How Apple's Changes May Significantly Limit Your Marketing Efforts

How Apple's Changes May Significantly Limit Your Marketing Efforts

The Facebook advertising platform is a powerful channel through which you can reach your target audience.

The platform is integrated with many data sources.

These partnerships enable advertisers like you to zero in on your target audiences so that your ads are highly relevant to the people viewing them. 

This hypertargeting makes your advertising dollar stretch further, increases your return on investment and reduces waste.

When I logged in to my Facebook advertising account this week a pop-up message displayed which is going to raise some eyebrows.  It's something you need to be aware especially if you are participating in the Facebook advertising ecosystem.

Here's a copy of Facebook's message:

In June, Apple announced product and policy changes that will impact data sharing across iOS. The proposed changes will significantly impact the way you can run ads, measure performance and engage your customers, while also harming the growth of businesses and the free internet.

We believe that free, ad-supported businesses have been essential to the growth and vitality of the internet, and that personalized ads and user privacy can coexist. We support proactive privacy measures and data transparency, but we don't agree with Apple's policy changes.

As we continue to work on your behalf, we encourage you to share this information within your organization and develop a plan to address this disruption to your current marketing efforts.

Apple’s proposed changes will limit your ability to effectively reach, understand and engage people on mobile devices and across the web. They will impact 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.

Specifically, these changes will limit your ability to:

• Effectively deliver ads to people based on their engagement with your business
• Measure and report on conversions from certain customers
• Ensure your ads are delivered to the most relevant audiences at the right frequency
• Accurately attribute app installs to people using iOS 14 and later
• Predict and optimize cost per action over time and efficiently allocate budgets

Apple’s policy will make it much harder for small businesses to reach their target audience, which will limit their growth and their ability to compete with big companies.

To see the full message on Facebook simply click here.

This is a significant development in the digital advertising space.

Finding the right balance between data privacy and advertising relevancy is tricky.

According to Facebook's research, ads that disregard personalized targeting generate 60% fewer sales than ads that target consumers.

Facebook is so passionate about their stance that they placed ads in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Washington Post.

I doubt that Apple will change their position. 

Apple’s new data privacy feature will not completely block companies like Facebook from collecting targeting data, but will ask them to disclose it and seek user opt-in.

If Apple users do not opt in then their user experience on their devices will result in seeing ads that less relevant to them compared to users who choose to see relevant ads.

You are presented ads no matter what - so is your preference to see ads that are relevant to you or not? Share your opinion in the commments below.