Now that iOS 14 changes to data tracking have been out for a couple of weeks, Facebook marketers have had time to assess how their campaign performance will likely be impacted. Interestingly, campaigns for most audiences have not seen a big downturn, likely due to a delayed adoption of iOS 14 by users, as well as the slow implementation of changes by app makers. However, there has been a hit to retargeting performance, and below we will discuss the best steps every business should take to get performance for these audiences back on track.

At Omneky, we usually segment marketing campaign audiences into “interest”, “lookalike”, and “remarketing”. Out of these, Interest and Lookalike have been affected the least by the iOS 14 changes—there is less audience data, but the analyses we have been running show minimal impact on campaign results.

Remarketing, however, has shown to be a different story. Constructing this audience depends on creating audiences from higher funnel website events that previously relied on cookies due to their lack of personally identifying information , so with the prevention of cookie tracking this audience size has been downgraded for most businesses. On a technical level, the browser pixel which is responsible for conversion tracking across the web has now become ineffective.  This is the greatest impact of the iOS update, as Remarketing has consistently been the audience with the highest ROAS across all audiences.

All is not lost, however! To work around the ineffectiveness of the browser pixel, Omneky recommends implementing Facebook’s server-side conversions tracking API. This will add a tracking snippet of code to your website which will mark events and conversions as they happen on your website server, thus partly circumventing the need for cross-web tracking. Once this is in place, you should see an improvement in the effectiveness of Remarketing audiences.

Follow our step-by step guide on implementing the conversions API on your website:

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Following these easy steps will get your retargeting campaigns prepared for the iOS changes and ensure your business experiences as few performance interruptions as possible. Keep an eye on our blog for more updates on the Facebook marketing scene!

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