In early 2021, Apple announced that with their newest iOS update, users would now be given the option to ask apps to no longer track their off-app activities. This tracking previously allowed platforms like Facebook, TikTok, and Pinterest to track what users did on other sites, and then allowed marketers to then remarket to those users on the platform. The announcement sent a wave of panic through marketers all over, and a scramble from Facebook (now Meta) on how to respond.
iOS 14 may have been a setback for sure, but was it worth all the panic? No, and it’s just the first in what is sure to be a decade of radical data and privacy changes in digital marketing.
Meta struggled to come up with a solution that would keep their billions in ad revenue flowing and rolled out Domain verification (verifying ownership of domains within Meta’s system to allow data to flow better), Conversions API (a direct connection from Meta to the server side of a website, circumventing browser limits entirely), Aggregated Event Measurement (a solution stemming from Doman verification that allows advertisers to prioritize which action are crucial to track, like purchase, submit form, etc.), and a bunch of other ‘fixes’ for the iOS 14 update that was rapidly coming down the pipeline. The problem with these ‘fixes’ was that they didn’t really solve the core issue, at least not 100%. Domain verification and Aggregated Event Measurement helped slightly but would still result in losing a huge percentage of data on nearly every user. Conversions API wasn’t going to fix anything either, since it just bypassed browser mandated limits on cookies, and offered no real solution to operating systems allowing users to opt-out completely. The options from Meta were not great.
Can you please do a brief explanation in simple terms of what these are?
By June 2021, the panic had fully set in. IOS 14 began rolling out and marketers everywhere braced themselves. They had no idea how many people would opt-out of tracking. Some estimates started at 20% or 40%, some rising to 80%. Meta continued to offer its ‘solutions’ and assured marketers that everything would be okay as long as the recommended steps were taken. Adoption of iOS 14 slowly rolled out, and the full breadth of the damage really wasn’t seen until late 2021, and they were worse than expected.
While most experts had anticipated 50% of iOS users would opt-out of sharing off-app activity with Facebook, in reality the percentage was closer to 90%. With Apple owning over half of the mobile market, this meant the elimination of off-app tracking on close to half of users in the U.S. Marketers, fairly enough, began to truly panic, even while Facebook continued to assuage fears with one hand and stealthily remove more and more targeting and reporting capabilities with the other.
Needless to say, late 2021 and early 2022 were an adjustment for many marketers. While the reports become more and more dire with time, life (and digital advertising) goes on. Off-app tracking, while an invaluable tool for marketers, was still a relatively new thing, with what we know as pixel tracking rolling out in 2017. Five years is an eon in digital marketing time, but in the broad scope of advertising, it’s just a blip.
The capabilities these platforms built themselves on are still there. Massive reach, demographic data, street level geographic targeting, and on-platform user behaviors and interests are still available and just as vibrant as ever. Not only that, but due to the next looming deadline on every marketer’s calendar, the elimination of cookies on Chrome in 2024 (though whether this actually happens is a whole other blog post in and of itself), advertisers have been working tirelessly to shore up first-party data building robust customer lists that could then be leveraged on these platforms through secure owned data.
iOS 14 may have been a setback for sure, but was it worth all the panic? No, and it’s just the first in what is sure to be a decade of radical data and privacy changes in digital marketing.
Will this make us more creative in our targeting? Absolutely.
Will we have to be better at managing first-party data? Yep.
Will we take these learnings and apply them to any and all of the changes that are to come? Of course.
We’re digital marketers after all. Things have always moved fast and that won’t change this decade either. Each tracking or pixel capability we lose, we pick up a new platform, a new audience, a new technology. Digital marketing changed drastically from 2010 to 2020, and 2020 to 2030 looks to be no different. In 2032 we could be writing about targeting users in the Meta-verse, or YouTube managing multiple streaming platforms. Platforms we rely on may not even exist then. But, we’ll be here for whatever happens next.
SOURCES:
Statcounter.com
Forbes.com
