What You Need To Know About The Apple iOS14 Update and It’s Impact On Facebook & Google Ads with Scott Desgrosseilliers From Wicked Reports
Timestamps
00:40 – Episode & Guest Overview
03:46 – Why is the iOS 14 Update is Important and Why You Should Care
06:11 – Aspects of the Update that will Affect Advertisers
15:31 – Ways to Workaround with the Update
19:55 – How Advertisers Can Cope Up
23:57 – How Retargeting Audiences will Be Affected
24:57 – The Affected 8 Conversion Events
32:25 – Is Google Ads Landscape Going to Be Affected As Well?
35:07 – Is Retargeting on Google Ads Will be Affected?
38:04 – Steps that Advertisers Should Be Taking Before the Update
42:33 – Mine those Emails As Early as Now
45:08 – How Wicked Reports Work and How its Not Going to Be Affected
47:24 – Learn More About Scoot and Wicked Reports
Episode & Guest Overview
Ilana:
Welcome back to another episode of Teach Traffic. I am your host, Ilana Wechsler, and I’m really excited to have Scott Desgrosseilliers on today’s episode.
He is the founder of a very awesome software tool called Wicked Reports. And if you’ve never heard of wicked reports, you most likely after today’s episode will definitely want to check it out.
They’re a software which allows you to, I guess, provide clarity and forgive me Scott, if I’m not giving the full picture provides clarity for attribution. So if you’re running, let’s say paid traffic or you know, developing other traffic sources, it will provide a lens as to the attribution of where your leads and sales are coming from, from all your different traffic sources.
In the world of many, many touch points and many traffic sources. It’s the endless quest, I find business owners to work out which traffic sources are ultimately contributing to their sales, and in the multi touch point world we can definitely provide that lens of clarity, did I give it a well rounded introduction on it?
Scott Desgrosseilliers:
You know, you did well. I always enjoy hearing how people describe it. Because you know, back when we first cooked this up, I had to even explain what it was was always interesting.
And people didn’t even know the word attribution. Now. It’s like, at least it’s a category. But before it wasn’t sweet to explain even what the hell we did, and then why people should care?
Yes, and no, you should, you know, the endless quest. I’m 20,000 hours in on this. So that’s how I feel like I’m comfortable talking about what to do, because it’s been like seven years of my life.
You stop up if it’s not, it takes a while to get the hang of it. In some cases.
Ilana:
Yeah. And you know, I speak to business owners all the time, who are running their own traffic or getting somebody else to run their traffic for them.
And by far and away, the thing that I hear people say is, I’ve spent X amount of dollars on traffic, and I’ve got no idea where my sales are coming from.
And it’s a common complaint, comments made by people.
So Wicked Reports is obviously a tool which helps solve that exact problem.
But that is not why I have invited you on today’s show.
You are here to talk about all the Facebook’s issues that are coming with the Apple iOS 14, update the software updates.
So we’re going to cover a Why is this important? What is this all about? And importantly, what you need to do about it?
And Scott, I recently read an article by yours and I read it, I thought this is the man to talk about it. Which is why I have asked you to come on and share your wisdom is it’s uncharted territory for many of us advertisers. And we’re all still very much learning and discovering the true impact.
Why is the iOS 14 Update is Important and Why You Should Care
So Scott, why don’t we kick off by explaining Firstly, why is this really important? Why do advertisers need to be aware of this?
Scott Desgrosseilliers:
Sure. So Apple has decided that due to a certain technology that Facebook snap, Pinterest, Google and others are using that the only way they’re going to be able to continue to use that particular tech as if they alert the users.
And so in a nutshell, what’s going on is that in the background, these Facebook and say Facebook, but it’s not just them, it’s a lot of other companies are using something called Apple IDFA, which stands for ID For Advertisers. They take your phone number, and they send it to Apple and then Apple returns this list of everything that they know about you or not everything but places you visited all kinds of information about you from your phone.
So Apple was the one that was collecting and sharing out that point. And so Facebook, Google, Snap, Pinterest, others, those are like the big four though out of all your audience or at least people that I talked to, they download that data and use it for All sorts of things.
In some cases, it’s to determine what conversions have happened. In some cases, it’s to determine audiences such as if you, you know, they’re trying to target a certain interest. And it could be because they looked up on phone numbers and discovered that you appear to have an interest for some reason, they put you in that pool of targeting. Those are the kind of the major, those are the major high level, that point of using your phone number.
Apple has now decided that if anyone’s doing that, in their app on the phone, they have to first there’s going to be a prompt, that’s going to say, “Do you want Facebook pin whoever to be able to track your activity across websites?”, and then it says, “Do not allow”, then it says “Allow”.
And everything we’re gonna talk about comes down to when this software update hits, some of the implications have already hit advertiser accounts, more related to AD buying and attribution that we’ll talk about.
But the big impact that’s coming is going to be when people are on their phones and say, I don’t want to be tracked, what’s going to happen. And so that in a nutshell is like, what’s hitting the phones?
