Apple’s iOS 14 Changes Are Almost Here: How to Finish Preparing and What’s Changing

As part of these changes, following the release of iOS 14.5, Facebook will implement new advertiser experiences and measurement protocols, including Apple’s SKAdNetwork API and Facebook’s Aggregated Event Measurement. These protocols restrict, aggregate and delay reporting, while continuing to enable the measurement of campaign results, with limitations. Advertisers can expect to see changes in Facebook’s business and advertising tools set up, audience selection, delivery, measurement, and reporting. For example, if you’re an app advertiser, you’ll need to run iOS 14 mobile app install advertising within one ad account and will be limited to nine campaigns per app; and if you use web events to optimize and measure your campaigns, you will be limited to optimizing for no more than eight events on each domain that you own. We plan to share future guidance that may update these limitations as we innovate to operate with restricted, aggregated, and delayed data.

Act now to minimize disruptions to your advertising campaigns

If your business currently runs ads on Facebook and Instagram, there are a series of actions that you will need to take to prepare for these changes.

Main Actions for App Advertisers

• Update to the Facebook SDK version 8.0 or above. If you use a Mobile Measurement Partner, confirm you’re using the version of their SDK that supports Apple’s SKAdNetwork API.
• Set up your conversion schema in Events Manager to optimize for App Events, Value and Mobile App Installs with Automated App Ads.
• Plan to create iOS 14 app install campaigns with one ad account per app, nine campaigns per app and five ad sets per campaign of the same optimization type.

Main Actions for Advertisers using Web Events

• If required, verify your domain in Facebook Business Manager.
• Set up and prioritize up to eight web events per domain in Events Manager.
• Review ads and ad sets that will be paused via the Resource Center tab in Facebook Ads Manager and update or replace them.

It’s important to understand that not taking these actions could result in disruptions to your Facebook and Instagram advertising, including:

• Inability to create mobile app install ad campaigns targeting users on iOS 14.5 and above.
• Limited access to certain optimization choices and the pause of certain ad sets.
• Ad performance impact as delivery to users on iOS 14.5 and above may decline for certain ad sets.

We’re providing resources to help you manage these actions:

• Resource Center tab in Facebook Ads Manager (available on Desktop only): In the new Resource Center tab in Facebook Ads Manager, we have created a customized list of actions for your ad account to help you prepare for the changes that will begin going into effect next week, If your ad account requires actions, we recommend that you take action today to avoid disruption to your campaigns.
• Ads Ecosystem Hub: The ads ecosystem is rapidly evolving with increasing regulation and changes to mobile operating system and browser policies. This comprehensive guide includes resources to help you evolve your advertising strategies based on the technical changes emerging from mobile operating systems and web browsers.

These actions will prepare you for changes you’ll see next week, following the release of general availability of iOS 14.5. We will provide an update to this post with a specific date when it’s available.

Event Measurement:

• We’re going to restrict, aggregate and delay reporting to align with Apple’s policies by implementing Apple’s SKAdNetwork app attribution API, and Facebook’s Aggregated Event Measurement for website conversion events.
• We’ve given advertisers tools to flag which app events are to be used for ads, in line with their legal commitments and platform terms for data privacy and data use.
• We are limiting the number of website events that can be used for optimization to 8, while we continue to explore ways to add events.
• Events from iOS 14.5 devices that opted out of the Apple prompt on Facebook will not be used to include users in Website Custom Audiences.
  

Measurement and Reporting:

• We will no longer support long attribution windows where we won’t have full event data and will likely not be able to do modeling for 28 day click-through, 28 day view-through, and 7-day-view through.
• Delivery and action breakdowns will not be supported for offsite conversion events. This includes demographic breakdowns such as age, gender and region.
• We are introducing modeled reporting for our 1-day click-through attribution window that accounts for events no longer reported. To adjust for data sharing limitations, we will not use modeling for our 7-day click through and 1-day view through attribution windows. Reporting for these attribution windows will be partial and not include all events.
• Lift Measurement will not be allowed for iOS 14 Mobile App Install and Mobile App Events campaigns.
• Self-serve conversion lift, also known as Holdout Tests in the Experiments tool, will no longer be available.
• The ability to measure the incremental impact of both Facebook and another publisher’s advertising through the Cross-publisher conversion lift beta will no longer be available.
• Data-Driven Attribution, the ability to assign fractional credit for a conversion to Facebook touchpoints based on their estimated incremental impact, will also no longer be available for iOS 14 app install campaigns.

Ad Creation, Audience Selection and Delivery for App Campaigns:

• To reach iOS 14.5+ users, you will be required to create separate iOS 14 app install campaigns with one ad account per app, nine campaigns per app and five ad sets per campaign of the same optimization type.
• Mobile app custom audiences for inclusion are no longer available.
• The ability to provide a link that sends people to a custom view after they install an app is no longer available.
• iOS 14 app install campaigns are not available for Reach and Frequency buying.
  

How we’re thinking about advertising and privacy on Facebook

As we look ahead at the future of advertising, it’s important to acknowledge that the ways that digital advertising collects and uses data will evolve. While we have expressed concerns about Apple’s approach, we support giving people more control over how their data is used to improve advertising relevance. Toward this end, we are investing in new approaches to privacy-enhancing technology and building a personalized advertising ecosystem that relies on less data, while helping to ensure a level playing field for both large and small businesses.

At Facebook, we build privacy into everything we do, including our advertising products. This is why we created tools like Off-Facebook Activity, among others, to help people take control of their data.

Additionally, we’re investing in privacy-enhancing technologies — technologies based on advanced cryptographic and statistical techniques that minimize the data we collect, process and share — to help protect data at different stages of the data lifecycle. And while these technologies are an important part of our work to build a technical foundation that supports privacy, we are still in the early stages of this investment and are continuing to explore their various use cases.

As part of this effort, we’re exploring advertising solutions that process aggregated data for purposes like measurement. For example, we’re implementing aggregated events measurement, which limits access to the individually identifiable information we process. In addition, we’re exploring an approach known as “federated learning,” which is designed to keep personal data localized on a person’s device. On the technical side, we’ve shared research proposals with our industry colleagues on other privacy-focused solutions like Blind Signatures to mitigate ad fraud and private matching to deliver insights from data without having to share raw data with third parties.

We believe industry collaboration is critical to arriving at solutions that work for all stakeholders — not just a single company. We continue to work with our customers, privacy advocates and industry groups such as the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), the Partnership for Responsible Addressable Media (PRAM) and World Federation of Advertisers (WFA) to develop and implement new standards that further protect people’s privacy, while keeping content free for people and enabling businesses to grow.

Going forward, we’ll continue to provide clear guidance for advertisers — as we evolve our products and deprecate tools and features that no longer offer advertisers value — so that advertisers can continue to use ads to drive their business goals. In parallel, we’ll continue to update our tools in a privacy-enhancing way for consumers and advertisers, while allowing advertisers to still optimize and measure campaigns.