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Explained: How iOS 14 Privacy Changes Will Impact Facebook Ads and How You Can Still Optimise Paid Ad Performance

Marketing
November 16, 2021
3
min read

In a bitter dispute with Apple, Facebook has made its case very clear that upcoming changes with iOS 14 will impact their ability to receive and process conversion events. Apple will, by default, prohibit all apps on a user’s device to collect, share, and track their data, unless the user opts in to authorise the process.

Facebook claims that the prompt message shown to users will discourage them from opting in. According to Facebook’s statement, this will result in Facebook ad personalisation and performance reporting becoming limited for both app and web conversions.

For a full list of how to prepare for campaigns while targeting iOS 14 users, see this official guide released by Facebook.

Privacy is a hot topic, and Apple’s moves will strike the right chord with the public. For businesses however, leveraging Facebook as a platform for marketing is increasingly difficult. The average Facebook news feed is getting more cluttered, and to keep users engaged with fresh content the algorithm is pushing new posts more frequently while leaving them in the feed for shorter. Facebook itself admitted that their algorithm prioritises posts from friends and family over businesses, who struggle attracting new likes or followers organically.

Mastering Facebook ads is crucial to win and engage customers on the Facebook, yet the iOS 14 changes are sure to hit a further blow to business use.

Some businesses may give up Facebook altogether, such as Bottega Veneta did in January. But compared to other channels, Facebook ads come with the biggest audience, are still cost-effective, and see higher conversion rates on average.

Expert tips to optimise Facebook Ad performance – even in the iOS 14 world

There are of course many tips and tricks to optimise Facebook ads for improved performance, RoI, and conversions – in spite of upcoming restrictions or further movements against Facebook’s dominance. Here’s the top 3 from our customer engagement experts at CINNOX.

Tip 1 – Connect your ad to Messenger for conversational marketing and recapture your data

Conversational marketing is the quickest way to convert online traffic to paying customers through real-time conversations, leveraging data, personalisation, targeted messaging and support, and often chatbots.

By connecting Facebook Ads to Messenger, businesses can easily engage in conversational marketing with skilled sales people and marketers guiding customers along the purchase journey while collecting valuable data and insights that they normally wouldn’t gain.

This data is key –add it to your CRM and you have more data about your customers than Facebook. Use this to follow up with those customers through highly targeted and personalised campaigns. Ask for their phone numbers to send SMS or WhatsApp messages, or run your own campaigns on Facebook Messenger instead for anniversaries, hobbies, an upcoming birth or more. Instead of relying on Facebook ads to know what’s going on in their lives – you already have the data to push your own messaging directly to them, removing Facebook as an intermediary.

Bonus tip: Facebook Ads not only connect to Messenger, but can connect to WhatsApp too. You need a WhatsApp Business profile to set this up.

Tip 2 – Leverage the lookalike audience feature

With information currently available, the iOS changes will mostly only affect performance of Facebook ad features managed through Facebook Pixel. With Pixel weakened, consider focusing your efforts the old but trustworthy lookalike audience feature.

Target your ads to people who have ‘liked’ or ‘followed’ another group that you identify as having a similar audience and location to those you are targeting. Facebook’s algorithm can identify commonalities and features from your existing successful marketing campaigns and look for any other users that match those identified characteristics based on public data.

However, lookalike ads are typically significantly larger than the audience group you generated, and they’re not guaranteed to be as effective as the smaller group from which they were generated. Testing and regular monitoring is required. Help the Facebook machine learn so it can grow your business with its powerful algorithm.

Tip 3 – Optimise Facebook ads with CINNOX

CINNOX is a leading customer engagement platform which unifies communication channels such as Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, WeChat, Live Chat, SMS, and Virtual Numbers into one platform. This optimises Facebook ad performance in 4 ways:

Get more omnichannel customer data

CINNOX’s “chatroom” approach to customer engagement means that every time a customer messages or calls your business, every communication is centralised in 1 chatroom for that individual customer. Say for example Tim sends you a Facebook Messenger chat from your Facebook ad, and then calls you from his mobile, then sends a live chat message on your website, all of those chats and call histories are in the same chatroom. Instead of only relying on Facebook Messenger history – you now get all of the communication history for Tim to provide personalised service and more relevant marketing.

