There are some really key actions and strategies that you need to implement so that you can protect your advertising from the iOS 14 update. In this post we will go over the complete list of actions to take.
What is iOS 14 and why does it matter to Facebook Ads?
When iPhone and iPad users go through the next iOS 14 update, the next time they open Facebook they will be asked if they want Facebook to track their activities across other websites There will be only two options as shown in the image below-
While Facebook won’t report how many people decide to not be tracked, it’s safe to assume the majority won’t opt in.
I looked through all my ad accounts and found 40% of the users were on iOS devices. So we’ll lose over 20% of our retargeting audiences. Don’t worry, we can still track leads and purchases (more on that later), however, retargeting is people who opted out is going to be nearly impossible.
How will iOS 14 impact Facebook Ads?
Here’s the old way of doing things: when you run Facebook ads you are able to track just about everything on your website. Things like: How many people made it to each individual page? How many people added to the cart? Where did they click?
Havin this information helps you to then segment your audience and send them targeted ads, for example here is an ad you could send to someone who abandoned their cart:
You can also use this information to track the actions users are taking,and their behavior. That way you could know how many users:
- Added to cart
- Viewed a specific page
- Added payment info
- Purchased
Knowing all of this is really helpful when you are optimizing your Facebook Ads because you can easily see where the process is not working well.
Back to iOS14, once people opt-out of Facebook tracking them, you will lose visibility of their behavior on your page. You won’t be able to show certain ads to people who completed actions or viewed specific pages.
Did someone visit a page for a fishing product? Well, if they opted out you can’t show them an ad for the product they were looking at.
Retargeting has been in the past a core part of any marketing strategy. This retargeting is what allows many marketers to break even or make money on the advertising investment.
What problems will iOS 14 create for your Ads and how should that impact your strategy?
Don’t worry, I would definitely keep running a lot of the same retargeting ads. While iPhone users represent a good chunk of your audience, there are still a lot of people this won’t impact: Android users, people on a desktop, and people who allowed it to track. The audiences might be a little bit smaller, but they will still be very profitable and important.
Quick tip: Don’t stop running your retargeting ads. Keep them running AND implement some new strategies.
Let’s look at some solutions for smarter retargeting in a post iOS14 world.
Solution 1: Move more of the ad cycle to Facebook
Are you sending people to a page to watch a video? Why not run the entire video or training directly on Facebook, and then you can create audiences to retarget the people who watched 25%, 50% and 75% of the video, or who engaged with it.
Start moving some of the content from your website to Facebook itself. You can track everyone on Facebook.
Solution 2: Focus on email
If done right, email can be a huge money maker. Once they give you their email, you can continue to email them until they unsubscribe. Create email opt-ins. You can give people special discounts and bonuses, but you’ll also want them to show interest in receiving future offers from you.
If someone simply opts in and never opens another email, this is no use to you.
Leads are really quality over quantity. Cheap leads rarely convert. That’s why I recommend creating a 5-7 day email sequence where you can build the relationship and make them offers. You can set up email purchase tracking and see how many people convert into customers.
And, for people who become customers: technically when someone buys from you and gives you their email, you automatically have some permission to reach out to them with new offers. However, I recommend that you always include a checkbox in your check out so that they can opt-in to receive future promos and emails. This way people will actually be more excited to receive emails from you.
Get people excited to receive your emails and build that relationship.
Solution 3: Up your ad game. Create more engaging, attention grabbing, and sharable content.
It is especially important to create ads that are more engaging, which will lead to more shares and comments. If someone likes your post, invite them to like the page. I do put it in my calendar and do this once per week.. That way those people will continue to see your posts, and you can build a relationship with them. You can also add them to a retargeting audience of people who have engaged with the page.
And, you need to up your copywriting game. That’s a HUGE part of getting engagement with ads. Here’s my copywriting training below.
What impact is iOS 14 having on my ad accounts?
Facebook seems to be overhauling their platform and things are a bit crazy. There’s reporting errors, ads reporting as 0 sales or the platform not loading properly.