Aspects of the Update that will Affect Advertisers
Ilana:
Yeah. Okay. So the impact that this is going to have on advertisers is multifaceted. From what I understand. Do you want to maybe expand on what aspects it’s going to impact advertisers?
Scott Desgrosseilliers:
Sure. So all the impacts are currently going to affect only phone, apple, iPhone, iOS 14, dot four dot five, it doesn’t matter.
Point is, sooner or later, every Apple iPhone, at first is where the impacts can happen, these people are going to have the prompt, and they can be allowed to opt out of tracking.
So if you’re targeting desktop right now, this has no impact on you for the desktop traffic, but it has all the impact on the phone traffic. Now it’s likely somewhat to spread elsewhere. But what’s first going to happen is that because people click “I don’t want to be tracked”.
Well, I should back up and say one thing. So Facebook’s mobile traffic is pretty significant. It’s about according to you can just google it says it’s 80%
Ilana:
I’d say it’s more.
Scott Desgrosseilliers:
Yeah, and then how much of that is Apple. Apples, the dominant phone, so probably half your traffic, let’s say I mean, maybe a little bit less. But the point is, I mean, it was 40 percent of your traffic.
So when you say I don’t want to be tracked, then, for various reasons, Facebook’s not able to use your data in virtually anything, it means Facebook can’t show you as a conversion. In the ad manager. That’s the biggest one, no matter how you try to do it.
I’ve even known, we’re a Facebook conversion marketing partner. So this isn’t just me conjecturing, but also my natural gifts, I don’t have a lot of them. But what I do have I can read technical documents and map data together.
That’s why we have a marketing attribution business, what I love to do is piece together this stuff. So when I first saw in October, I was like, oh, man, this, this, there’s no way this is going to happen. And it really has happened.
Most of it, and the rest of it’s happening this month, it looks like so because you say I don’t want to be tracked, then you’re not going to show up in the ads manager, even if you convert…your data….
What’s that?
Ilana:
I was just gonna say so as an advertiser when you log into your ads manager account, and you see, I’ve spent $200, and I’ve made $400.
Now, you may see that you’ve spent $200, but the ads manager is only going to tell you made 100 even though in actual fact, you have made 400.
Scott Desgrosseilliers:
Yes, definitely, there’s definitely going to be an understatement of how much you’re making. Assuming you have iPhone traffic, which everyone does,
Ilana:
So it doesn’t mean you’re missing out on that revenue. You just can’t attribute that revenue to the Facebook ads or even within your Facebook ads, which particular interest group in which particular ad generated that revenue?
Scott Desgrosseilliers:
Yeah, so I mean that that part already stinks. But the second thing that we already have? Well, so the attribution windows that determined your attribution Windows, or how you did determine credit for a particular click?
So Facebook used to say, I’m going to take a click and look forward to 28 days to see if you made a sale.
And in some, in some cases, I’m going to look for that far from your, from a view from a scroll by on the phone and say, “Hey, did you end up buying from this advertiser that we showed you the ad X amount of days ago?”, and that’s now shrunk to seven days click in one day view so that already is hitting ad accounts.
And that’s a huge impact because you’re losing three quarters of your time window to get credit So that’s a big one right there that I don’t know if you’ve seen it in any accounts yet, but it’s already been landing in accounts or people have been already, like testing out the differences so that that one could be somewhat traumatic.
Ilana:
Okay, so that’s the second thing that’s impacting advertisers?
Scott Desgrosseilliers:
Yes.
Ilana:
Is there a third?
Scott Desgrosseilliers:
I’d say there’s two more.
Ilana:
Okay.
Scott Desgrosseilliers:
The third one is that events manager, you need to go in and prioritize, you are allowed eight events, of which a purchase somehow can take up four of them due to value based bidding ideas and concepts.
But a lot of people that are using a bunch of custom events, which some advertisers get really into . You’re only allowed eight events total, and you have to prioritize them.
And until you prioritize them, sales is obviously the top one. And then lead is that, you know, abandoned cart might be second, lead might be your third most important, maybe view contents for that.
I don’t know, that’s just one logical one that might happen.
Well, you’re only reporting one event per user per time period. So this one is actually quite impactful, I think, because if you click, if you run an ad to cold traffic, you click and get a lead, then your retargeting campaign kicks in, and it’s amazing.
And it gets someone to abandon the cart, and then the abandoned cart kicks in and closes them. And if that magically all happens in one day, or you know, in whatever time, they haven’t said what the time frame is, but let’s just say it’s all in the same day, you’re only going to see the sale reported, if they and that that’s not even related to the OPT outs.
That’s just one sale per user, one event per user. So that one stinks. Because you wouldn’t have got the sale without the other two campaigns.
And this, you know, I mean, I don’t know if that’s a common scenario, right? cold traffic campaign, abandoned cart campaign and then buy my stuff.
And that one, no one’s reported or really fully digested that one. But they’ve stated it, I’ve had it verified. And they’ve, they’ve presented it as well at their public webinars.