If Facebook Messenger is integrated with your CINNOX dashboard, you can access visitor intelligence – and see important data about every customer when they message you such as location, device, language and more. This adds further data to your records, add it to the CRM and enhance your marketing power.

Use CINNOX web links to increase engagement rates

Whether you connect your Facebook ad to a landing page, payment gateway, or Messenger, you can still use CINNOX web links in the text box as another avenue of engagement.

CINNOX web links enable customers to click and call you instantly – and enable quality web calls, live chat with multimedia engagement, or even video calls and screen sharing. With web links you create a more seamless communication flow and the experience overall is more rich and engaging.

Build more efficient and satisfying experiences

Set up smart routing on CINNOX so Facebook Messenger or web link enquiries are connected to the right person at the right time. With smart routing, enquiries can be connected to someone who speaks the customer’s language right away, is based in their country, or skilled in the product/promotion they want to talk about. You can even enable sticky routing, so that the customer is connected to someone who has helped them in the past.

This enables your business to answer enquiries faster, with a more memorable and personalised service, and takes the load of your staff as enquiries are automatically sent to the best person instead of bounced around different agents.

Your staff can also collaborate freely in the CINNOX dashboard with video conferencing, chat transfers, group chats and more to better support customers – instead of having to swap between the Facebook interface and multiple team platforms or instant messengers to collaborate with staff.

Follow up with customers on their preferred channels

Just because you first attract a customer via Facebook, doesn’t mean that’s their preferred channel for future communications from your business. Throughout your conversational marketing, ask customers what their preferred channel is for future engagements, get their contact details, and follow up.

CINNOX’s SMS campaign manager is a fast and efficient way to send personalised or mass messages to customers, in 150+ countries worldwide. If they prefer WhatsApp, WeChat, or Facebook Messenger – integrate them with your CINNOX account for smooth and efficient operations.

While upcoming changes in iOS 14 may seem all doom and gloom, there are ways around the changes that not only counter the consequences, but empower stronger customer experiences and conversions overall.

By subscribing you agree to with our Privacy Policy.
Thank you! Your submission has been received!
Oops! Something went wrong while submitting the form.

In a bitter dispute with Apple, Facebook has made its case very clear that upcoming changes with iOS 14 will impact their ability to receive and process conversion events. Apple will, by default, prohibit all apps on a user’s device to collect, share, and track their data, unless the user opts in to authorise the process.

Facebook claims that the prompt message shown to users will discourage them from opting in. According to Facebook’s statement, this will result in Facebook ad personalisation and performance reporting becoming limited for both app and web conversions.

For a full list of how to prepare for campaigns while targeting iOS 14 users, see this official guide released by Facebook.

Privacy is a hot topic, and Apple’s moves will strike the right chord with the public. For businesses however, leveraging Facebook as a platform for marketing is increasingly difficult. The average Facebook news feed is getting more cluttered, and to keep users engaged with fresh content the algorithm is pushing new posts more frequently while leaving them in the feed for shorter. Facebook itself admitted that their algorithm prioritises posts from friends and family over businesses, who struggle attracting new likes or followers organically.

Mastering Facebook ads is crucial to win and engage customers on the Facebook, yet the iOS 14 changes are sure to hit a further blow to business use.

Some businesses may give up Facebook altogether, such as Bottega Veneta did in January. But compared to other channels, Facebook ads come with the biggest audience, are still cost-effective, and see higher conversion rates on average.

Expert tips to optimise Facebook Ad performance – even in the iOS 14 world

There are of course many tips and tricks to optimise Facebook ads for improved performance, RoI, and conversions – in spite of upcoming restrictions or further movements against Facebook’s dominance. Here’s the top 3 from our customer engagement experts at CINNOX.

Tip 1 – Connect your ad to Messenger for conversational marketing and recapture your data

Conversational marketing is the quickest way to convert online traffic to paying customers through real-time conversations, leveraging data, personalisation, targeted messaging and support, and often chatbots.

By connecting Facebook Ads to Messenger, businesses can easily engage in conversational marketing with skilled sales people and marketers guiding customers along the purchase journey while collecting valuable data and insights that they normally wouldn’t gain.

