Today, we're going to talk about iOS 14 and the recent tracking changes that were introduced on this platform that is powering a half of all mobile devices, which are Apple devices just like the iPhone. So it's a pretty big deal, and people were upset about it. And even Facebook was upset about it, put out a big, huge ad that a lot of people were talking about. And we're going to talk about how it will impact your tracking.

The story so far.​

Well, what is the story actually so far in the years that led up to this tracking change? Because if you have been living under a rock, then you probably noticed that we have, here we go, we have some privacy changes that came along in Europe with GDPR, but also the US laws are changing, CCPA is out there, and we are all looking at our data as something that we might want to protect in some instances. And so the recent regulation changes have brought companies to think about this more clearly.

But one company has taken this really seriously, and that is Apple. Now, Apple has really taken this to a whole new level by branding themselves as the privacy-conscious company and are marketing themselves as this as well. And they say, this is good business. This is what our consumers want.

Obviously, there are companies out there like Facebook that don't really like the changes too much, because when you look at what Apple's business model is, they mostly sell devices and make most of their money through devices, whereas other companies like Google and Facebook are mainly looking to make money through advertising. And that is pretty important for them to have the right data for targeting available. So companies like Facebook don't really like these changes that are coming in. Now, at WWDC in 2020, they announced recent changes that will be introduced into the new operating system of iPhones, which is iOS 14.

What are the changes?​

What are actually these changes and what are the most distilled changes that I would say would impact us as people who are looking at data and privacy on these platforms?

First of all, we need to talk about IDFA. IDFA was a standard for a long time. It was kind of like a cookie on mobile devices. So in browsers, we identify a user by setting a cookie, and then we know if the user comes back to our website and we can tracking as the same user, essentially. And this became a really big part in targeting advertising, like Re-targeting and Re-marketing, because we were able to re-identify a user on a different platform and show him our ads. And this became a really popular advertising form, and therefore it powers a lot of what we do as advertisers. And the same can be said for what IDFA was like for the iPhone or for mobile devices. That's a unique idea that would be able, the ad platforms to enable the ad platforms to re-identify a user. This is important for obviously targeting, but then also attribution. So did the user actually buy something on my platform? If I can re-identify them by knowing, okay, they have clicked on this ad, and then they bought later on, then it's gonna be hard to make any attribution work. And then obviously also the targeting gets a bit out of whack on the other side. Now, the next change that iOS 14 brings is privacy changes. So now you cannot just put your app up on the App Store and say, hey, this is my app, and I am essentially harvesting data. You actually need to have a privacy policy and be very, there are very strict rules now, what does privacy policy needs to entail? So you can't just ask or take data from the user. You need to ask the user for permission. And you actually also have to have a way to delete that data. And if a user asks you for deletion of that data, you need to comply with that. So it kind of models a little bit what GDPR is doing in that sense that they want to give more control back to the user, but it's not implemented by government or by the European Union or a big economic area. It is actually implemented by a technology company that rules something that is hugely valuable, the App Store, and they can actually make up their own rules. And this obviously, if you don't comply with these privacy rules, your app can be kicked from the App Store. And we all know that Apple is pretty ridiculous about how their apps are, or what apps you can actually put onto the App Store itself. So that is already one thing that app developers need to comply with. If they don't, they are subject to be kicked off the App Store.

But then the biggest change that probably everybody was talking about is this little pop-up here. Anytime you open up an app now that sends data over to an advertising system like Facebook ads or AdMob from Google, this pop-up will ask you if you allow this kind of tracking. And it probably will lead to that people say, no, I don't really want to be tracked, as this message also is not very customizable. So you can't really put up more videos or something. It's just this plain thing. It's implemented on the OS level. So it's not something that comes through the browser and you can change around how a consent pop-up like this one looks like. No, it's a message that Google, that Apple makes you to put in, and you can change the text around, but not the appearance itself. And therefore, a lot of advertisers are now scared that people will say, no, I don't want to track this anymore.

