targeting iOS 14 may be impacted by data sharing limitations on Meta platforms.
You can learn more about Apple’s App Tracking Transparency here.
On IOS 14, apps, including Facebook and Instagram, must ask for users’ permission before sharing data (such as gender, age, hobbies, search history, and more) for advertising purposes.
Without getting too deep into the technical implications of these changes, it means that user privacy has become more important, and it is now more difficult to obtain and analyze information about their behavior, control who exactly will see your ads, etc.
Therefore, Facebook Ads measurement is a bit less accurate since many of the users targeted by advertisers have Apple devices.
The most significant changes in Facebook Ads in the IOS 14 era:
Pixel Tracking & Reporting – Fewer events are reported, so advertisers get a less accurate picture of their campaign’s results. Plus, no more delivery and action breakdowns of IOS 14 users. This includes gender, age, region, and placement.
Optimization – Since less data is been collected, it is now more difficult for the Meta (Facebook) algorithm to analyze the performance of the ads and optimize accordingly.
Remarketing – IOS users who visited your website can not be included in remarketing campaigns.
IOS 14 – What To Do?
According to Meta (Facebook), there are still several steps that advertisers should take to avoid this inaccuracy as much as possible:
Facebook Domain Verification:
Configuring and measuring conversion events should not be disrupted when your business domain is verified. There are three methods of implementation. Your webmaster will only need to use one. The three are DNS TXT, HTML, and Meta Tag. You can find more about how to verify your domain here.
Event priority:
Prioritize your top 8 conversion events that are most important for you to track.
Enable Advanced Matching:
Turn on advanced matching. Just follow these steps. Go to the Events Manager and select your pixel. Click on “Settings” and turn on automatic advanced matching.
Implement the pixel’s server side (Conversion API – CAPI):
In eCommerce platforms like Shopify, it’s a built-in feature. On other platforms (like WordPress, for instance), there are some plugins like Pixelyoursite that can do it for you. In some other cases, you need a developer to implement the CAPI properly. You can learn more about how to do it here.
IOS 14 Tip: Campaigns Separation:
If before IOS 14 you could see exactly which audiences (i.e. gender, age, etc.) are performing better in your campaigns/ads and make the necessary changes. Now you can’t. So it is sometimes recommended to set up different campaigns and see what works better. For example, one campaign for males, another one for females, and so on.
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