How Apple’s iOS 14 Release Might Affect Your Ads

The major updates in regards to iOS

You may have (or maybe not) heard a lot of talk about challenges relating to reporting and advertising.

The digital marketing landscape is undergoing some pretty major shifts in regards to tracking and the personalisation of ads.

These fall into 3 categories:

01

iOS 14 Update

Users will be asked to “Allow Tracking or “Ask Apps Not To Track”. People that opt out will will still see ads, but they will be less relevant.

02

Cookie Blocking

Safari and Firefox already have full Third-Party Cookie Blocking and Google has said it will the same before 2022.

03

Ad blocking

Ultimately, increasing revenue is the focus of what we do, and an increase of 533% is a great result.

The background of this social phenomenon.

In June, Apple announced changes with iOS 14 that will impact the way in which advertisers are able to target and deliver personalised advertising.

Apple’s proposed changes will limit our ability to effectively reach, understand and engage people on mobile devices and across the web. These changes mostly affect our ability to understand performance, control who sees your ads and make informed decisions about your advertising budgets. As these changes take effect, over time, you may see an overall decrease in ad performance and personalisation and an increase in cost per action.

Areas that will be affected:

There are a few areas that will be affected by the iOS 14 update.

Attribution

The attribution or lookback window used to attribute a conversion to an ad has been shortened to 7 days after clicking or 1 day after viewing.

Pixel Tracking

The pixel is limited to 8 conversion events per website. As Facebook can only report on one of these events per session we will need to set their priority.

Estimated Results

For web conversion events, statistical modelling may be used to account for conversions from iOS 14 users.

No support for breakdowns

Delivery and action breakdowns, such as age, gender, region and placement will not be supported.

Delayed Reporting

Real-time reporting will not be supported and data may be delayed up to three days. Conversion events will be reported based on the time the conversions occur and not the time of the associated ad impressions as previously was the case.

Audience size

As more people opt out of tracking on iOS 14 devices the size of your website Custom Audiences may decrease.

We simplified this down

Before these changes were introduced the percentage of users that were invisible to tracking pixels was minimal, but since they’ve come into force the difference is a lot more noticeable.

So, what have we learnt?

On first inspection it may seem the performance of your ads are declining, when in actual fact the only thing has changed is the number of people we are able to track. This means our ability to optimise our advertising budgets efficiently and effectively will be directly affected, as well as the relevance and size of our retargeting audiences. We don’t anticipate the proposed iOS 14 changes to cause a full loss of personalisation but rather a move in that direction over the longer term.

Listen to Dan discussing it in more detail.

Worried about the performance of your ads?

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