When it comes to the Apple iOS 14 changes, several things are happening in the internet space that have been transformative for digital advertisers. Many of them stem from legislation and governances adopted by technology platforms since 2020. Read on as our Wendt Media team shares their insights and expertise in these updates and learn how we help our clients navigate Apple iOS changes masterfully to successfully target audiences.

General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) enacted by the EU, is a set of guidelines that have been adopted by most American/Global technology platforms and ad services. The GDPR addresses how ad tech companies collect data. Browsers can leave bits of your user identifiable information across the web. You searched for a product, looked at colors and different aspects, and looked at comparable information. Those bits, known as cookies, are used by ad-serving companies to target users repeatedly based on the cookie data.

Retargeting campaigns result from cookies and the data gained from a user’s behavior on their devices. Cookies are instrumental in how data is gathered and utilized by ad-serving companies. Due to GDPR, many browsers, devices, and publishers now allow users to either “accept” or “do not track” the use of cookies/tracking on the site. Wendt expects retargeting estimates and campaign metrics to be somewhat lower than previous years from various ad tech platforms, including Facebook.

When you visit a site or app, you opt out of tracking; that data bit is lost to the ad tech serving company, and advertisers have now lost that bit of behavioral tracking. This has been occurring since early 2020. As a result, behavioral targeting is harder to do. However, it is still available from other sources such as Google and The Trade Desk, which have engineered their own “privacy sandboxes or unique cohorts.”

Pam Bennett, Senior Media Strategist
The Wendt Agency

ATT Policy and Audience Targeting

Advertisers are shifting to contextual targeting, search-based targeting, social and content engagement metrics, and ad assets and videos. Placement in content-rich, content-matching environments is one way of targeting and finding our audiences. Programmatic technology helps us correlate content and context to find prospective customers. Based on data from these sites, using first-party or content matching technology, we capture the user’s attention and clicks from this strategy.

BUT: Apple has now thrown a wrench in the mix. They have prioritized user privacy over targeted advertising, from any platform or app serving to Apple devices – anything that uses iOS 14. Apple has now implemented the ATT policy – App Tracking Transparency, and it is one of the most restrictive. The consent from users will prompt across every app and is not transferrable to ad networks. For example, an iPhone user will not be able to see or be served any behavioral or contextually targeted ads previously available before the ATT policy began. This rollout started in late March 2021.
However, this doesn’t change our targeting – for any digital campaign, we would still want to target all users regardless of their device/platform, but the ATT policy will impact the tracking data received from Apple devices.

We can still break out the data of various mobile users (iPhone vs. Android).

For our advertisers, this means:

• Minor impact to targeting audiences and securing impressions – since it is based on inventory and cost.
• We can still measure ad click engagement on your site and implement site pixels; GTMs (Google Tag Manager containers) and Google Analytics will be source one for providing the information of a user’s journey from ad serving your pages.
• UTM tags can also be implemented for granular study of an advertising campaign.

In summary, the changing and dynamic forces in the advertising ecosystem impact users’ privacy and willingness to participate in data collection. These changes will likely have the largest impact on social media tracking, specifically Facebook placements. Facebook has been openly and adamantly opposed to the Apple iOS 14 changes in the months leading up to the roll out. This is because these changes will impact how Facebook receives and processes conversion events from tools like Facebook pixels. So, as more people opt out of tracking on iOS 14 devices, ad personalization and performance reporting will be limited for both app and website conversions.

Tegan Bauer, Social Media Specialist
The Wendt Agency

Key Apple iOS 14 Changes*:

• Campaigns with the objective of app install may be severely limited.
• Real-time reporting will no longer be supported, and campaign data may be delayed up to three days.
• Both app and web conversion reporting breakdowns, like age, gender, region, and placement, will no longer be available.
• The attribution setting (see below) will change, which may result in a decrease in the number of reported conversions. The default for all new or active ad campaigns (this will not affect past campaigns) will be set at a 7-day click attribution window instead of the current 28-day click. o The attribution setting is the
• period during which conversions can be credited to your ads and used to inform campaign optimization.
• Facebook pixels will only be able to optimize for eight conversion events for each website domain.
• Facebook may begin using statistical modeling to account for conversions and report results from iOS 14 users.

*Source: How the Apple iOS 14 Release May Affect Your Ads and Reporting. Facebook for Business. Retrieved 18 May 2021, from www.facebook.com/business/help/331612538028890?id=428636648170202&_rdr 

The Apple iOS 14 change has both good things and bad things for advertisers. In a nutshell, Apple is requiring app owners to ask for explicit permission to track users to other apps. Many people will certainly deny that. And it does limit some tracking and add complexity to online marketing efforts, which have come to rely on this specific type of tracking. However, this is not nearly the death of online marketing or tracking. It is just another adjustment in the highly fluid world of online marketing. One which applies to Apple products only (not that we all aren’t tied to our iPhones but …). Does that mean ad placement and spending might shift? Of course it does. But savvy marketers (and their agencies!) have been preparing for this and are already shifting communication strategies in ways big and small, such as leaning more heavily on contextual targeting to find an audience through the content or environment they are interested in and by working with programmatic vendors who have invested in cross-device tracking (remember that web browsing you do at your work computer?).

CAROL KRUGER, SENIOR VICE PRESIDENT
THE WENDT AGENCY