In late 2020, Apple released its most controversial (to-date) iOS update, which heavily affects advertisers, marketing professionals, and the general public.
iOS 14’s most notable update has affected some of the ability for targeted advertising…especially for tech giants such as Facebook and Google, whose revenue relies heavily on advertisements from businesses and the public.
Apple seems to be on a spree of strengthening its privacy on its devices to increase security and limit data collection to protect its users.
With tech giants being affected by this swift update, this even means that many local businesses and mid-size enterprises are being affected. A lot of them use the platform of Facebook and Google for advertising.
If you have ever utilized Facebook or Google to advertise, you are probably aware of having the ability to tailor a specific advertisement to an audience based on interests, location, age, gender, and more; but with the iOS 14 update, targeting an audience is more difficult than ever, due to the lack of data tracking.
Although this update makes the job of a marketing professional a bit more difficult, there are ways to pivot, and we’ll show you how.
How does the privacy update work?
When an apple device user updates to iOS 14, they will begin to receive a pop-up asking if they would like to share tracking data across apps and websites owned by other companies, specifically when downloading an app.
With this pop-up, the user will have the option to ask the app not to track activity or to allow the app to track activity. It has been noted by several studies that when an iPhone user has the option to choose to allow or decline tracking, a majority of people are going to decline it, thus making targeted advertising even more difficult.
“While it’s difficult to quantify the impact to content creators and publishers at this point with so many unknowns, in testing, we’ve seen publishers experience more than a 50% drop in revenue when personalization was removed from mobile app ad install campaigns. Publishers and developers have clearly taken notice.”
Many are unaware that Apple’s iPhone users have always had the option to turn off tracking; it’s not necessarily new, but it didn’t use to be front and center when downloading an app. For those operating off of an older version of iOS, simply open your settings > Privacy and click the button to limit ad tracking if you wish.
How to pivot through this update
Let’s face it; there will be many updates over the years that affect us and the way we market to the public…the answer? We pivot.
While platforms like Facebook and Google continue to address the flaw presented to them by Apple, and they seek to strengthen more in-house data-collection methods, we have a couple of solutions that you can utilize to maximize the viewership of your advertisements in the meantime:
- Collect. More. Emails. Collecting more emails will allow you to generate your very own lists of clients to target with advertisements tailored to them. One way you can integrate the email strategy into your marketing efforts is through a digital newsletter. Host the digital newsletter on your website and share it across socials, with the only sign-up requirement being the collection of names and email addresses. This method will protect your marketing efforts and self-sufficiency through the next iOS privacy update.
- Create better advertisements. As we used to have a more comprehensive way of targeting, businesses could distribute mediocre advertisements and still generate interest because it was already reaching a specific audience. Focusing on creating better advertisements by strengthening copywriting, implementing ad psychology into messaging, and developing more powerful visuals/graphics.
Remember, you still have the ability to target audiences very broadly, of course. So from here on out, it’s essential to take matters into your own hands to create the most effective advertisements by collecting your emails from clients and generating stronger advertisements.