Who will be affected?​

Who will be affected, right? Will you be affected as somebody who has a Facebook pixel on your website? Let's first talk about app developers. These people are the ones that are creating apps with languages like Swift. And these will see bigger changes because not only do they need to comply with the new privacy changes in the app store, but also they need to now build into their apps or the app will have this automatic pop-up if you send data over. And what this will lead to is they will say, okay, if somebody says, I don't want to be tracked, can I even show still advertising on my page? Well, if I don't, or on my inside of my app, and if they say, no, I don't want to be tracked, you could show them general advertising that maybe AdMob gives you, but you won't be able to share highly targeted advertising that the user maybe wants to see because he was on some other store on the internet and now gets an advertising inside of your app. And that will definitely lead to lower revenue for the app developers. So if there's an app that is free, then they were previously probably really reliant on this advertising revenue and that this advertising revenue is highly targeted. But if this data can't be given out anymore and the user clicks do not track me, then it might lead to lower ad prices for the advertiser and lost revenue on that sense. And therefore, a lot of people predict that these apps will now say, well, maybe I shouldn't be banking on advertising. Maybe I should make it a subscription app, or maybe I should make it a $1 app or $2 app. But guess who actually profits from that? It is Apple because Apple takes a 20%, 30% cut from every payment that goes through the app store. So yeah, bad voices, voices like Facebook are saying, well, maybe Apple is doing that for their own gain. But app developers are the big losers here, I would say, when it comes to advertising or just this bigger change. Now, we also will see in the bigger ad platforms that are on mobile, like Facebook and Google AdMob, if a app developer wants to be a publisher, so he puts ads onto his app, then they will see a bigger change because presumably the app developers will be leaving so they will lose business. Facebook even says that, or Facebook has a network called the audience network where you would be able in Facebook advertising to say, I want to display my ads in certain apps or yeah, certain apps like in workout apps, for example. And maybe this will go away because the audience network is not as large and huge as what Google has to offer, as Google obviously also owns a platform with Android and they have a different rule set there. So might still make sense to put your advertising out on AdMob, but on Facebook it might be something that they will shut down at some point, or they at least see a big difference that this can go away, this revenue source for them as an ad platform. But now let's, well, before that, let's talk about how will this actually be for advertisers, for people like you out there who are tracking, who want to advertise on Facebook.

Will you lose out on data?​

Will it create chaos for you in your analytics? First of all, I must say we are talking about iOS here, iOS 14. So we are not talking about the Safari browsers, which are also having impacted by changes, but not by the mobile app changes that we see on the platform of iOS 14. So you will still be able to put your Facebook Pixel onto your page, but if you have an app out there, and if you are an app developer, or you want to pixel people that go through a part of your app that you have on iOS 14, then it might make it harder to retarget those people. And especially if you want to get installs for your app, mobile advertising in that sense will get a bit harder, and you would need to deal with this change. But for everybody else who thinks, well, now I can't advertise on iOS on Facebook anymore. Well, hold on there for a bit because Facebook actually has their own system of how to identify the user. They don't need IDFA. They also don't need this plugin there, this Do You Want to Track Me? pop-up, because they are actually a vault garden already. You cannot use Facebook without logging in or without adhering to their privacy policies as well. So they have probably a different identifier how they can re-identify you on the mobile app of Facebook, and your newsfeed ads won't go away. So you will still see your newsfeed ads, and they will still reach people in the iOS ecosystem on Facebook, but anything that's outside of the Facebook app and maybe outside of the Facebook ecosystem. So let's say we have WhatsApp, we have Instagram, we have Facebook app, obviously. If you think that it's out there in the audience network, that might not have as big of a targeting possibility anymore. Now, what will this actually mean for advertisers? What impact will you most likely see? Well, if we are not able to target so many destinations anymore, we won't be able to get so good of conversions, because we might not be able to reach our user in his favorite app. What would this mean? Well, the advertising, the slots of advertising will decrease, and what will happen if the inventory decreases? Well, more people are going to bid on the slots that are actually still available, and therefore the price might increase. So this is something we would need to monitor on our side. Like if we do advertising, does it actually still hold true that we can get cheap clicks through the Facebook audience network on iOS, or is this virtually impossible now, and it just doesn't make sense? So there are changes that we probably closely need to watch and see what the impact will be on our implementation and our data as well. I would say that when we look at the small advertisers that are out there, the small businesses, you have bigger opportunities to actually target people in the Facebook newsfeed. You probably are doing AdWords advertising. That is not going to be impacted so much on the side of the iOS 14 update.

