MARCH 2021 UPDATE:
How To Mitigate The Effects of Apple’s New Policy: Changes To Facebook Ads
I’ve spent some time learning as much as I can from Apple’s and Facebook’s response to this iOS14 rollout in Q1. I’m going to share what I think I know about event tracking impacts for eCommerce.
Facebook’s overview is not very specific to Shopify or eCommerce. There are A LOT of unknowns with specifics to this industry.
I believe the largest impact is App to App advertising. Specifically, iOS apps advertising on Facebook promoting app installs. These rely on shared data to help attribution conversions. Apple even outlines this in its official iOS14 data privacy guide.
I may have a blind spot. I don’t know the full impact of users clicking on ads from the Facebook iOS app that leads to your website on Safari/Chrome/etc. Can iOS block your website from tracking, too? Nothing I’ve read explicitly states this will happen.
With Safari’s recent changes in Q3/Q4 resetting cookie expiration to 7 days amongst other privacy enhancements, I believe Facebook’s response is one that is more comprehensive around iOS14 + the ITP browser industry as a whole.
Here’s the summary of event tracking changes (i.e., “pixels”):
- You’ll be limited to a maximum of 8 conversion events. This is a combination of events from your tracking (like purchases, add to carts) and custom conversions (from URL matching, etc.).
- If multiple events are completed by a user (i.e., “add to cart” and “purchase”), only the higher prioritized event will be reported. This is where the accuracy of event tracking, to me, comes into play the most. With Facebook moving to Value Optimization and missing a % of events, this could skew your ROI reporting.
- I believe that email and SMS signup conversion reporting is so much more important than we’ve previously tracked. With FB removing 28-day click, 28 view-thru, 7-day view-thru conversion windows, the necessity of analyzing the performance of campaigns against non-purchase events is that much more important. For example, if you know that every email is worth $1.50 and costs you $0.75 to acquire an email for a campaign, you may ramp spend in a similar manner you did if these were the purchase conversion values.
For us at Green Stick and our customers is this;
We will put as much focus as we can on ensuring all conversion events are tacking as accurately as we can humanly support. This month we will be meeting with Facebook Partners to understand their stance on Apple’s iOS14 policy requirements and provide you with the guidance to help you plan.
Want to read more about FB Conversion API options? Read More Here
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