So this isn’t secret info, it just might have been glossed over with all the other big ones. That could be a really big one. Maybe it won’t be, it sounds massive. To me, it sounds like a massive impact.
Ilana:
I want to expand on that in a second. But let’s just go, I need to close the loop on what the fourth one is. And then let’s go back to each of these in a bit more depth.
Scott Desgrosseilliers:
The fourth one is that they’re using the ID lookup for ad sets.
And they have mentioned that the audience network in particular is going to suffer a definite reduced return on ad spend due to the changes.
So anyone using an audience network, which most people probably are, or if they aren’t getting into specifics, but a simple example, let’s just say that, uh, you know, I like a particular Music Group.
I like Aerosmith, for example, or Guns and Roses. I love Guns and Roses. My 50th birthday is coming up this winter, this fall my goal is to be watching them in Australia, if the borders are open, they might not be but we’ll see.
Ilana:
I like your chances.
Scott Desgrosseilliers:
But anyway, I know I don’t think it’s gonna happen by that. But so if an advertiser is on there, and they’re saying, hey, I want to target people to like Guns and Roses.
So one of the ways they could do that, well, I was on the Guns and Roses Facebook page, and I liked them. I’m 49. I already have Facebook on my phone, you know, I have it on my desktop phone. So I’m not going around liking everything, you know, I’ve got three kids in business, I don’t have time to like stuff.
Like them personally, I don’t even have time to do that. But to go on and then tell people a lie doesn’t happen.
So then they might have also inferred it because they looked up my phone number and they saw that I went to the website, they’re no longer able to do that. Or they might know that I like them and they might be able to target me as Guns and Roses, because Guns and Roses has uploaded their email list of which I’m on. So that one will still work. But if I’ve opted out of tracking, they can’t use my phone number to say hey, this guy likes Guns and Roses. And if I haven’t liked that Facebook page, they’re just not going to know, now they’re likely to develop other ways to figure that out.
But they’ve just been warning people ad sets are going to have a lot shrunken potential reach and the audience networks are really gonna be affected. And so that’s one simple example. I mean, you got to figure Facebook data scientists will figure stuff out and you know, eventually but it’s gonna be a little crazy when it first hits. So those are the big four, I would say.
Ilana:
Okay, on that last one that you were just mentioning in this scenario where you might have been on the Guns and Roses email list, but you might have opted out. What’s that situation where you know, you’ve opted out from your phone number but they’ve got your email?
Scott Desgrosseilliers:
So they could still upload and target me and still probably get me to convert because I’m very into Guns and Roses. But if I converted on my iOS 14. And I said, don’t track me, then even though I may have conversion API set up through Shopify or WooCommerce, or pushing up lead conversions, wicker reports has the ability to do that coming up shortly, no matter what I tell Facebook, they’re not allowed to report on it.
Because I opted out of iOS 14 and I converted on the phone, meaning they use the phone number lookup to figure out who that’s how they generally do it.
Ilana:
Interesting. Alrighty, so let’s expand on this a little bit more. So the first one that you said is obviously, from a reporting point of view, less is going to be reported.
As I said, in the scenario, someone will log into their ads manager and their return on ad spend will not look nearly as attractive as it once was.
Ways to Workaround with the Update
Ilana:
And therefore advertisers might question the effectiveness of their Facebook ads, and therefore whether they’re going to continue to run or do they, how can they scale? What are some of the ways that people can combat this? Or is there no way that people can combat this?
Scott Desgrosseilliers:
Well, there is a way so I mean, you need an independent measurement solution that is able to track. And so the way that you’re able to still measure and track results is if you aren’t using Apple IDFA, you’re not using the phone number lookup, and you’re not spying on people on other websites, or you’re not using the data for anything other than to track your own performance.
So I mean, I, this isn’t gonna be an infomercial, wicked report, I just want to help people, but we sat, we check all those boxes. So this isn’t the worst news for us. But there’s others you know, there’s other solutions out there as well. Or you could hack up your own homegrown one.
But you need to rely on particularly with Facebook, there’s a lot of incredible lifetime value you can get from the leads, you get, even as an ecomm store, you can still pull leads down there, and you know, have them opt in for a coupon or buy one, get one free shipping, whatever, and then redirect them to your offer page. And then you still got that data point that, hey, they came from Facebook, and then track this lifetime value.
Because the people, you know, there’s going to be chaos, because everyone’s going to be used to looking at their ad manager and see low numbers, particularly in cold traffic that takes a little time to convert is going to be you know, you’re taking more than a week to convert leads, which isn’t terrible. If it happens, normally pretty normal, and it’s cold traffic, and it’s an iPhone, it’s gonna look horrible inside of Facebook, unless they can lobby away all these changes for the year.
