The anti-Facebook Apple update is officially here and is rolling out to iPhones at this very moment. In this episode, we'll discuss what the next few weeks will look like in Facebook advertising, how to rise above the noise, and ideas for future campaigns. Plus, the actions you should take to keep your account in the best shape possible.
Transcript
Welcome to The Ultimate Marketer Podcast. I'm your host, Orlando Rios. Welcome, everybody. How is it going? I hope your week is starting out great. And I hope you're not a little too stressed out. If you're a Facebook advertiser, just like me, and I'm sure many of you are that watch this show, or listen to this show rather, you're probably a little bit nervous about what's going on in the world of Facebook advertising.
Well, the thing we've all been talking about for a really long time now with Apple is finally arriving. People that have Apple devices, iPhones, are starting to get the Apple iOS 14.5 update to their phones this week. I mean, it should start rolling out this week. I haven't got it yet on my phone, but I know it's coming. And this is going to change the way we know Facebook ads as we know it. It'll be a little bit silly to actually predict what is going to happen because we don't know. Look, Facebook is a smart company. They're going to figure it out, trust me. And we're just going to have to wait and see, but we're going to have to be smart about it. We're going to have to not panic. We're going to have to really think about how we utilize that specific platform for our businesses, or for our clients, and make sure that we're not leaving opportunity on the table, we're not making rash decisions because of out of fear, and we're taking a really good educational approach to this.
So we all knew that with this update that once it's installed, when the user opens up Facebook on their Apple device, that they're going to get a notification about accepting the tracking from Facebook, which is not good. Right? What we didn't know, and which is kind of new over the last week or so, is that people are going to be automatically opted out. We thought for the longest time that they were going to see a thing, Facebook might be able to have some kind of message on there that'll make people be like, "You know what, yes, I'm going to be advertised to. It makes sense to see things that I like. Yeah, sure, let's just keep this going. That's fine." That's not going to be the case.
Now it's going to be an automatic opt out, and you will have to opt in later. Facebook will have to figure out how to ask that. But that is going to have a significant impact on things. That's way different than what we were initially expecting with this roll out. So that remains to be a thing that we're going to have to really think about and kind of wait to see how it kind of plays out. So over the next several weeks, it's going to be kind of a gradual adoption. A lot of people have their updates set automatically, so that'll be a bulk thing. But there's some people that it could take some time for those updates to actually take an effect. Yeah, it's going to be different.
So what do you need to do? So if you're the first time listening to this podcast, or if you've been listening to the previous episodes, I've been talking about making sure you do a couple of things. And number one is making sure within Facebook Business Manager, that you have your domain verified, number two, that you have your aggregated events set up within Facebook's Event Manager, and you have your events prioritized. Those two things are super important. Now if you've been running a campaign for a while that's been good, and you haven't done these updates, what's going to happen is all those campaigns are automatically going to be shut off. So any campaigns that you have running on Facebook right now that weren't set up with domain, verification and aggregated event set up, those are going to be turned off. You won't be able to run those anymore, so be mindful of that. You're going to have to update any campaigns that are not new with all these different settings that you're going to have to have for this new roll out.
So if you haven't done that, you need to do that now. The period for when you set these things up, I mean, it's a 72 hour reset period. So you're going to want to get that going very, very quickly to eliminate any risk of incorrect attribution. And of course, you don't want your campaigns to just turn off. So as you've heard in other episodes as well, and as you already probably see within your Facebook ads manager, the 28 day click through is gone. It's going to be seven days click through now. So you're going to need to think about that in terms of the time to purchase. How long does it take a customer to view your product, to end up making a decision, and becoming a purchaser? If you're into leads, how long does it take somebody to see what you have to offer, fill out a form, and become a lead? Those things, you're going to need to think about.
If you're in the purchase game and it takes longer than seven days for somebody to make a purchase, you may want to go up the funnel on your initial prospective campaigns to something a little bit more likely, like an add to cart, or if you're way up there, maybe you even view content if you're not sending them directly to a product page, so just some things to think about there.
So another thing that I wanted to talk about is as we hear about all this, and everybody's concerns, people are kind of forgetting that this only applies to Apple. This only applies to people that are using an iPhone. This means everything will remain the same for people on Android devices, and there is a lot of people on Android. There are more people on Android than Apple iPhones. So what I would suggest you do right now before this is taken away, because there's going to be some stats taken away, some demographic based stats, and I don't know if they're going to take away this one, but there's going to be some stats taken away, but still there now. So what I suggest you do, I would go look at your results from Facebook ads, look at the history, and you can pace it out for all time or whatever. Look at your most successful campaign. That's what I recommend you do.
