Effects of iOS 14 on Your Facebook Campaigns, and What Can You Do?

As real estate digital marketeers, we have all faced some obstacles in our Facebook campaigns. Also, what’s even more bothering is that the CPLs have been continuously going up in the last 4-5 months. As we are heavily dependent on Facebook and Instagram for lead volumes, we have seen major fluctuations in our campaigns with the latest update by Apple for devices using iOS 14 and above.

• This upgrade has affected the way Apple devices track conversion due to their App Tracking Transparency Framework.
• Certain data collection and tracking are prohibited unless a person opts for tracking.
• This directly limits the ads personalization and reporting, which affects campaign learning, affecting the optimization, thus the CPLs shoot up and quality of leads being delivered goes down.

Specially for high ticket size projects (Unit price above Rs 1 Cr*) most of the TG uses Apple devices (being a premium-end device) and it was crucial for Facebook to find a way around this without violating the privacy of the customers To help overcome, Facebook is processing a pixel conversion event using Aggregated Event Measurement (AEM) With AEM we can set up to 8 events on your landing page like lead capture, download brochure and get directions, and prioritize them for sending the signals to Facebook via integration. This will improve the optimization, reporting and measurement, and help the campaigns learn without violating the privacy of the users.

How Does AEM work?

For you to measure events of your landing page on Facebook dashboard, you would have to build the web connection to your Facebook using either Facebook API or Facebook Pixel which you will place in your website. You get to measure 8 events and prioritize them for your campaign optimization Eg, if pixel A is racking “Lead Capture”, B is tracking “Download Brochure” event and C is tracking “Get Directions To Site”, which means you are tracking 3 events. Then you can prioritize them the you would like to optimize your campaigns. For example, starting with “Lead Capture” then “Download Brochure” and then “Get Directions” To have web events configured;

1. Verify your domain (landing page) with your Facebook Business Manager (then your BM has the authority to configure the events)
2. Configure and prioritize top 8 events (you can choose standard or custom)
3. Set up conversion in ads manager
4. Set the attribution window for all campaigns at ad set level and not at the account/campaign level. This will help in campaign optimizations.

Note: In Events Manager on your Facebook Dashboard, Pixel Conversion will show all conversion numbers whereas the AEM will show the ones that have happened through devices with iOS 14 or above. This will help you differentiate, and due to this, your pixel conversions will always be higher than your AEMs. For understanding your cost per lead, you will have to measure pixel conversion. But to understand and analyse the conversions that have come specifically from IOS 14 and above devices, you can check your Events Manager. This will solve majority of optimization fluctuations you are facing due to iOS upgrade although, there are a few limitations you might face like;

• Delayed reporting, for up to 3 days.
• Demographic breakdown for AEMs not available currently (this may be available at a later stage as Facebook develops it.
• Targeting limitations – as more people upgrade their iPhones, your custom audiences will decrease as Facebook will not be able to track all demographic details. For this, you can start utilizing broad targeting and let Facebook learn.
• Size of re-targeting audience will also decrease as the upgrades increase

All these factors directly affect our campaigns and costs. Having said that, this is where Growth Marketing kicks in… where you experiment and optimize your campaigns continuously. At BeyondWalls we have been trying to learn from this since we began implementing growth Marketing. Being a leading Proptech firm in India, this is our signature way of approaching any campaign, and due to which, we were able to make our campaigns efficient. These learnings can be applied across a range of projects to cater to different sets of challenges in real estate campaigns, not just through one media but experimenting on multiple mediums, using attribution modelling and keeping a tap of consumer events.