But that Facebook actually is still going to be just as good as it was prior, it’s just going to be tough to prove it. And so if you can prove it and continue spending, you’re going to be able to fish out those ad sets and crush all the great leads that turn into customers that your competitors that are just looking to AD manager and say, Oh, this isn’t working anymore, that are just leaving to you. So it’s a big, big opportunity if you can get in there and take advantage of it.
Ilana:
What about a situation where in your ads, you use trackable links with UTM sources? And then really, you’re leaning not so much on the ads manager for your return on ad spend calculations, but rather Google Analytics, because Google Analytics, I’m assuming, is unaffected by this.
And therefore you can then calculate your return on ad spend. That way, so in your Facebook ads, you put, you know the tracker, the Google trackable links, you know, the source medium, and then in your traffic sources, reporting analytics, you can then see how much revenue was produced from those specific ads, would that get around this issue?
Scott Desgrosseilliers:
Yes, that should get around this issue. So there are some. So a couple of things on that approach that will work if you have clean utms. And you get your cross domain tracking, or you only have one domains, you don’t lose the sense to Google Analytics, that can tell you some conversion data, particularly if it’s last click now when there’s leads that take time to buy Google Analytics is more it’s much more advanced implementation to try to sort that out.
That was kind of our initial use case was you know, he had an e-commerce store where his leads were actually taking 40 days to buy on average. So he wasn’t spending on ads because they never ROI positive.
And they were able to show him that he made 10 to 1. It just took three months which he sent to shorten that but he was unhappy but happy it’s like okay, I’m making money. This is making me sad. It’s taking too long.
But now this advertisers are now spending a couple 100,000 a month on paid because he’s making it back on the back end when he looks 60, 90 days out. That took him you know, a few years you don’t just go from a couple grand a couple 100 grand overnight but it works. Just takes a lot of just takes work.
How Advertisers Can Cope Up
Ilana:
Yeah. Okay. What about the the second point that you said that advertisers are going to how advertisers are going to be affected by this with sort of the reduction in in the targeting, do you want to maybe, is there any way around how advertisers can cope with that, or it’s just something that we’ve got to live with now.
Scott Desgrosseilliers:
So it puts a big emphasis on first party data, which is emails that you’re able to collect your data you’re able to collect to help you target.
So the shift there that would be helpful is if you’re cold traffic offers, instead of just counting on the pixel to get seasoned, and to be able to target everyone through the pixel, you’re gonna have to do more email collection near the top of the funnel, particularly as your price point rises, or your consideration cycle is longer, then that’s going to be paramount.
For example, we have ecommerce brands, a lot of them they’re selling 100 to $500 things online, well, you don’t normally see a brand, someone selling something for a couple $100 click and buy first impression, you know, you got to warm up, then it’s a couple 100 bucks, you want to see is it cheaper, because the quality Google reviews, you know, all that stuff that goes on before you’re gonna shell out a few $100 or subscription ecommerce box companies or subscriptions or people selling courses, we might get excited about the course.
But am I going to really recoup 99 bucks a month with someone I just heard of, no, I’m going to take a little time. So the better you can do a capture that email address up in the cold, then you’re going to be able to still retarget them reasonably well, just as well.
You know, using a whole uploaded ad set sinking from your email list and doing it that way it’s going to work. That’s always work. But that’s going to become more important because of the decreased effectiveness of the ad sets. Without that.
Ilana:
Yeah, I also imagined that the real micro interest targeting is going to be less effective now as people are possibly opting out. And the level of granularity of interest data that Facebook has on people is probably decreasing.
Scott Desgrosseilliers:
Yeah, I think like at first the impacts they’ve still got that whole backlog of seven years of data. 10 years of data on you but you know, as this continues, like near for Christmas, you know, Black Friday, Cyber Monday, the end of this year, how much is that six months? last eight months loss of data gonna be affecting things then?
Ilana:
Once a Gun N’ Rose fan, always a Gun N’ Rose fan. (laughs)
Scott Desgrosseilliers:
Always, target me, I want more ads from them. No issues there. I will opt in for them specifically. (laughs)
Ilana:
What about a situation that I know many people use the strategy of top of funnel promoting a video creating a video engagement audience to then retarget people. If somebody has opted out from being tracked, then that video engagement audience has meant that they’re not part of that audience. Is that true?
Scott Desgrosseilliers:
Yeah, that strategy is probably most at risk. You need to try to capture the user off that.
I mean, YouTube, it’s a little easier where you I mean, all paid advertising, you know, you got to know what you’re doing. But at least with YouTube, they have the true view action, you can try to capture the lead with the overlay. Yes, that you’re gonna almost see the video have to be more important you have to email to get this offer, you have to get your email, you know, you might need to entice them more to convert there.
Yeah, because in that exact scenario, that’s really common. Yeah, the video and Facebook retarget those people that watch X percent. That’s where if they’re not allowed to be tracked, my understanding is they’re not gonna, that’s, that’s gonna be painful right there.
Ilana:
Well, it’s time to change strategy. I would imagine.
Scott Desgrosseilliers:
Beg them at the video it is always gonna be grabbing for info, you know, grabbing for their email.