And then you're going to go down to the breakdown, where you can select placements and devices, and see what device got you the most conversion, to what devices were people using. You might be able to also look at this in Google analytics as well. And if you have a higher percentage of converters that are on Android devices, you might be pretty good. You might be pretty good there. If you have more that are on Apple, I would be a little bit more concerned. If you're 50/50, that's pretty good in my opinion too. So that's something to think about.
One thing that I'm thinking about doing, and I haven't done it yet, and it's still just kind of a thought in my head, so I'm going to share my thoughts with you, this isn't necessarily an endorsement of this method. I'm going to wait to see how things play out first, but one thing I'm considering doing is possibly splitting my campaigns for Android users and those that are not, as long as that option still is available because whenever you set up an ad set, you know where you set up the demographics, the targeting, you can select desktop, mobile. There's an option there where you can target specific devices, like iPhones or Androids.
So if that piece of targeting remains there, which I don't know if they'll keep it with this, I might try on conversion campaigns just targeting Android users because they're not going to be affected by this tracking stuff. They're not going to have to opt into anything. Just a thought there. And those are the kind of thoughts that we're going to need to be creative and think about really, as we discover what happens here. The thing that I kind of don't know about is obviously the attribution is so important when it comes to Facebook ads, because how else were we going to know if our campaigns are effective. I've already mentioned that you should be taking an overall view of your marketing and revenue, how much money you're spending on advertising versus your revenue. When you spend more money on advertising, does your revenue go up? Those type of things, we should be doing that all along. But now more than ever, as attribution gets a little bit more cloudy, we're going to need to look at it that way.
So what I'm thinking about here is Facebook mentioned that it's possible, or it may happen, that a lot of the events that we're seeing and that we're going to see in ads manager rather, once this takes full adoption, is that these attribution events will be modeled. They won't be exact. I don't know what exactly that means. I don't know how they're going to estimate the conversions from campaigns when it comes to Apple users, but it's going to be modeled. That right there kind of, I'm cloudy on. It's a cloudy, cloudy vision, but it's not going to be the same as before. It's not going to be the same as click, purchase, boom, purchase, attributed to this campaign, modeled campaign.
So we're going to see for sure, I have no doubt about it, we're going to see less conversions across the spectrum. Your cost per acquisition is going to go up. I think that is a given. Another thing, as all these Apple devices get opted out, audience sizes may possibly shrink pretty hardcore. So I'm talking about the size of a million could go down to, I don't know, 500,000. It could be cut in half. That is a little crazy because that means we're going to have less people to advertise to. Now does that mean that it's automatically going to make our cost per impression higher? Because remember, Facebook ads is an impression based platform. If there's less people to advertise to, based on detailed targeting, and there is the same amount of advertisers, you're bidding for those select few. Maybe you're just bidding on everybody that's on Android, but that can make the cost per impression go even high, and it's pretty high right now, so that's a possibility too.
On the contrary, some businesses that rely on the tracking because they have a very strict, small budget to work with, they can't afford to not see instant results, may fold out of Facebook advertising, and then that could actually bring cost per impression down because competition goes down. This is going to push out a lot of small businesses, and unfortunately, it's going to possibly make some small businesses hesitate to grow. The thing that I loved the most about Facebook ads and still do is that it gives any new business a chance to become successful. It helps you find new customers really quickly, and that's with all of Facebook's failures, and the things they do, that is the one bright light, is that it gives small businesses an opportunity to become legit.
Before that, you had to do so many things. So many things had to go right. And many small businesses couldn't afford the traditional advertising placements, like television ads, magazine ads, all that kind of stuff. Facebook ads gave us the opportunity as a small business to spend as little as five, 10 bucks a day just to start getting some quality traffic of people that are actually likely to be interested in a product or service. So for all Facebook's failures, that is the shining light. And now thanks to Apple, as I record this on my MacBook Pro, and I have my iPhone sitting next to me, they're trying to play this privacy guy here that didn't need to be there. It's kind of ridiculous considering.
