The New iOS 14 Update: What it means for your Facebook Advertising

You may have heard a lot of buzz in the last few months about the new iOS 14 update, and that it’s going to affect your Facebook Advertising. But, what does it mean for your business, and how will it affect you?

So, what’s the big deal with the iOS 14 Update?

The biggest change this update brings is to privacy permissions within apps installed on Apple devices. The update now allows people to choose whether they want to be tracked while using an application. Until iOS 14, Apple automatically allowed apps to track user data, and users actually had opt-out through the phone settings if they didn’t want to be tracked.

This decision to opt-us of an app tracking your data is made upon installing or updating an app on an Apple device, through the selection options of “Allow Tacking” or “Ask App Not to Track”. This includes social media apps like Instagram and Facebook.

The key takeaway here is that the default setting in the iOS 14 update will not allow tracking in apps. This means that users will now have to manually adjust their app settings to enable tracking. And given the current public concerns around privacy and collection of their personal data, this is highly unlikely.

Impact on social media advertising:

At the core of any good paid advertising strategy is retargeting. Retargeting captures users who have visited your business’s website or interacted with your brand as they are more likely to be interested in your business’s product and service offerings.

The new iOS update limits this. It will become increasingly difficult to track Apple users’ interactions and visits to your website. This does not mean that these users cannot be advertised at all on social media, it means the ads they see will not be personalised based on their website and application interactions.

This update however does have a greater impact on eCommerce businesses, for example, clothing brands than it does for service-based businesses as eCom business will no longer be able to personalise shopping ads based on similar products.

In addition to this, specific location-based targeting has become more difficult as the new update now only allows an ‘approximate location’ for a user. This means that company won’t be able to access extra locations, but instead just a 16 square kilometre radius.

It is not just Facebook advertising that will be affected:

Most platforms use some level of tracking in their digital advertising, whether that be YouTube, Instagram, or other programmatic ads.
These changes will result in a considerable loss of consumer data collected from mobile device users, considering that approximately 52% of all internet traffic on Australian websites is completed on mobile devices.

What does this mean for my business?

No business should be reliant on a single marketing channel – this change proves that. Businesses need a strategic marketing plan. Diversity is key, businesses need to be across multiple channels to reach consumers, using organic social media, email, and traditional marketing as well as digital advertising.

This change is not the first and will certainly not be the last. Hiring a marketing professional can assist your business to not only succeed but thrive in this ever-changing landscape that is digital advertising.