What can you do?
Strategy 1: Look at ad set results, not campaign if you’re having reporting errors.
While there are inconsistencies on the reporting at the campaign level, if you go into the ad set results you can find more accurate data. You will actually need to tally up the ad set results to know how well the campaigns are doing.
Alternatively, a tool like Supermetrics can report every function including daily results. That’s how I’m currently tracking results. If you want to know more about it you can watch my video review by clicking here.
Strategy 2: If there is a delay in your data, turn off automations.
I used to have automations in place to help adjust the spend of my ads. So if a certain ad or ad set was performing better or worse, the automations would automatically kick in to either scale the ads or rein them in. These automations now seem to mess up with the data, so I was seeing my data with a delay of days sometimes. I now look at each campaign daily and compare the results to the actual sales on the website, and adjust manually. Once things settle down, I’m going to try and implement these automations to see if I can get them working again.
To learn more about ad rules, check out Facebook’s guide.
Strategy 3: Give historical winners more spend
If a campaign has been performing well for the past 5 months, I am less likely to pause that campaign or turn it down just because the data has changed. Since I know it has been a strong performer in the past I trust that information, especially when I compare it to the actual purchase numbers on any given day.
Strategy 4: If your data isn’t working, do slightly less new ad launches
It might be wise to launch less testing campaigns right now. Since the data collection is weird right now, and you really need good data to make good decisions, you might want to wait a little before launching new campaigns.
Strategy 5: Create a separate checkout
If you need to know exactly how many people that come from Facebook actually purchase, you can create a separate checkout page only for people from Facebook. That means that anybody who lands on that page would only be people Facebook sent. You will have the exact numbers through looking at you Google Analytics.
What are the biggest changes we will see thanks to iOS 14?
Big change 1: Attribution window
You will no longer be able to do 28-day-click or 28-day-view. If you’re unfamiliar with ad rules, if somebody clicks on your ad and makes a purchase within the time frame, that ad will get credit for the sale. So, it can be set to 1 day click, 7 day click, or 28 day click, meaning that ad could still get credit 1, 7, or 28 days after they click on your ad. The maximum attribution window is now going down to seven days. So now, if someone clicks on an ad and buys a product 10 days later it will not show up in your results.
Obviously you would have still made a sale either way. But you will probably see the performance of your ad account itself drop.
Important: This change is not only for the people who opt out of tracking, these changes will be for everybody.
My suggestion here would be to track the exact number of purchases that are happening on your website. That way, if you see a drop in your Facebook Ads performance, but there is no change in your actual sales, you could probably conclude that people might be buying out of the 7-day period.
This change especially impacts businesses that sell expensive products. Generally these products have a longer sale cycle, and require more follow up on your part. So, you might need to shorten your process here. So instead of having a sequence of follow ups that last 3 weeks, you might want to take that down to 1 week.
Also, keep good track of your customer list. This way you can actually compare your results on Facebook with your growing client list, and upload this list to create a Lookalike audience.
I would also start relying more on google analytics. You can get a lot of good data from there, and use it to compare it to your Ads results. If you need to set up Google Analytics I have a great tutorial you could check out.
Big change 2: Limited to 8 events per domain
You will now be limited as to how many Events you can have in each domain. Events are things you can track with your Pixel, like view content, add to cart, purchases etc. So going forward you need to be very intentional in deciding which events you want to track going forward.
Big change 3: The most impacted group will be the App developers
People who are running Facebook ads that direct to App downloads will be hit the hardest by all the changes coming up. While you can use deep linking to track behavior in the App itself, you won’t be able to use deep linking for people who opt out.
Big change 4: It is more important now that ever to verify your business with Facebook.
This has always been an important step to take, but now more so that ever. If you have not yet verified your business I will show you how to do it step by step
First, go to Business Info and set your primary page, and click save.
Then you will want to set up your business details.
