Apple iOS 14: How It Impacts the App Industry?

Start preparing for the impact of Apple iOS 14 changes. The absence of an IDFA will hit ad campaigns hard because advertisers will be driving blind. Now, some small Digital Marketing exclusive shops will be out of business. After all, there's an absence of user data essential for optimal advertising. Advertisers will not be able to optimize their campaigns and target users based on behavior, control a campaign's recency or develop retargeting campaigns.

Apple has announced iOS 14 to impact how we receive and process events from tools like Facebook. Once these changes take effect, website domains currently sending events will be initially configured by Facebook to send no more than eight default events per domain. Any ad sets optimizing for events outside of this new event limit will be paused.

Learning about these changes and preparing for them can help you prevent your ad sets from being co-paused and may help you minimize any adverse effects on your campaigns' performance.

What will this impact directly? Attribution will be harder; obviously, frequency capping and retargeting will be off the table as we know them.

Advertisers impacted in two main areas:

Ad Retargeting – Any retargeting to users (based on device-level targeting) will no longer work for users that have opted out of sharing their IDFA. Platforms like Google and Facebook have other deterministic variables to identify devices (email, phone number). Still, other programmatic platforms that don't have such deterministic ID graph information are likely to see a reduction in targetable audiences.

Ad Measurement – Mobile Measurement Partners (MMPs) built its measurement and fraud capabilities around the IDFA identifier. While Apple has announced a replacement API (SKAdNetwork) that will allow for conversion data to be passed back at the campaign level, we're still going to see a reduction in the fidelity of data that MPPs have to identify fraud and performance across mobile campaigns. 

Wrapping up:

What to do? "First-party data is still king, specifically email database. Industry advice to all advertisers is to start the process of creating a usable identity graph of customers and prospects with an email address and/or phone numbers as your primary key to ensure your business/organization can continue to market on a 1 to 1 level across ad products."

The IDFA "opt-in" functionality in iOS 14 represents the most significant shift in the mobile advertising industry to date. It's going to change how apps spend money and make money fundamentally. The future belongs to apps and companies that provide real value to users because the value exchange we've always discussed with consumers will now be front and center. From a publisher perspective, it means we have to work on our 1st party data more so we can leverage it effectively.

Brands that directly relate to customers and deliver excellent customer experiences should have no problem adapting to the changes announced.

Brands and Businesses that are looking for Digital Marketing help and need implementing changes in Paid advertising (PPC)? Let's connect. https://www.tridence.com/digital-marketing-strategy