How Retargeting Audiences will Be Affected
Ilana:
What about generally retargeting audiences? Well, I would imagine they’re going to reduce in size as as well, if you don’t capture their email that is,
Scott Desgrosseilliers:
Yeah, it will reduce in size. Well, any time an audience is derived due to phone number lookup, it’s gone. In any audience that the phone number lookup, because the people will opt out so they won’t be in that audience.
So they can’t track that their phone number indicated that they’re part of that audience.
So Facebook will likely develop other ways to figure that out. But as it stands right now, it’s a pretty big part of how they do it because I mean, they spent a billion dollars fighting it and PR and that’s what got it, you know, for whatever reason, it keeps getting delayed and delayed was supposed to go live like last fall. So they’ve managed to, you know, fight it for this long, but I think it’s, I think it’s hitting,
The Affected 8 Conversion Events
Ilana:
I’m definitely seen, which I want to talk about now is the eight event, event restrictions or conversion events.
I’ve definitely seen that in some of our ad accounts. So that’s definitely hit advertisers. Do you want to maybe talk about those eight events, and also, the importance of the priority works.
Scott Desgrosseilliers:
So you can set any priority of events you want, but the importance of it is, in a given timeframe, which they haven’t debated hasn’t revealed how long that timeframe is; only the highest most called most priority event is the label they use. is the one reported in the ad manager. Events. Yeah, let’s just use two events to make it easy, became a lead bought something.
Well, okay, so obviously bought sale is more important than lead. But that means that the same person that became a lead and then turned to sales only to be reported as a sale, even though maybe they only bought because they became a lead, and then that other campaign made them buy.
So that one’s really frustrating that there’s that the only clarity they’ve had on it is that it’s eight events,max. So if you have a big Custom Event, complicated solution, you’re probably already know about this and are scrambling to you know, figure out a new strategy.
Ilana:
So can I just quiz you a little bit more on that. So in this two events scenario that you’re talking about, of the lead and the sale, if you’re running two separate campaigns, one is optimizing for a lead. And the second campaign is optimizing for the sale, retargeting.
Only one, if one person does both, for example, becomes a lead, and then and then purchases. So only one will be reported. Because the priority is set for the sale. Is that right?
Scott Desgrosseilliers:
That’s what’s been stated. Yeah.
Ilana:
So what is the point then?
Scott Desgrosseilliers:
Yeah, imagine if it was all you had 20 leads, and then they all bought.
And then in theory, and they’re all using iOS 14, and they all opted out, then you would see zero leads, and zero sales in that case, but then in the other event they haven’t opted out.
But they’re still limiting the events per user, you see zero leads and 20 sales, we’re like, well, they only get to the sale campaign because of the lead campaign.
How can this be? That’s how it reads right now. And it’s been mind blowing to me that like I had it triple confirmed through various sources that I have at Facebook as from a relationship.
So that one’s pause. I mean, I haven’t seen it impact someone yet. So from I’ve seen the events configured.
So that’s the one that I’m least like, thrilled to talk about, because I’m like, how can it be this way? That makes no sense. But
Ilana:
What about a situation with this same example of 20 leads and no sales, but the sale is the priority event. Does that mean it shows zero even though they got 20 Leads?
Scott Desgrosseilliers:
No. So then you’d see the 20 leads,
Ilana:
Okay, then you say the 20 leads, okay, it’s only in the event of the duplicate conversion, only one is credited.
Scott Desgrosseilliers:
It’s a dupe conversion in what has not been clear is how long that user conversion time window is. I mean, if it’s the same day, though, then it’s, it’s only going to show the highest, how long it has to go to show the different events hasn’t been made clear to me. So….
Ilana:
it just seems like such a silly rule.
Scott Desgrosseilliers:
That would make no sense. So there’s something around the bits that they’re allowed to store. It got shrunk.
And so they had to figure out how many they didn’t have this unlimited storage of data, basically, they had to shrink, how many things are available to store and so they had to pick and choose where they were going to cut some painful data points.
I don’t know why, how that ties into this. I just know that that was the rationale behind it. That bit storage.
Ilana:
I have to completely agree with you on that one. This one makes zero sense whatsoever.
Scott Desgrosseilliers:
It does.
Ilana:
What about a situation with this whole eight event business where people are running, let’s say multiple lead magnets. And would you suggest let’s say they’re you know, that’s what they’re optimizing for?
Would you recommend them as a way to conserve their very precious eight conversion events that they’ve been allocated?
By creating let’s say one thank you page. That’s a commonality amongst multiple lead magnets.
You kinda understand my question?
Scott Desgrosseilliers:
That sounds like an interesting way to handle that. I don’t know if it’ll work.
Ilana:
It’s too sneaky?
Scott Desgrosseilliers:
It’s too new of an area to know I wouldn’t feel comfortable unless I saw that it worked. It looks like it might well let’s say something like you opt in for two different magnets.
