Still having trouble understanding the Apple iOS 14 and Google Ads updates, and how they’ll affect the way you market you business? No sweat – we’ve put together this Q&A that hopefully makes these changes clearer, so you can best understand how you can prepare your business’ digital marketing activity. Don’t forget to bookmark this page for reference!
What happened to Facebook after the Apple iOS 14 update?
So, the Apple iOS 14.5 update comes with App Tracking Transparency (ATT). This feature means that users who download or update their existing apps (including Facebook) are now prompted about whether they would like their data to be tracked. If people opt out of tracking on Facebook, it makes it more challenging for advertisers to target the most relevant audience with the most relevant ads.
So, start panicking?
There’s no need! Technically, Apple has actually always included this feature within Settings – this pop-up just makes the setting more accessible to users as they download apps. And just like things are now, it’s unclear how many iOS users will actually opt out of the tracking, let alone updated to the new iOS system yet. It’s also important to note that these changes affect every business, publisher and organisation that uses Facebook advertising, so it’s still an even advertising playing field.
How will my ads be affected? Is it still worth using Facebook Ads?
Because some users may opt out of data tracking on their iOS 14 devices, you may find that personalising ads has some limitations, as does your ability to retarget ads. As such, the number of conversions may decrease and your costs per conversion increase slightly. It also means that any custom audiences you create may be smaller in size, too.
Facebook remains an immensely powerful tool to reach new audiences and interact with existing ones to help them convert. While custom audiences may be smaller, some audiences such as Facebook page visitors and video audiences aren’t affected, which still offers opportunties to retarget to big groups.
Furthermore, the changes also present an opportunity to diversify your ads strategy and see if there are other ways you can foster your brand awareness and conversions, be it on new social channels or by building your email database.
When are these changes happening?
The update has come into effect now. If you haven’t checked your Facebook Ads Manager account in a while, it’s worth logging in as Facebook has recommended changes to be made to minimise the potential impact on your ads.
Will the changes affect my business page?
There shouldn’t be any changes to your page at all, such as followers and organic post engagement, as this only focuses on paid ad content.
What can I do to ensure my ads still perform?
To help minimise impact to ads, Facebook is also going to measure web events from iOS devices via Aggregated Event Measurement. A maximum of eight conversion events is allowed per domain, and if you don’t manually prioritise them before the changes are in
place, Apple will do this automatically based on knowledge of your site’s contents and only the highest priority event will be tracked. In order for your Facebook Pixel to work effectively, you’ll also need to verify your domain.
I also heard there’s a Google change happening soon What is that about?
The major update (with a tentative rollout date of June) is called Google’s Page Experience Update and it is focused on Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS). This is how users experience unexpected layout shifts depending on the screen or device they are using (e.g. a button moves, the text shifts etc).
Other changes coming include a modification of a previous major update, called BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers). It’s a language algorithm that will improve search results as it helps to understand the context of search queries.
What does this mean for my website?
Content, content, content! Improving your content with relevant keywords and maximising the user experience with things like mobile optimisation and fast loading speed, will help ensure you rise up or maintain good page results. Ensure that you’re regularly publishing content that addresses key audience questions to build your industry authority and brand trust among your audience.
Will there be more changes coming?
We don’t know, but you can be sure that if there are, you’ll hear about it here!
Whether you need help safeguarding against the upcoming iOS changes or need to optimise your site to improve your search ranking, get in touch and let’s see how we can help you!
Hero image: Pete Linforth / Pixabay
