Facebook Business Page Admins: How to Prepare for iOS 14

Are you a business owner who relies most of your marketing efforts on Facebook?

Do your fans and target market on Facebook, an iOS user?

Then this update from Apple might interest you.

Let’s start first with Tim Cooks’ tweet last month.

Apple is making big changes to data tracking permissions in iOS 14 that could significantly impact Facebook advertisers, publishers, and app developers. These changes will dramatically affect app developers’ ability to measure and monetize advertising. You’ve surely heard of this news in sheer terms, that advertising will be less effective and businesses will suffer.

In an official blog post Facebook stated the policies are harmful to the ‘free internet’ and make some forceful statements about how it will impact small businesses:

“They’re creating a policy — enforced via iOS 14’s AppTrackingTransparency — that’s about profit, not privacy. It will force businesses to turn to subscriptions and other in-app payments for revenue, meaning Apple will profit and many free services will have to start charging or exit the market.

They’re hurting small businesses and publishers who are already struggling in a pandemic. These changes will directly affect their ability to use their advertising budgets efficiently and effectively. Our studies show, without personalized ads powered by their own data, small businesses could see a cut of over 60% of website sales from ads. We don’t anticipate the proposed iOS 14 changes to cause a full loss of personalization but rather a move in that direction over the longer term.

They’re not playing by their own rules. Apple’s own personalized ad platform isn’t subject to the new iOS 14 policy.

We disagree with Apple’s approach, yet we have no choice but to show their prompt. If we don’t, we’ll face retaliation from Apple, which could only further harm the businesses we want to support. We can’t take that risk.”

Is Facebook concerned with these changes? Yes, they are, and that concerns me.

By far, this is the biggest battle for Facebook to conquer based on my experience and reactions of the Facebook advertiser community.

If these changes do, in fact, make advertising less effective, advertisers will spend less. If advertisers spend less, Facebook takes a big hit to their revenue.

In this update of Facebook for Business, iOS 14 updates have an impact on personalized ads.

“These will affect your ability to understand performance, control who sees your ads, and make informed decisions about your advertising budgets. As these changes take effect, over time, you may see an overall decrease in ad performance and personalization and an increase in cost per action.”

The point of this post is to help walk you prepare action plans to deal with this event.

Ready for this monster topic? Let’s do it…

iOS 14 Action Plan for Business Owners

Collect first-party data

As early as now, start collecting first-party data. This includes data you collect from your CRM, website, loyalty programs, mobile app, etc. If you aren’t already retargeting your customers on Facebook, now is the time to start.

Invest in your brand

Brands that you love today didn’t build their name overnight. They put money, effort and smart strategies to create attention from a huge number of people. Gone are the days you post an update to your Facebook page and forget it, then expect that people will still remember you.

Diversify your marketing channel

Relying on one marketing channel is not a good idea to achieve business growth. Start to think about email marketing, content marketing, influencer marketing, and SMS marketing.

Increase Facebook page’s organic growth

Drive more engagements to your Facebook page so you can collect a sizable amount of retargeting audience.

On the technical side of things, these are what you can do to prepare:

1. Verify your domain ownership in Business Manager. This will allow you to have authority over which conversion events are eligible for your domain https://developers.facebook.com/docs/sharing/domain-verification
2. Adapt for 8 conversion events for Optimization & Reporting only (not Custom Audiences)
3. Update Your SDK (if applicable)
4. Install Facebook’s Conversion API
5. Install Server Side Tag Management

Wrapping Up

There are a lot of discussions around these changes which is great because we are giving awareness to Facebook users, app developers, media buyers, and business owners.

Facebook created a page for small business owners to “add your voice” in opposition to the iOS 14 updates and even created a toolkit to help you share posts, videos, and stories to #SpeakUpForSmall businesses.

Here are other resources you can explore about the iOS 14 update.
iOS14 Guidance for Facebook Advertisers – Public
How Apple’s iOS 14 Release May Affect Your Ads
Use Facebook Pixel to Reach iOS 14 Users