And it still fires the one lead and then it’s gonna say Hey, wait a minute. I had a click from campaign A. Yesterday and campaign B today. I don’t know what will happen. But I don’t know.
Ilana:
Did I throw you a curveball?
Scott Desgrosseilliers:
Yeah. So with the events, that’s interesting, because it’s so out there, what they’re doing, it almost just doesn’t seem like, how can it be?
But had it confirmed and I read it like 17 times I’ve been on the webinars, I’ve queried all the various sources we have as marketing partners.
Ilana:
Why eight? Why is that? Like, what they just pluck that number from the air? or like?
Scott Desgrosseilliers:
It’s like, eight is one, you know, if you’re storing things at the bit, byte level, eight is one of those ones. eight rounds is like one slot of storage in memory. So one slot for events?
Ilana:
Yeah, it’s a binary, isn’t it?
Scott Desgrosseilliers:
Yeah. It was very, it was a binary decision. And then the attribution windows are a big thing, too, because people are used to seeing a month’s worth, you know, you’re earning a click.
And then within a month, they buy Facebook getting credit. And that’s shrunk down to a week. That’s a, that might be a reasonably big impact, but just on its own, those are, that’s already hitting accounts now. So that one’s tough.
Ilana:
So now that you’ve delivered us all this great news.
Scott Desgrosseilliers:
I’m such an optimistic person. No. This thanks, because it’s like not like, I mean, granted, maybe they shouldn’t, you know, some tracking, you should be more transparent about it or something. But for them not to be able to report honest conversions that were earned that that one stinks, that part is a little unfair, a little extreme, in my opinion.
Ilana:
Do you think they might change the rules with this?
Scott Desgrosseilliers:
Yes. I mean, they’ve already delayed things a couple times and managed to have it delayed a couple times. So possibly, or maybe there’d be some correction back? I mean, it. I mean, this apple coming out with their own ad network. Is that the game plan here and they want it or…..
Ilana:
Or is Facebook coming out with their own phone? Is that the new game plan?
Scott Desgrosseilliers:
Yeah, double Yeah. So it’s getting it’s it’s a real like food fight almost between two tech Titans.
Is Google Ads Landscape Going to Be Affected As Well?
Ilana:
I’m curious, though, also, like, we’re sort of banging on here all about the impact of Facebook ad land. What about on the Google Ads side of things? Is that going to be as impacted? Yeah, what are your thoughts?
Scott Desgrosseilliers:
Well, so Google’s been super quiet. And they haven’t got a lot of press on this. Like neither a Snap or Pin. I mean, I guess there’s a lot less spend there. And still a lot of spindles, platforms, but a lot less than Facebook or Google.
It’s anyone using IDFA for is impacted. So Google’s been super hush hush working on the impact, but not said anything about what it’s going to do to them.
So I mean, they have a lot more signals that Facebook has the app, right? That’s what they have. Yeah, people go on it. Maybe they go on the desktop. That’s it.
But Google owns all their other all their other properties, you know, they have what you’re doing in your Gmail, what you’re watching on YouTube, what you’re searching for and what you’re doing on your pixel.
So they have massive signal already, that they are using it, or they were using it? And are they still going to I don’t, they might just stop using it as my is the rumor, because they already have so much else signal. They don’t necessarily have to rely on it.
Ilana:
Interesting. So they’ve got other data points that they can use and leverage. They’ve got the Pixel phone, obviously, they’ve got Chrome browser and Gmail and Google Apps for Business and Google Analytics.
Scott Desgrosseilliers:
Already have, you know, more than enough data, so that people based tracking on Google Now, you know, you can target people on interests on, you know, affinities intent.
People visited your customers, your competitors, websites, people search for your competitors, all those reasons, you can show them a YouTube video, it’s, it’s come a long way. It’s pretty powerful.
Search has always been super powerful. But now you can just target people and take like your best social ad and put it on there and target people based on rather than, you know, dealing with bidding on keywords, you can just say, I would create this audience that’s done these things, show them the ad.
So it’s a lot more intuitive to a Facebook marketer to target on Google Now.
Ilana:
Absolutely. I mean, the targeting on Google side of things with their, what’s called their behavioral targeting, which is really what they want on Facebook has improved massively over the last 18 months if one of my favorite audience types is that in market audiences, which I do talk about in my training material as well as I’m a big fan of actually their custom intent audiences. I don’t know if you’ve ever experimented with them.
Scott Desgrosseilliers:
Yeah. So typing in your company. keywords or whatever? It’s so easy to set up and it generally converts. So….
Ilana:
If you give Google enough data, I do find you need at least 30. Sometimes even up to 50 keywords or competitors, or a mix or something like you don’t want to create one with just one or two keywords, then Google doesn’t have enough direction of where or where they’re going to go.
Is Retargeting on Google Ads Will be Affected?
But with enough data, and the right creative, and etc, then it can work extremely well. Yep. I’m curious though, if retargeting is going to be affected on the Google side of things, do you know much about that?
