New Delhi: Mark Zuckerberg and Tim Cook are in a fierce duel with Apple users being able to turn off tracking via its latest mobile operating system update, iOS14.
Bowing to advertisers’ concerns over Zuckerberg’s festive season, Facebook, the world’s largest social media platform, made a confession: “Apple has announced changes with iOS 14 that will affect how we interact with tools like the Facebook Pixel.” Receive and process conversion events. Businesses that advertise mobile apps, as well as businesses that optimize, target and report web conversion events with any of our business tools, will be affected.”
Facebook has been strongly critical of Tim Cook’s masterstroke of retiring the Identifier for Advertisers (IDFA) in the iOS14 update.
Not surprising at all. Apple’s search ad revenue market share has improved, while personalized ads on other platforms have been affected – read Facebook the most.
“Specifically, Apple will require apps in the App Store that Apple defines as ‘tracking’ to show a prompt to iOS 14 users in accordance with their App Tracking Transparency Framework. Apple U.S. policy will restrict some data collection and sharing unless people choose to do tracking on iOS 14 devices via Prompt. As more people opt-out of tracking on iOS 14 devices, ad personalization and performance Reporting will be limited to both app and web conversion events,” Facebook blogged over the weekend.
The company sought reassurance, saying, “In response to these changes, we will begin processing pixel conversion events from iOS 14 devices and subsequently use aggregated event measurement. This will help protect user privacy and effectively.” Will help you run the campaign.”
Cook is actually doing more damage to Zuckerberg than just a series of scandals so far.
The changes made in iOS 14.5 – asking people if they want to opt-out of apps that track them on the web – are appealing to users.
Advertisers who rely on Facebook to sustain their business, especially in the coming festive season, are not happy at all.
Performance marketers – who want people to buy immediately after clicking – are struggling the most.
They believe the public has chosen to allow Facebook to be tracked by Facebook, so they can’t be sure that people are buying their products after seeing their ads.
Even Facebook expects us to make fewer purchases as a result.
“Just going completely blind” is how Aaron Paul, a performing Facebook marketer, described it on CNBC.
Paul’s company carousel has grown from spending millions of dollars a day on Facebook to a few hundred thousand dollars. Before the change to iOS, Facebook generated 80 percent of the carousel traffic sent to its product pages. It has crashed only up to 20 percent.
Even beyond the festive season, Apple’s iOS changes are doomed to irreparable damage to Facebook’s advertising business.
Marketers have noticed that relying on a single channel (albeit very effective) is risky. So they are trying to diversify. For example, Paul told CNBC that he has shifted his advertising budget elsewhere – not just Snapchat and TikTok, “but also silent killers like email”.
On Twitter, Facebook marketers stuck to agreement.
“We have heard from many of you that the impact on your advertising investment has been greater than you expected. The cost of achieving your business results has increased and it has become difficult to measure your campaigns on our platform. In some cases “This is due to under-reporting on our part. We estimate that overall we are reducing iOS web conversions by about 15 percent, although there is a wider range for individual advertisers,” said FB Vice President Graham Mudd.
Storms facing the world’s largest social media platform include the Wall Street Journal’s disclosure last month that “Facebook Inc. kind of understands”.
It is “based on a review of internal Facebook documents, including draft research reports, online employee discussions and presentations to senior management”.
“Time and again, the documents show, Facebook researchers have identified side effects of the platform. Repeatedly, despite congressional hearings, its own promises, and numerous media exposures, the company did not fix them. The documents thus paint perhaps the clearest picture of how widely known about Facebook’s problems within the company, up to the chief executive officer himself,” the Journal has said.
Facebook was at $303 on April 26 when the iOS14.5 version was launched. It was priced at $376 when the iPhone was unveiled on September 14th – and is now down to $326.
Apple has stayed flat at $148 since the iPhone launch, but is up an impressive 10 percent over the past six months.
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