iOS14, Apple and the impact on potential and real impact on Facebook advertising, a thread:

1. What’s happening: In June 2020, Apple announced an upcoming change to their (at the time) new iOS14 iPhone and iPad operating system. Apple would prompt users on whether they were willing to allow the app developer to track their personal usage of the app via their

‘AppTrackingTransparency’ (ATT) framework (explained further below).

2. Why is this happening? The truth is somewhere between Apple wanting to protect users’ privacy and

Apple being a for-profit business that is potentially looking to monetize a new opportunity (the latter is a personal opinion).

3. When is this happening? iOS14 has now rolled out and the impact of ATT on businesses and advertisers will be felt once a large number of Apple users either upgrade their operating system on their iPhone or iPad, or have bought new devices with the new operating system.

This is expected to be towards the middle of 2021 by when apps will be able to measure the impact.

4. What’s the overall impact going to be? As of now, the impact is not completely known and isn’t expected to have a significant impact until such time as:

a) there are enough users on iOS14
b) there is quantifiable data on how many people accept/reject the apps from tracking them
c) the impact on the apps’ ability to deliver a personalised experience and advertising, if relevant

5. What’s the impact on Facebook advertisers? If the Facebook (and Instagram, Messenger) apps cannot track users on iOS14 because of mass opt-out the concern is 3-fold: can I retarget users? Can I track the performance of campaigns effectively?

Will top of funnel audience targeting still be as effective without data from users on iOS14? In most cases all 3 could be negatively impacted and we’ll know the extent better towards mid/late 2021 as more users adopt iOS14 and the apps lose more and more valuable user-level data

6. Is it just Facebook that’s impacted? No. This update from Apple impacts ALL apps, not just Facebook, so this includes TikTok, Pinterest, Snapchat, Amazon and any other app that relies on collecting user data in order to build advertising and/or personalisation services off-app

7. Are all advertisers equally impacted? The update impacts mobile app advertisers far more than non-app advertisers with sweeping changes coming in to restrict the data they can see.

8. Does this update impact website tracking? This does not change or impact what you can or cannot track from websites, whether using cookies or server-side tracking. As far as a mobile browser running inside an app (i.e. like Facebook’s in-app web browser),

the advice from Facebook so far has been this does not see an impact because the app itself is NOT sending tracking data back, it is the web browser communicating with Facebook’s server and is explained further below.

9. Will server-side tracking solve this issue? The Conversion API (cAPI) is not a straight up solution to the above issues caused by Apple’s update since it is designed to help advertisers collect data through their website without relying on cookies and

so has no impact on tracking in-app activity, which is the main concern here and explained further below.

10. Is organic Facebook marketing impacted? This could impact organic performance on Facebook, since the newsfeed relies on signals from users

(whether in apps or websites when browsing Facebook, Instagram or using Messenger) in order to see who you interact with, the items you’re interested in, groups and Pages you visit and more. Facebook would need to confirm or deny this (mostly my opinion on this)

/end. This is all based on my own research and I've written this up into a 50+ page document, mainly for our agency and clients but to also help fill the void for other Facebook advertisers. The full doc is here: https://depeshmandalia.com/facebook-advertising-ios14-guide/

Feedback welcomed.