For advertisers, I think we can all take a breather here. We still need to watch our data and see what the impact will actually be, but we all know that tracking data and our targeting data is not perfect. I cannot see exactly who is in front of the screen at any given time. I can only abstract and work with the targeting that is out there. Now, if the data gets a little bit worse, I still need to deal with it. I can't really say, well, this is all unfair and I want to go against Apple here, or I will boycott Apple because we always know that we are working with imperfect data and we should just see what this actually does to us and how it's impacting us and what we can hopefully do about this.

Any workarounds?​

And this is my next point, like, are there any workarounds? Lots of people have asked me, well, do you have any tracking changes? How do I need to change my tracking around based on these iOS 14 changes, right? But first of all, I would say, if you are on a website, you can look into what changes were brought to on your website for the updates that came out for the Safari browser. So, ITP might be something you want to be looking into, but when it comes to iOS 14, then if you don't have a mobile app, can you actually change something around in the tracking, right? You are only on the side of maybe displaying advertising in somebody’s app. So, if you don't have an app, then it's not something that you might be able to work around. Now, if you have an app and you want to work around this, how, what were some things to think about? First of all, I always think there is a trade-off between, hey, do you want to go against the privacy of your users and really go around this and just track them however you want? Or do you actually want to comply with the privacy rules that are out there and have a good business, a good practice in your marketing and actually inform people about what they're getting into? And the one thing that I already talked about, if you have a mechanism to identify the user by yourself, so for example, if he logs in, then you might not need to use any kind of these identifiers that Apple provides. IDFA, which is now gone, they have something new there. You might be able to have a different identifier on that end to re-identify the user. There's also a technique called fingerprinting that you could use, but definitely these tracking tools out there, they need an identifier and you could build your own, which would obviously mean that you would need to change your business around a bit or your website in order to make sure that people actually log in and they identify themselves. We also know of other methods of not sending the data over to Facebook directly or to Google Analytics directly, but actually using something called server-side tracking. Omnitrack brought out the solution there as well. Server-side tracking is something that you could install as a workaround, partial workaround, but again, this is not something that you would do with a few clicks. It's actually something developers need to get involved in. It needs a very strong policy of how you handle that data. And I think it's still best practice to inform your users what you're actually doing with that data.

Conclusion​

So in conclusion, what is actually some, what did the iOS 14 changes bring to us in this new year? Well, Apple has introduced a lot of privacy changes because they feel like they need to protect their users' privacy. And the biggest change that we came across was this pop-up that now makes everybody who logs into an app that sends data over to advertising networks or to websites or owners of analytics tools, makes them opt in. And that is something that a lot of advertisers, especially the advertising platforms like Facebook, would criticize as very intrusive because most of the users will say, do not track. And then the advertisers will lose out on advertising data or targeting possibilities. Possible workarounds are there, but they are not end-all solutions. I think as a wrap-up here, we all need to get used to this changed world, just like we need to get used to GDPR, just like we need to get used to CCPA, and just like we need to get used to the next privacy thing that will come out. And we will need to still work with that data, see what the impact is, and then adjust our marketing accordingly, change the budget around, change the targeting around, still find the most profitable spaces for you. World is changing, technology is changing, and yeah, privacy and users' data is changing as well. All right, this was my little monologue on our privacy changes in iOS 14.