Scott Desgrosseilliers:
I don’t. And that’s one where so they have all those other signals contributed their retargeting. So how much of it? Did they depend on looking up your phone number is, we’re gonna find out. That’s the cliffhanger. There’s been no guidance on it. And it’s hard to read the tea leaves as you know, they were using how much of a signal it was, we’re about to find out. You know, I see the retargeting stats saying may and we’re like, they’re either going to be untouched, or, or worse. And then we’ll know that’s how we’ll know. Unfortunately.
Ilana:
At the time of this recording, which is in March 2020, when is this rollout, it’s expected to really hit advertisers?
Scott Desgrosseilliers:
So that it was supposed to have already hit a couple of times. And it’s been a very last minute push back. Who knows what was going on behind the scenes of that?
So the latest guidance was, it was just done at the neck, it’s supposed to be the very next iPhone push. Whatever their cycle is, you know, and I wonder if we could just Google and find out when does 14.4 hit?
Because it was supposed to hit, was it delayed? Let’s say apple. See if they have one for me. No, the computer doesn’t want to work? Sorry. I’m wicked curious. Now. 14.5 release date.
Doesn’t say, let’s see what 14 got for us. I believe it’s 14.4 that has it? No, it’s 14 dots. So supposed to be 14 dot four. And that was released January 26. And so I pulled it. And so this one has not sometime in the spring.
After March 20. springtime. So that’s it probably dependent on, you know, furious negotiations. Yes. Who knows? says a billion just delays another two months.
Ilana:
Yeah, I can imagine a suit would have a massive impact, especially on Facebook. So revenue, dollars coming in as if an advertiser starts to question the effectiveness of their ads, they start pulling their ad campaigns that’s going to have a massive impact.
Steps that Advertisers Should Be Taking Before the Update
What are some of the steps that advertisers should be taking now to prepare for this March 26 rollout, obviously, that the eight conversion events and setting those priority is one obvious one.
You mentioned one, that’s an obvious one, you mentioned also really optimizing your top of funnel campaigns to capture email rather than perhaps building engagement audiences like is a very well known strategy or even building a retargeting audience with the view of retargeting them lighter, and therefore, less reliance on capturing that email.
Yep. What are some other things that advertisers can do to prepare?
Scott Desgrosseilliers:
Well, one simple thing that you have to do is verify your domain with Facebook. It’s very simple, you can just google verify my domain with Facebook. And it’s a simple process, but they’re having everyone do that.
So you’ll want to think about how within your once you have the the leads captured in your CRM, what type of engagement and ad sets you want to create around those because there could be some things that you just haven’t had to do that might be valuable, such as when someone clicks on this type of email, they’re interested in that topic.
So I’m going to show this ad. You know, I, we, I use plus this for a long time, and it would sync my ad sets with my CRM based on activity. And I know there’s maybe maybe there’s a couple other tools that do that, or CRMs that do that quite well.
But when you can do that, that can help increase retargeting success. And that’s not the same as relying on the pixel. But it’s something that will work just you know, takes work and might be a little less exciting than some of the Pixel THINGs. Yeah, but that’s a key one.
I think the other thing is, you know, related to what we do with marketing attribution. It’s Starting to get a good grip on your customer lifetime value by lead source by campaign by targeting. Because you’ll want to know where you are finding your highest value customers.
So you can continue to buy into those areas at the top of the funnel, when you know you’re going to have really limited visibility. And there’s a lot of different ways to skin that cat, some easier and more effective than others.
But at the end of the day, if you can say, hey, when I target these type of people on Facebook, or this type of ad group and criteria in Google, and those leads are worth four to one after a set amount of time that I know I can buy there, because I’m making it three, four fold after a couple months, that’s going to be a huge edge because people aren’t going to have that visibility, or maybe have any way to know about it unless they do the work to to learn what that value is.
Ilana:
Yeah, right. Just going back to segue, you said the one thing that advertisers must do is to verify their domain, just for the purpose of our listeners, essentially, that is going into your business manager on Facebook and believe it’s in the domain section or security that you you’ll see you to verify your domain, you have to add your domain to the business manager.
And it involves installing it once you sort of go through those, I think it’s only two steps, it spits out some code, in which case, you have to put that code on there in the header tag on your website. So it’s much like even really installing the pixel or installing Google Analytics.
Scott Desgrosseilliers:
I actually think of verifying with a text. I don’t know if that’s available everywhere. But they texted me some code that I typed in really quick, because I saw the header thing. And I was like, I don’t feel like doing that right now.
And there was like some who chose another option. I was like, I don’t feel like doing that header thing.
I just wasn’t in the mood for it. That’s fast and simple. So that is probably the way most and I am able to do it through text. This was probably two months ago.
Ilana:
Yeah, cuz I went through this process two months ago because I was recording a training video inside Teach Traffic. But I didn’t see the text option.
Scott Desgrosseilliers:
There was another I needed another way or something was this little quiet link?