And of course, there's always some hidden agenda in there. It's also known that Apple is also working on their own ad network. So I mean, there you go. And actually, I saw this posted on Twitter earlier today, there's something regarding Apple's advertising to you, that you're already opted into. But they're making you automatically opted out of Facebook tracking. So a lot of double standards here from Apple. Obviously, and maybe they consider Facebook competition. Apple probably has their own plans here for some kind of social thing. Everybody already knows they have something happening here with advertising. They're pushing for their thing, so there's definitely something behind there.
I'm still super optimistic, however, when it comes to Facebook advertising. I'm definitely not thinking this is the end because it's not. Like I said, most people are on Android. There's that part, and you're just going to have to get smarter when it comes to figuring out your attribution. And it's things that we should be doing all along. We shouldn't just rely completely on the ads manager for things. Conversion campaigns as they're modeled, maybe that's not the best bet. Right? Maybe we need to scale back to those higher level conversion events, or even go to traffic campaigns. Those are things that we're all going to have to think about. Right?
And of course, there's other platforms out there that may be considered, but they're going to face the same things that Apple is doing here, so it's just a matter of time. And what I mentioned in I believe is the last episode, we're entering a world of cookie-less advertising, but something will replace it. They'll figure something out. There's too much money involved in the ad marketplace to just fold and just let it go, and oh, well, it's all done, and pack up shop. That's not going to happen. So don't get discouraged. If you have clients, don't get discouraged, just be smart. Figure out your own attributions. Have your own models that you can compare to Facebook's. And really understand the impact of ad dollars to traffic to sales. If you have your own small business, or you're trying to start your own small business, and obviously, Facebook advertising is going to be a big part of that to get you your initial customers. Yes, of course, definitely still do that with Facebook. It's going to be still the best option for you.
And just you're going to have to have some guts to go in it. If you have a small budget you're working with, and it's something that you're going to be looking at every single day to monitor your dollars, you're going to have to have some guts. We don't know what's going to happen. We have ideas. We have possibilities, which I've discussed here. In the end though, it's all just being, I don't know, it's just being like a scientist. These are all hypotheses. There's nothing that's proven. And we're just going to have to wait this out to see what exactly happens. So there you go.
Imagine this is going to take a couple of weeks or more for all this to start really, really hitting, so just monitor everything and make sure. I'm sure you have done it, but I'm going to just make it a point again, it's so important, verify your domain in Facebook Business Manager. Make sure you have aggregated events set up in Events Manager. If you need help, instruction how to do that, head to blog.dropkickads.com. There's an article there, a blog there that we put together that kind of guides you through it. I have a video on YouTube. It's also on the blog that I did a screen share with. It'll show you how to do it. I even did a podcast episode on it. You go a few episodes back. And I'm just harping on this so hard because I don't want people to get too relaxed on that and just forget, and then be in a situation.
This is your time to be prepared and just get it done. It doesn't take that long. Just get it done. And be ready to take a really good look about your, of how you market and when it comes to Facebook ads. And just be patient and go in with guts. Easier said that done. Right? Especially when you're budgeting clients and your own money for ads. Yeah, just have some guts. Yeah, Orlando. Yeah, smart. Right? But advertising is educated guessing. Advertising is basically educated gambling. So this is where we are.
Well, all right, guys. That is it for today. Just wanted to touch on some of the things going on with Apple's new roll out as it's happening this week. We've been talking about it for months and here it is. I'd be interested to know how things affect you. If you are on Twitter, give me a follow at Orlando Rios, and let me know how your campaigns are being affected, or if you have questions. We can all figure this stuff out together on Twitter and in public so other people can learn. And as always, there's always Dropkick Ads to help you. If you need help with your campaigns, maybe you want an entire reset, you want to kind of start from scratch as this new stuff turns on. You can get our pro setup, which we will go into your account and we will set up brand new campaigns with you, with targeting and creative and all of it under the new guidelines for this new type of advertising that we're going to have to do with Apple's new operating system and privacy policy.
And we'll also help you, if you get a pro setup, we'll help guide you through that setup of the domain verification and the aggregated events. We'll help you do that too if you get the pro setup, so go check that out at dropkickads.com. Obviously, you can use the promo code ultimate and save 10% there. Awesome. Well, thanks everybody for listening. We will be back next week, hopefully with a new episode. Been a little busy lately, so apologies on some of the missed weeks here, but I'm going to get back on it and try to keep going every single week. It's tough, it's tough. I'm not going to lie. All right. Thanks again, everybody. We will see you hopefully next week.