We’ve all seen either bright yellow warning signs in our Facebook ad account, Facebook’s full page ad in the NYT, the Facebook ads on The Daily calling on the government to “clearly define privacy law”, or the write-ups on The Guardian, The Verge, Wired, or Bloomberg… the signs are everywhere. To sum it up in a sentence, Apple’s AppTrackingTransparency framework that will be released in iOS14.5 later this month requires Facebook to blatantly ask for the user’s permission to track and utilize their data for paid advertising. That means you, as a Facebook user will have to explicitly give Facebook permission to track your behavior and use it to sell advertising.
What this means for marketers and publishers is a little more complex. Ultimately, it is going to be harder to advertise on Facebook. Harder logistically (the back-end requirements are a little dense) and harder to reach the person you’re intending to reach. As more people opt-out of tracking on iOS14 devices, ad personalization and performance reporting will be limited for both app and web conversion events.
As consumers become aware of data that Facebook tracks and knows about their behavior, it’s fair to assume the rate of consumers that opt-out of tracking will be substantial. However, what is Facebook’s loss might ultimately be publisher’s gain, so the changes should not be assumed to be all bad.
I’ll spare you my personal thoughts about this (No I won’t, actually: Go, Apple! ✊ Make my job harder if it gives consumers more privacy! Did you see the list of things they track!?), and get into how this is going to impact your business.
Facebook has shared some helpful articles laying out exactly how marketers need to prepare, but it’s not clear *exactly* all of the ways Facebook marketing efforts will be affected. The digital marketing community is anticipating more of a wait-and-see type thing.
So what exactly is changing? A lot:
1. Targeting Limitations
As of May 2020, Apple had 52% of the market share of American consumers. It remains to be seen what percentage of users opt-in to Facebook’s targeting so the exact impact is unclear. But if you use web events to build your audiences, including ‘Page View’, to retarget visitors who were on your website, you should expect disruption. This also means your suppression audiences won’t be all-encompassing and your ability to create lookalike audiences based on your user data–one of TFD’s favorite audience types–because Facebook will be building profiles from fewer data points. Sigh.
Real life example: When you run an offer for $12 and you have subscribers that paid $26, there is a chance that they could see the lower price.
Because the size of your off-Facebook owned audiences will be changing, that could mean an increased dependence on interest-based audiences. This could create a need to re-evaluate your paid social budgets entirely.
2. Conversion Tracking
Another area affected is Facebook’s ability to own the datastream collecting data outside of their app (on-website activity). The Facebook Pixel is now handcuffed from collecting and storing data on users, if they opt-out. As a result, Facebook is changing how it reports conversions, anticipating conversions to decrease when it can no longer collect conversion data.
Currently, you can choose your ‘view-through conversion window’ up to 28 days, meaning when a user clicks on your ad, or scrolls past it and then makes a purchase on your site in the next 28 days, it counts towards your conversion total in your reporting. Going forward, Facebook is only going to be saving browser-based conversions for 7 days. If you depend on the historical 28-day view or click and 7-day view attribution data, you should export it before the changes go into effect.
Real life example: No longer will you be able to build audiences to target people who “had a page view pixel event in the last 180 days” or “made a purchase in the last 30 days”. Sigh again.
3. More Reporting Impacts
In rolling out the anticipated effects of these changes, Facebook noted that because of this gap in tracking for conversions, it may take a few more days for your campaign conversions to show up in reporting, as the campaigns will become relying on statistical modeling to fill in the gaps in browser conversion data, in the absence of iOS tracking.
Because Pixel conversion tracking is going to change, you may see a decrease in MOM performance (or even YOY), because those view-through and click-through conversions will not be showing up days after the fact. Because Facebook will be filling in the gaps with statistical modeling, it will not match up 1:1 with your sales data.
What Need To Do Right Now To Prepare
1. Configuration
In order to comply with the new standards, businesses will need to verify your domain to prove that you own the domain in which your web pixels are collecting data. When Apple pulls the trigger on their new policy, any ad campaigns that are utilizing a pixel event with no verified domain associated will be turned off. (don’t say we didn’t warn you–if you take nothing away from this blog post, let it be this.)
For anyone that runs ad campaigns optimized for conversions on domains that are shared, like subscription pages, event pages, ecommerce stores, scheduling pages... as far as we know, you will not be able to verify the domain. (We have asked Facebook for clarification on this point.) This means that you may not be able to track conversions using the Facebook Pixel, or optimize to Landing Page Views. You may be limited to campaigns that are based on clicks or impressions, inside of Facebook’s realm, rather than optimized to off-site conversion metrics.
