Nowadays, most advertisers use The Identifier for Advertisers (IDFA) to collect user data and target ads.
IDFA associates a unique random number with the user’s device, allowing advertisers to more accurately target their ads and evaluate ad interactions.
In June 2020, during the Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC), Apple announced that with the release of IOS 14 in fall 2020 – ID will only collect data with the permission of users themselves. But Apple later postponed these changes to early 2021.
What does that mean?
Any application that wants to use IDFA must request permission from the user to transfer data. The permission request will remind you of sending a push notification. If a person agrees, they will see relevant ads matching their preferences, it will be the same amount of advertising, but on random topics, niches, interests.
Now the main challenge of the business is to convey the value of these changes and make sure that IOS 14 users agree to data transfer. And this is not easy.
For example, on Instagram, there is a setting to allow the use of data from partners to display personalized ads.
Audience Network
Audience Network allows you to place ads outside of Facebook and reach your audience through mobile apps, games, and websites on mobile devices.
Restrictions on the collection of IDFA will lead to the fact that advertising on the network will be less relevant.
For most advertisers, apart from mobile app ads, which are quite rare in using the Audience Network (although Facebook strongly recommends using it), there will be no significant loss in performance.
Campaign optimization
How does the Facebook ad campaign optimization algorithm work? Facebook tracks what people make purchases or other actions on your website or mobile app within a given targeting. The algorithm then automatically shows the ad to users who are similar to your customers. The more conversions, the more accurate the Facebook optimization algorithm will work.
Advertisers ‘ campaigns that use the Audience Network as their primary placement will no longer be able to optimize properly and find high-quality traffic. The problem is a lack of data, which affects reports in analytics systems and the Facebook Ads Manager itself. Probably, the number of conversions will not fall, just they will not be assigned to a specific source/channel.
Data on user behavior
Facebook will have significantly less information about people’s actions outside of Facebook by losing access to information that links user behavior across apps.
Retargeting
Now, without clear information about potential consumers, less personalized ads will be displayed in apps and devices. It will be difficult to determine who is being served the ad and Facebook’s algorithms will not see how it affected the decision-making conversion. Also, users will be able to allow applications to show only an approximate location instead of the exact one, as before.
Lookalike Audience
The Lookalike audience is a significant component of marketing, and it is often built from lists of the most valuable buyers uploaded as a user audience. Lookalike will take much longer to build, as there will be fewer indicators to build it. There is an assumption that most of the audience will be built on the basis of demographics and interests that provide conversion for existing campaigns.
Facebook’s own placements
Most advertisers use the placements on Facebook itself – the actual feed, Instagram, Messenger. These platforms are available everywhere: in the app or in the browser, on a mobile device or computer. Advertising on these sites will remain effective, and advertisers will be able to benefit from full clear targeting, as before. But the performance indicators may differ from the current ones.
For example, if your KPI is impressions/reach/clicks (i.e. what happens in Facebook products, not in the app), then everything will remain at the same level. And everything related to in-app actions and behavior of users inside the app will obviously sink and will depend on whether the user has given permission to collect and transfer his data.
The leaders of mobile app analytics have already given their assumptions and forecasts for the new tracking, as the changes to iOS 14 affect a very large proportion of users.
Summary
Changes in the IDFA transmission will affect both advertising in applications (e-commerce and other projects) and advertising of the applications themselves. Because ad campaigns simply won’t be able to optimize on incomplete data about user actions, and the ad itself won’t be as personalized as it is now.
How advertising campaigns will really work and how this will affect their effectiveness, we will be able to find out more precisely already in real cases after the release of innovations from Apple.