Once you have filled out your business details you can click on “View details” of the Business Verification Status. Here you can set up the two-factor authentication for added security. For many of you, the “Start Verification” button will appear blue, which is what you want. If it’s blue, click the button and move on to the next step.
If “Start Verification” is blue, click here to be taken to the next step on this page.
If the button is greyed out the button is grayed out, as in the image below, you will have to take a few extra steps.
Sometimes it is greyed out because you have not filled out your profile enough, so go ahead ad fill that out.
If it is still grey after that you will want to go to Apps and connect a new App id to manage business integrations.
You don’t have to completely finish the App installation, you just need to click next on the first few prompts and that will usually allow you to go and verify your business.
Continue here after it says “start verification”
To finish verifying your business you will need to fill out all your details
Then you will choose a verification method. My favorite way is to receive a text and then enter the information.
How can you improve your tracking ability?
Installing a conversion API will help you track your customers as they come from Facebook ads and into your page. I will cover the API setup for Shopify and WordPress.
Feel free to watch this video, or follow the written instructions below:
Conversion API setup – Shopify
To skip to WordPress click here
To skip past conversion API setup, click here
First of all, you need to make sure you have the Facebook sales channel installed in Shopify. If you don’t have it already you can easily find it and add it.
Once you have added it you need to set it up. Click on the Facebook Sales channel and select “Create free and paid ads on Facebook”
Then you will need to make sure you select the correct Facebook Ad account and Facebook page
On the Data Sharing tab make sure to select the Maximum option, this will make sure you use the Conversion API
Also make sure to select the right Pixel for the website. After the pixel you will also need to select your target country.
The conversion API setup is ready!
If you already had the App installed, make sure you go into settings and in Data sources select the Maximum level (as we did above). Also make sure that you have the right Pixel.
Conversion API setup – WordPress
Open your WordPress site, we will come back to it in a second.
Go to your Facebook page and click on Ads
Then in Business Tools go to Event Manager
In events Manager you will select the Pixel that is on the website you want to set this up for.
I would recommend that you copy your Pixel ID and save it for reference later
Now on that same window go to Settings and scroll down until you find the Conversions API section
Now you will see the option to Choose a Partner. Once you click on that you will be able to choose WordPress
Then select advanced matching and enable the conversion API.
Then you will be able to create and Access Token, which you can copy and paste on the same place you have your Pixel ID. Then click Continue.
Then we can download the Plugin. It should download as a Zip file. If it does not try using another browser. Click continue.
Now Facebook will show the step-by-step instructions of how to activate the Plugin on WordPress.
To follow the instructions let’s go back to WordPress. On the left menu select Plugins
The click on “Add New”
Then you will be able to upload the Plugin. Choose the file you just downloaded from Facebook. This is why it is important the the file is in a .zip format.
Click on Install Now
And now you are ready to activate the Plugin
Then you will be able to configure the Plugin
First of all, make sure that the Pixel ID matches the one you had copied earlier. Then enable Advanced match if it is not enabled already. Also enable “Use Conversions API?”. finally paste the access Token you had generated, and save the changes.
Now go back to Facebook and verify the connection. Keep refreshing the page if it says that it is not active.
Click on continue. We will skip the event setting for right now. If you would like to learn to set up events check out my full tutorial here.
Once you click on continue you will go into confirmation, and the Conversions API is ready.
What’s Next
You are all set to crush it with your ads even after iOS14.
Now you can just focus on getting insanely good at running Facebook Ads.
Luckily, I have you covered.
You’ll definitely want to take a look at my free 18 day Facebook Ads Course by clicking here.
It has over 4 hours of content and covers campaign setup, copywriting, scaling, research. Basically everything you need to know to be a successful ads manager.
Whether you’re just getting started or have been doing it for a while, there should be something valuable in there for you. It has a number of videos from my YouTube channel with extra resources, guides, and even several videos that don’t appear anywhere else.
The content is sent via email. You’ll also get my most up to date strategies via email each week that I don’t share anywhere else.
Join the 100+ people who have gone through the course by clicking here: https://jacob-le.com/18-day-opt-in/