After you’ve verified your domain, you will need to outline eight preferred web conversion events in order to leverage Facebook’s Aggregated Event Measurement (AEM) tool (the thing that will do the statistical modeling of conversions mentioned above). Any changes made in the AEM will take 72 hours to complete, so if you have any deadlines coming up for campaigns, it would be best to get started on this now.
TFD Tip: Remember to set-up upper funnel conversion events such as Landing Page Views, especially if you use that as a conversion event optimization strategy. If you haven’t set up your event in the AEM, Facebook will turn off your paid campaign, for optimizing to an ‘Unsupported Event’.
In order to utilize statistical modeling to attribute conversions, Facebook is requiring that you select eight web events to be used in Ad Manager as conversion events. In order to set these up, you will first need to verify your domain and do a little “soul searching” to determine which events are most necessary. This will be a little tricky, especially for our friends with non-owned subscription pages, as purchase events will not be on a verified domain. I’d suggest Landing Page Views as a top eight event so you can build a retargeting audience. Purchase or Subscription, if you own the domain. Lead, for email collection, white paper downloads, registration for upcoming events (again, if you own your domain). Determining the remainder will be specific to your business goals. I want to call out that we don’t actually know yet how the model will fill in the gaps for users that have opted out, and if the LPV event will put that user in a retargeting audience.
After you set up the events, you need to assign the events to each event configuration. Placing the events in order of importance to your business so the algorithm(s) know what to prioritize.
2. Conversions API
If you’ve gotten this far and think, “okay this is a big change for how I run my paid social campaigns”, Facebook is putting together a new product that will comply with Apple’s privacy concerns, but… it’s a little complicated. Meet the Conversions API. I know just the word API makes people’s eyes cross, but hang with me for just a second.
Essentially, Facebook is creating an API that is completely private, that can collect data similar to a browser pixel, but rather than hosting and reading the data, you own the website engagement data, with the user’s permission. To be fair, with ad platforms and browsers killing the third-party cookie, this was bound to happen sooner or later. Apple just sped up the process.
The Conversions API is a secure channel that allows an advertiser to send conversion data to Facebook, similar to how the browser Pixel currently works. Because browsers are implementing privacy changes, browser-based cookies are beginning to phase out, and the Conversions API allows businesses to house and save conversion data, and send select pieces of data to Facebook Ads Platform. Facebook wants advertisers to implement both the Pixel and the Conversions API for “full-funnel visibility.” Because the Conversions API is owned by you, the business owner, you will have the ability to match conversion data with other data, like data from your CRM or lower funnel events.
Facebook is spinning this as a way to support efforts to provide consumers with appropriate data transparency, giving advertisers total data control. So far, it seems like a way to get more data on your consumer’s behavior , but with the liability on the advertiser (again, you). If you implement the Conversions API, your business will be responsible for requesting the user’s permission to utilize their personal data on Facebook, but if you overlay that data with any of their personal data in your CRM, you’ll need to disclose that as well.
Unlike the Pixel, the Conversion’s API will require server access, coding ability, and a process to de-dupe Pixel events and Conversion API events. Picture the Conversion API as a Pixel on steroids, you can store, save, and add context to conversion data. Then the advertiser can choose what data it sends back to Facebook, to then use to target users. This gets around Apple’s privacy rules, because Facebook is not collecting the data on the advertiser’s website, the advertiser is. The advertiser then uses that data within Facebook’s ad platform.
3. Be a resource for your clients
If you’re still confused after reading this entire blog, imagine how your clients and the small businesses you work with are going to feel! Not only are they losing some tried-and-true conversion metrics, but the entire online advertising ecosystem is becoming increasingly complex and difficult to navigate. Maybe that is where you can help. This could be an opportunity to manage more digital advertising business for your existing clients, taking this entire mess off of their hands entirely. Additionally, this is a perfect opportunity to share with them the street-legal first-party data you have on your audience and how you can help them reach their marketing goals with your audience as well.
What’s that saying? “When one door closes…” Or perhaps, “Don’t cry because it's ending, smile because it happened.” We will most likely not return to the freewheeling early days of digital advertising, when you could stalk your potential customers for weeks with offers for the items they absent-mindedly left in their cart 5 minutes ago. One day you can tell your grandkids stories about how you participated in the digital advertising gold-rush, when targeting wasn’t regulated and you could get away with just about anything.
That was a lot of information and unfortunately, we don’t have all of the answers yet. But because we’re all in this together. TFD hosted a support group webinar where we talked through some of these changes. We covered the steps for domain verification and how to set up and order your events. Here is the link to the webinar to watch!