Apple has launched an announcement about changes to its iOS 14.5 operating system, which requires that a notice be displayed to users of iOS 14.5 and later.
All apps in the App Store must submit a proposal targeting iOS 14.5 according to their App Tracking Transparency framework.
These changes will affect the way Facebook receives conversion events and handles them with tools like Facebook Pixel.
Once the notification is requested by Apple and it is displayed on Facebook, advertisers who run ad campaigns for iOS 14.5 users will be affected by the restrictions on data sharing.
If you improve, target, or report web events through Facebook Pixel or any other business tool, you can take steps to update your event setting and manage changes.
Steps to update your event setup and manage changes:
Complete the domain verification:
It is imperative that you verify the domain of your website, and all businesses must verify its domain as this is one of the best and most important practices.
However, it is important to give priority to verifying your domain if your domains merge the pixels owned by personal ads accounts or commercial activities.
Noting that verifying the domain is not a new procedure and commercial activities can complete it through their respective business manager, and the main difference is that domain verification here should be done on an effective top-level domain plus one eTLD + 1 but the process is the same.
For verification purposes, such as measuring Apple’s private clicks, we will also recognize domains within the PSL list of public suffixes as an eTLD.
Meaning that businesses that host their websites on platforms that have actually registered their domain in the public affixes list, can check associated subdomains with the purpose of creating the event, noting that this will not apply to URL paths such as myplatform.com/jasper or eTLDs + 2 such as abc.jasper.myplatform.com.
In order to use URL paths and eTLDs + 2 you can go to other methods, such as displaying the landing page, improving clicking on links, or purchasing your own domains, in order to avoid disrupting your advertising campaigns when Apple begins to impose the notice.
Current efforts have been directed at supporting pre-existing domain registrations on the list of existing generic suffixes or eTLDs, so that this support is in line with the recent update from Apple to measure private click, and there are other technical implications that a business should consider in the event that the domain is registered as a generic suffix.
For example (a domain registered as a suffix that does not have any cookies of its own), and that is why it is not recommended to register domains in the public suffix list, especially if the goal is to create an event on Facebook.
Here are some guidelines for how Facebook understands the cases of usage of the generic suffix list:
Your business acts as a platform by providing business subdomains separate from your business, and you want to protect the user from being tracked across these independent subdomains.
For example, if a business called myretailplatform offers its services to a number of businesses with the goal of selling its products by creating its own subdomains on myretailplatform.com.
If this describes your business, the following conditions must be met before attempting to request a domain registration in the public suffixes list:
- Your business does not require any jobs in the domain that you want to register in the public affixes list:
If you add your domain to the general suffixes list, cookies will not be stored on your domain.
For example, myretailplatform.com hosts many small businesses on subdomains of their website, but myretailplatform.com does not perform any functions of its own, and the business owner must not need cookies on myretailplatform.com, and also does not need to be able to create events on myretailplatform.com.
- The sub-domains of the domain that you want to register in the list of public suffixes must be completely separate from each other, with no sharing of data between them:
Once registered with the global suffixes list, browsers displaying this list will treat each subdomain as a separate eTLD + 1 website.
- Each subdomain must correspond to a separate business:
For example, if myretailplatform.com wants to be included in the general suffix list, jasper.myretailplatform.com must be a completely separate business entity from abc.myretailplatform.com.
It is not recommended to use subdomains to represent different products, different people, or different devices, so your application to be registered in the public suffixes list may be rejected.
Plan to work with 8 conversion events for each domain:
You can create up to 8 unique conversion events for each website domain that can be used to optimize your ad campaign.
Ad campaigns optimizing for the conversion event that is no longer available will be temporarily paused.
You can also create the eight conversion events in the Event Manager.
Initial configuration and how to change it:
In the beginning, Facebook will create the conversion events that are believed to be most relevant to your business based on your activity, and all other events will be stopped and made inactive in order to improve the ad campaign, and you can also modify the conversion event specified in the Facebook Events Manager.
It is recommended to select the eight most important conversion events for your important business outcomes, assess whether you need to make changes to your campaign or measurement strategy, and you can arrange your eight conversion events according to their priority in the Event Manager.
Because the highest priority event will only be sent when a customer takes multiple actions during the conversion period, all other events may get lower than expected numbers even if they are from the eight specified events.
When creating your own ad campaign, you will only select one conversion event from the eight events dedicated to optimization for it, and you may need to improve on top conversion goals such as landing page views and link clicks.
If you cannot verify domains or using more than 8 conversion events, per domain for optimization or reporting.
Moreover, it is worth noting that landing page views for the eight conversion events are not subject to all domain restrictions.
Define a single domain for conversion tracking:
To ensure that ads do not stop temporarily upon implementation, it may be required to specify one domain in the tracking section of the ad creation.
Because after implementation you will not be able to track advertising events across multiple domains if these ads are shown to a user who had canceled an Apple notification on Facebook or Instagram apps.
For events related to a user who subscribed to an Apple Notification on Facebook or Instagram, it would still be possible to report across multiple ranges of the supported referral settings.
If you have or are planning to configure your Pixel using IMG, it is recommended that you follow the Facebook Pixel developer documentation.
Conclusion:
After Apple announced the iOS 14.5 operating system and knowing the effects and changes that may occur on trademarks.
Specifically, the ones relying on Facebook in their business, it has become necessary to obtain an update to set up your events and manage all changes and verify all the necessary conditions before registering any domain in the list of public suffixes.
