Marketers Aren’t Waiting for Meta to Solve Apple Conversion

After a torrent of bad news—most notably a disappointing earnings report that sent shares tumbling—Meta finally had something good to share with the advertising community last week: It had improved its underreporting of iOS web conversions to 8%, down from 15% in September. Advertisers were, for the most part, nonplussed. “We were adapting to this new reality,” said Avi Ben-Zvi, vp, paid social at performance marketing agency Tinuiti, noting that his team has already been finding workarounds to measure ad effectiveness in the diminished targeting landscape. “I don’t think we can sit and bide our time.” In its most recent earnings call, Meta said the update to iOS 14.5 implemented last year, where Apple’s App Tracking Transparency framework let users opt-out of the mobile identifiers tracking them, would cost the company a staggering $10 billion. Without swaths of data from iPhone users, Meta is unable to target its ads and measure their impact effectively. On the earnings call, Meta COO Sheryl Sandberg said these changes impact smaller businesses the most, confirmed by a report in the Wall Street Journal. But while smaller brands and direct-to-consumer advertisers might be moving ad dollars from Facebook due to issues around targeting ads reliably and not seeing a return on ad spend, those with bigger budgets don't see Meta's conversion challenges as an impetus for ditching the platform, according to marketers interviewed by Adweek. Instead, bigger brands are diversifying how they measure the effectiveness of Meta ads, relying on a patchwork of workarounds they've honed not only as a response to Facebook but to also address challenges within the deteriorating privacy landscape, which includes Google's recent announcement to end cross-app targeting on Android. Meta: Underreporting of iOS Web Conversions Down to 8% From 15% Last September “I don’t believe that this makes Facebook any better or worse at what they do,” said Graham Wilkinson, evp of product innovation at ad-tech company Kinesso, whose parent company IPG counts huge corporations like Cinga, Amazon and Epic Games as clients. Wilkinson added that Facebook may be uniquely positioned to solve the industry's conversion problem rather than be weakened by it. “Facebook is not just going to lie down and see their advertising ecosystem degrade. … They’re probably going to have a head start on most people.” "Apple’s harmful policy is making it harder and more expensive for businesses of all sizes to reach their customers," a Facebook spokesperson said. "We believe Facebook and Instagram remain the best platforms for businesses to grow and connect with people, and we’ll always keep working to improve performance and measurement." Alternative conversion strategies Conversions help marketers measure the effectiveness of their ads. A conversion happens every time a user takes an action after viewing an ad, such as purchasing a product or downloading an app. But with Apple’s changes, it’s harder for Meta to tell if the person who saw a car ad on their iPhone’s Facebook app is the same person who later bought said car. Before identifier deprecation, measuring a campaign’s effectiveness depended a lot on statistics from Meta, said Ben-Zvi, who works with brands such as e.l.f. Cosmetics, Etsy and Revlon. "It was all about figuring out what is the proper attribution window based on what Facebook is telling me,” he said. Now Ben-Zvi relies on various tools, including looking for correlations between when a campaign was active and certain conversion outcomes, leveraging his agency's proprietary technology. For example, when the campaign was active, did the advertiser see a lift in direct sales on its website or an increase in branded search via Google? Ben-Zvi said he has also looked to third-party tech, such as Blackcrow.ai, which helps brands build their own audiences to target without Meta. Another strategy is having brands collect more of their own first-party data, so they don't need to rely as much on Meta tracking users. Ashley Karim-Kincey, vp of media at creative agency Dagger, said she uses tech such as floodlight tags on the brand's website to track who has visited and double-click tracking tags within their ads to cross-reference the data, both of which are Google ad-tech products. "Ultimately, we use technology to collect our own data to leverage and compare against all partners, not just Facebook," Karim-Kincey said. In fact, Meta is expecting marketers to collect more of their own data. One key workaround marketers say they have been increasingly relying on for the iOS problem is Meta's conversions API, which allows advertisers to plug in their own conversion data. This helps fill in the gaps from users who can no longer be tracked and allows brands to connect who saw their ads on Facebook and Instagram with who took an action. But the API does not solve brands' larger challenges around attribution in the digital advertising ecosystem, as it only helps measure the effectiveness of Facebook ads and not whether another media source drove more conversions. Meta's solutions help Meta While advertisers have found workarounds, there are still challenges to gauging the effectiveness of their Facebook and Instagram campaigns as attribution gets harder. However, Meta has improved its underreporting rate by relying more heavily on modeling based on the users who allowed themselves to be tracked. “The profile of the people who agree to be tracked is not necessarily the average person,” said a senior ad-tech analyst who requested anonymity, raising the possibility that this unrepresentative sample potentially undermines the validity of Meta’s data. A Meta spokesperson said it relies on various sources to compensate for the data lost from iOS changes. Meta Settles $90 Million in a Decade-Old User Tracking Lawsuit, Will be Asked to Delete Data As Meta's tech works to model audiences, it takes longer to get reliable conversion metrics from Meta. In response, Cindy Meltzer, director of data strategy at Dagger, said her team is exercising more patience since her clients have the budgets to wait on the platform to measure campaign performance. However, this isn't the case for small businesses. “Small business might need to look right away because their budget is low, [so they need to see] whether or not [the campaign] is performing the way that they want it to,” she added. But for all marketers’ attempts to become less reliant on Meta for analytics, paradoxically, the identifier-free future may make Meta more powerful, Wilkinson said. As has always been the case, these workarounds help measure Meta’s effectiveness within its walled garden, where it has reach, scale, and, for the most part, granular analytics. But it still doesn't compare between Facebook and other platforms. “[Meta’s improved underreporting] doesn’t really improve how you do any advertising," Wilkinson said. "It really just improves your Facebook ads."

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Marketers Aren’t Waiting Around for Meta to Solve Its Apple Conversion Problem

Rather than move money, brands with big budgets are expanding their conversion strategies

Catherine Perloff

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Catherine Perloff