Ilana:
Yeah, right.
Scott Desgrosseilliers:
I should be mining for easier way. Maybe it only showed it to me cuz it’s our number. I don’t know.
Ilana
Yeah, maybe it’s just reserved for special US advertisers as opposed to us….
Scott Desgrosseilliers:
VIP advertiser hotline. Yeah (laughs)
Ilana:
As opposed to us poor Australians on the other side of the world, our little island. Cool. Alrighty. So we will verify their domain and obviously out try and sync up their contacts, as you said, Is there anything else that people, you know, should be doing to prepare now, before this hits, or that’s pretty much it, it’s just the new, the new normal,
Mine those Emails As Early as Now
Scott Desgrosseilliers:
If you do have some great engagement on ad sets, that you’re relying on the pixel to do all of the heavy lifting, you probably want to start trying to mine those now while you still Facebook, they’re still so effective. You know…
Ilana:
And when you say mine those….
Scott Desgrosseilliers:
Well, spending more, but also trying to harvest the emails, if nothing else, I mean, obviously everyone wants to convert everyone to sales, that’s why they’re spending the money.
But if you see some ad sets that are you know, let’s just say like you have the video engagement that leads to the you know, lead magnet that leads to the sale offer that video engagement, one in the middle one there, we’re going to get you’re going to retarget the engagement with the leads.
And we touched on this earlier, but I want to reiterate it, that video maybe needs to try to get them to act in a way that you get their email address, because you might depending on your traffic, you could, you know, one other thing would be to start segmenting your campaigns by device type. Can you just have separate mobile versus desktop because then the stuff that’s still working on desktop isn’t affected? You can maybe spend more in desktop although most of the traffic’s Global’s the problem.
Ilana:
Well, what I find in my experience is the problem when they are combined together. So at an ad set level where it includes mobile and desktop traffic.
What I find happens is that the desktop just gets no airtime like it doesn’t get any budget at all, because all the budget is completely consumed by mobile.
And actually we will force we will create two separate ad sets one for mobile one for desktop, purely that the desktop has a chance to get some budget. It just doesn’t even get any budget. So perhaps that’s sort of another business case for doing that as well.
Scott Desgrosseilliers:
Yeah. And then yeah, so then your mobile we’re relying on the engagement to move it over. Once you see the impact you need to start you know, I don’t know begging for the email. I’m not good with ad hocs. And copy I’m a data person.
So I don’t know what specific script to say that’s your job.
How Wicked Reports Work and How its Not Going to Be Affected
Ilana:
All the advertisers job. And obviously, it’s a good segue Wicked Reports would also help attributing the success of your ads, as well,
Scott Desgrosseilliers:
Yes, we don’t, we start with the conversions and look back. So we pull from your real sales, and only consider those of sales conversions, not a pixel.
So we look back from your real sales and look across all your ad platforms, email and organic and just give credit where credit’s due. And the same thing for leads, we see a lead come in, we integrate with the CRM and determine Is it a new lead or an existing lead, and then we’ll hold on to that credit, and then give lifetime value back to it.
So when you’re trying to find cold traffic sources, that found new leads that became high-value customers, we know which click made that lead show up in your klaviyo, or Active Campaign or HubSpot, for example, or a bunch of those CRMs were integrated with.
And then we’ll connect it to whatever Shopify or WooCommerce revenue or whatever system you’re using.
And so your software doesn’t rely on that phone number that Apple knows what you call it. IDFA.
Scott Desgrosseilliers:
Yeah, we don’t use phone number lookup. And we don’t track people across websites, we only track it for the advertiser specifically for their use.
We’re only click based tracking. So it’s incoming legal clicks, that are tracked only for that advertisers purpose. And then we’re GDPR and ccpa compliance.
So if one of our customers wants to be forgotten, we can anonymize them or hide them from view or whatever. While not messing up your data.
Ilana:
Yeah, awesome. Great, well, is there anything else that we have not covered that you think is important for our listeners who are running traffic to know about with this Apple iOS update,
Scott Desgrosseilliers:
I think it’s just important to realize that all those good leads and sales are still in Facebook, they’re just going to be only the people with a data edge are the ones that are gonna be able to grab them on the mobile. So it behooves everyone to act on.
The sky isn’t falling. It’s just there’s chaos. And that means opportunity.
Learn More About Scoot and Wicked Reports
Ilana:
Yeah. Yeah, I agree with you as well. Well, Scott, thank you so much for coming on and sharing your wisdom in this uncharted territory that we’re entering.
Much really is like a, you know, representative of the PPC landscape anyway, it’s such changes the only constant I say to people, and then this is no different. So where can people find out more about you and your software?
Scott Desgrosseilliers:
WickedReports.com
Ilana:
Too easy! Thank you so much for coming on and taking time out of your evening, it is in the United States. So I really appreciate you taking time out of your precious evening, and sharing your wisdom. Thank you so much.
Scott Desgrosseilliers:
It’s great coming on. Thanks for having me.