How Apple’s iOS 14 release may affect your Facebook Ads

As you may know, Apple released changes with iOS 14 that affect how they receive and process conversion events from tools such as the Facebook pixel. Apple now gives users the chance to opt-out of their data being tracked, impacting on data collection.

Whilst these controls were previously available, they required users to manually check for them. This means that Apple users receive prompts from their device to opt into or out of data collection for each app they use. If permission is denied, apps will have a reduced ability to track site and app behaviour via their pixels. In response, Facebook has made changes to pixel implementation and event tracking. This is in order to minimise the amount of lost data.

What this means

As mentioned previously, Apple’s iOS 14 release prevents data collection and sharing unless people opt into tracking on their devices. If they decide to opt-out of tracking on their iOS 14 devices, ad personalisation and reporting will be limited.

Facebook responded to these changes by introducing a new way of processing pixel conversion events from iOS devices. To do this they use Aggregated Event Measurement (more of that later). This supports your efforts to preserve user privacy and helps you to run effective campaigns.

How will it affect your Facebook advertising?

Whilst we don’t know for certain how these changes will affect our client’s Facebook advertising, we can expect the following to happen:

Your Facebook pixel will only optimise for a maximum of 8 conversion events for each domain

Facebook configures the conversion events that they believe are the most relevant to your business based on your previous activity. All other events are made inactive for campaign optimisation and reporting.

Delayed reporting

Real-time reporting is not supported and data may be delayed up to three days.

No support for breakdowns

For both app and web conversions, delivery and action breakdowns, such as age, gender, region and placement are not supported.

Changes to account attribution window settings

Since Apple’s iOS 14 changes has taken effect, the attribution window for all new or active ad campaigns has been set at the ad set level, rather than at the account level. The default setting for all new or active campaigns (other than iOS 14 app install campaigns) are set at a 7-day click attribution window. 28-day click-through, 28-day view-through and 7-day view-through attribution windows are not supported for active campaigns. As more people opt-out of tracking on iOS 14 devices, the size of your app connections, app activity Custom Audiences and website custom audiences may have decreased.

How to plan around the iOS 14 update

Despite the changes following the Apple iOS 14 update, there are some simple workarounds to eliminate any significant changes to your ads and reporting.

Verify your domain

Domain verification is part of the changes Facebook implements in respect of Apple iOS 14 privacy changes. Domain verification establishes which Business Manager account has the authority to configure. It prioritises the 8 available conversion events for a given domain. If you’re optimising for conversions, then verifying your domain is THE most important thing to do to avoid any future disruption of your campaigns. If you’re running Facebook ads, you will have already seen prompts in Ads Manager to verify the domain associated with the account.

Domain Verification is a simple process that you can do inside your Business Manager. There is one step you need to perform on your website that involves one of the 3 following processes:

• DNS Verification
  Add a DNS TXT record to your domain host to prove that you own the domain. Most domain hosts allow this, but the specific steps for each service will vary.
• HTML File Upload
  Upload an HTML verification file to your website. To do this you need admin access to your website’s root folder. This will verify your domain immediately.
• Meta-Tag Verification
  Set the meta-tag containing the verification code into the <head> section of your website’s homepage.

Review your current pixel events and decide which 8 events you’d like to track

You will need to configure 8 preferred web conversion events per domain in Events Manager. Facebook’s Aggregated Event Measurement limits domains to 8 conversion events that you can use for campaign optimisation. Facebook configures the conversion events they believe are the most relevant to your business, based on your previous activity. Ad sets optimising for a conversion event that are no longer available were paused when Aggregated Event Measurement launched in 2021.

Exclude iOS devices from campaigns with conversion objectives

This certainly isn’t a permanent solution to running paid advertising on Facebook. However, doing so may give you an insight into what you can expect.

Create campaigns outside of the conversion objective

This would mean running traffic campaigns or similar. Then, use your website’s tracking to determine if a sale or conversion occurred as a result of the ads. You can use UTM’s and a variety of other tactics to determine which campaign, ad set, and ad that a conversion took place from without having to rely 100% on Facebook’s tracking pixel. You can also use lead generation campaigns as well. This strategy will not undo the impact on retargeting audiences but will help you to drive results from prospecting campaigns.

The future of Facebook ads

Many people see this as the ‘death of Facebook’. However, this is not going to be the complete end of Facebook advertising. It is very frustrating for Facebook advertisers, but there will be several workarounds in the coming months to help. As mentioned, start testing and attempting to rely less on the Facebook pixel. You can also explore ways to get more out of other advertising channels like Google, Bing and LinkedIn and build re-marketing audiences through those platforms.