This data is key –add it to your CRM and you have more data about your customers than Facebook. Use this to follow up with those customers through highly targeted and personalised campaigns. Ask for their phone numbers to send SMS or WhatsApp messages, or run your own campaigns on Facebook Messenger instead for anniversaries, hobbies, an upcoming birth or more. Instead of relying on Facebook ads to know what’s going on in their lives – you already have the data to push your own messaging directly to them, removing Facebook as an intermediary.

Bonus tip: Facebook Ads not only connect to Messenger, but can connect to WhatsApp too. You need a WhatsApp Business profile to set this up.

Tip 2 – Leverage the lookalike audience feature

With information currently available, the iOS changes will mostly only affect performance of Facebook ad features managed through Facebook Pixel. With Pixel weakened, consider focusing your efforts the old but trustworthy lookalike audience feature.

Target your ads to people who have ‘liked’ or ‘followed’ another group that you identify as having a similar audience and location to those you are targeting. Facebook’s algorithm can identify commonalities and features from your existing successful marketing campaigns and look for any other users that match those identified characteristics based on public data.

However, lookalike ads are typically significantly larger than the audience group you generated, and they’re not guaranteed to be as effective as the smaller group from which they were generated. Testing and regular monitoring is required. Help the Facebook machine learn so it can grow your business with its powerful algorithm.

Tip 3 – Optimise Facebook ads with CINNOX

CINNOX is a leading customer engagement platform which unifies communication channels such as Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, WeChat, Live Chat, SMS, and Virtual Numbers into one platform. This optimises Facebook ad performance in 4 ways:

Get more omnichannel customer data

CINNOX’s “chatroom” approach to customer engagement means that every time a customer messages or calls your business, every communication is centralised in 1 chatroom for that individual customer. Say for example Tim sends you a Facebook Messenger chat from your Facebook ad, and then calls you from his mobile, then sends a live chat message on your website, all of those chats and call histories are in the same chatroom. Instead of only relying on Facebook Messenger history – you now get all of the communication history for Tim to provide personalised service and more relevant marketing.

If Facebook Messenger is integrated with your CINNOX dashboard, you can access visitor intelligence – and see important data about every customer when they message you such as location, device, language and more. This adds further data to your records, add it to the CRM and enhance your marketing power.

Use CINNOX web links to increase engagement rates

Whether you connect your Facebook ad to a landing page, payment gateway, or Messenger, you can still use CINNOX web links in the text box as another avenue of engagement.

CINNOX web links enable customers to click and call you instantly – and enable quality web calls, live chat with multimedia engagement, or even video calls and screen sharing. With web links you create a more seamless communication flow and the experience overall is more rich and engaging.

Build more efficient and satisfying experiences

Set up smart routing on CINNOX so Facebook Messenger or web link enquiries are connected to the right person at the right time. With smart routing, enquiries can be connected to someone who speaks the customer’s language right away, is based in their country, or skilled in the product/promotion they want to talk about. You can even enable sticky routing, so that the customer is connected to someone who has helped them in the past.

This enables your business to answer enquiries faster, with a more memorable and personalised service, and takes the load of your staff as enquiries are automatically sent to the best person instead of bounced around different agents.

Your staff can also collaborate freely in the CINNOX dashboard with video conferencing, chat transfers, group chats and more to better support customers – instead of having to swap between the Facebook interface and multiple team platforms or instant messengers to collaborate with staff.

Follow up with customers on their preferred channels

Just because you first attract a customer via Facebook, doesn’t mean that’s their preferred channel for future communications from your business. Throughout your conversational marketing, ask customers what their preferred channel is for future engagements, get their contact details, and follow up.

CINNOX’s SMS campaign manager is a fast and efficient way to send personalised or mass messages to customers, in 150+ countries worldwide. If they prefer WhatsApp, WeChat, or Facebook Messenger – integrate them with your CINNOX account for smooth and efficient operations.

While upcoming changes in iOS 14 may seem all doom and gloom, there are ways around the changes that not only counter the consequences, but empower stronger customer experiences and conversions overall.

By subscribing you agree to with our Privacy Policy.
Thank you! Your submission has been received!
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If you've read this far, you're probably already working hard to make your customers happy! When you pair your efforts with a total experience platform like CINNOX together with the tips we shared above, they should help you onboard new customers, retain existing customers, and keep everyone coming back for more.

Thank you! Your submission has been received!
Oops! Something went wrong while submitting the form.