Surely you have already seen tons of articles all over the internet filled with the news. Apple has decided in its new operating system ios 14 to create a system to make the data that the user shares related to ads more transparent when third-party services for advertising (like Facebook or Instagram) are involved. If you usually use Facebook or Instagram to advertise your music, surely you have already seen many times in recent weeks a warning from Facebook, telling you to check that all your advertisements are correctly configured for ios 14, otherwise the ads could stop being effective as soon as Apple activates the new feature in its operating system. Immediately there has been a lot of noise everywhere and the most negative have dared to assure that from then on Internet advertising based on Facebook and Instagram will have gone down in history, because it will no longer be effective at all.
What does this change really means? is that as bad as they say?
Don’t worry! We see it in a positive way. The only thing that will change is following: In the future when you start using an app for the first time that uses the Facebook advertising system in the background, the iPhone will inform the user that the app is collecting data for advertising purposes and the user, similar to other permissions in the mobile, could deny them. So at that time the application will not receive more data while the user uses it. In other words, Facebook will not be able to collect information on what the user is doing, where they browse, what interests them, etc. With that the platform will not be able to advertise to that user as efficiently as to another from whom it knows more information. While it is true that some users obsessed with their data will not allow that monitoring anymore, many others will not care at all and will activate it or even prefer to have it active to receive more appropriate advertising for them (We ourselves prefer to receive relevant advertising than anything else). And of course we are talking about ios, but there are other operative systems as well (They are not affected at all).
From the point of view of creating ads on the Facebook platform, the system of events and conversions changes a bit for us. If you are not familiar with the subject. One of the most efficient ways to advertise something is to do it based on conversions. This means that actions related to advertising are defined and when the user performs the action after having seen a certain advertisement, it is marked as having made a successful conversion. Facebook and Instagram can optimize very well to generate conversions. These can be as complex as successfully completing a purchase of a certain product or as simple as ending up visiting an artist’s Spotify profile. Until now you could configure an event for conversions in any web address. However, Apple will limit this in the future and for this reason Facebook wants the events/conversions to be generated exactly in the web address of the advertising company and not in a third-party service. We actually see this again as something positive to identify the site where we click on an advertisement. At the time of configuring the advertising it is somewhat more complex at the beginning, since we have to verify our domain (like romamurecords.com)where we will generate the events and these will also be limited to 8 different events per verified domain in the future (For music advertisement we don’t see any disadvantage).
In short, do not be afraid of changes like this. While it is true that the way we advertise today will continue to change in the future, this has always been the case and is part of the advertising game, over time the way you advertise ceases to be effective and must be adapted. IOS14 provides us with some very interesting tools and although it is true that we will lose some users to whom showing our advertisements in the background. It only changes a little on the technical subject, how we configure these ads. We must use verified domains and the number of events generated per domain are limited.
Looking at it from the other side, if a user is not interested in advertising at all, then it is even good that with the new system we do not even spend a budget trying to convince him to carry out a conversion in our system.
