By Mahrukh Hoda

What Impact will the iOS 14.5 App Tracking Transparency Update Have on Advertising?

The App Tracking Transparency (ATT) update for all iOS 14.5 users means that now, users will get a prompt when they open an app for the first time that basically states, “Allow ‘App_Name’ to track your activity across other companies’ apps and websites?”

Overall, I expect that this change may cause a hindrance to campaign optimization due to insufficient data points, particularly for smaller advertisers or start ups who have not reached the stage yet of a large customer base and thus large data sets.

Below I’ve highlighted the impact that this change could have on campaign settings across Social, Search and Display campaigns.

Impact on Facebook Campaigns

• • Event data will be delayed, causing a three day delay in reporting after an app is downloaded.

  • Users opting out of tracking their data may decrease the size of audiences.

  • A conversion limitation of only 8 conversion events per domain from now on.

  • Limited to a maximum of 9 campaigns and 5 ad sets per campaign for each ad account.

  • Lift measurement will be unavailable for iOS 14 app install and app event campaigns.

  • Size of Retargeting audiences will shrink as more and more people update their operating system to iOS 14.5.

  • A possible increase in dark social traffic, when users share content privately which makes it difficult to track.

  • Action and demographic breakdowns for offline events will no longer be available.

  • The default attribution settings for new campaigns will be a 7 day click through going forward.

  • 1-day click through data for users who decide to opt out of tracking their activity will now be based on modeling.

  • 7 day click through with 1 day view through attribution settings will not include iOS 14.5 users who choose to opt-out of tracking their activity.

Impact on Google Campaigns

• • Modeled Conversions will be used instead for iOS 14.5 users who opt out.

  • Performance fluctuations are expected across campaigns.

  • Size of retargeting audiences will shrink if not using your own first party data and not reliant on the IDFA to tag iOS users.

  • Will need to consider alternative bidding to tROAS campaigns for iOS such as tCPA as Google tries to figure out the modeled conversions.

  • Certain campaign exclusions will not be available such as audience exclusions, negative filtering and deferred deep linking.

  • Google is also recommending to reduce the number of campaigns for each app to less than 100 in order to ensure that each campaign has sufficient conversion signals.

Impact on Display Campaigns

• • Modeled conversions will be needed here as well for iOS 14.5 users.

  • There will be performance fluctuations.

  • iOS campaigns may work poorly here and be unable to deliver ad impressions.

  • Retargeting limited to users who opt in only so performance could go down too.

  • Strategies for Android and iOS will need to be different as the same strategy may not work anymore.

  • Android users may become more expensive as companies may shift dollars from iOS to Android if they see more success and reliable data there.

  • iOS users that opt in may be costly to market to as well as now there will be a smaller pool of them that can be tracked with an IDFA.