IOS14 has not been kind to any business running Facebook ads. A vast majority have experienced a fair share of ups and downs in the past few months, and a few have outright experienced jaw-dropping and heart-stopping moments.
This is especially true if a large amount of leads has been coming from Facebook ads and all of a sudden, the CPA (Cost per Acquisition) has skyrocketed and nothing is working.
To add to that, financial businesses such as a mortgage, credit, or insurance were restricted by special categories and limited targeting. The added challenge of having your Facebook ads data being only about 50% accurate is not fun.
You’re losing money and it’s hurting your business.
I get it…
But luckily, after spending a few hundred thousand on Facebook ads for finance businesses (mortgage, insurance, credit repair) after ISO14 we have come up with 6 steps that you can follow to continue to achieve great results with Facebook Ads after ISO14 and scale your business with more quality and qualified leads.
Step #1: Adopt To IOS14
This may sound redundant but, if you’re planning to continue running Facebook ads, then obviously you want to make sure that your account is set up for IOS14.
Verify Your Domain: As part of IOS14, you must properly verify your domain, if you’re technical then the process is simple but if you’re not, then you’ll have to get your web developer to help you verify your domain.
There is no limit as to how many domains you can verify, however you really should only be verifying the domain you’re actually going to run the ads as well. Here is how you can verify your domain
Go to business.facebook.com to access your Facebook business manager. If you don’t have a Facebook Business Manager setup then you’ll need to set that up first. Once you’re there, go to the business settings of the business you’re running ads for.
On the left-hand side menu, click on Brand Safety then click on Domains. Add the domain name you wish to be verified and then follow the verification instruction that Facebook provides you. You may need to send it to your developer to complete this step.
Setup Aggregated Event Measurement: With IOS14 Facebook having limited tracking abilities on Apple phones, this means that Facebook will only receive a limited amount of triggered events back from IOS14 users so not all your conversion events will be tracked by Facebook and they must be prioritized.
This is exactly what the Aggregated Event Measurement does. It will allow you to prioritize which even matters more to your business and Facebook’s AI will do its best to record the prioritized event compared to all other events.
Does it always work, from our experience the tracking for your Facebook campaigns still will have a big margin of error depending on your daily budget and will vary from account to account? But it only takes a few minutes to set this up and it will help Facebook to know what event you’re looking to prioritize.
Here is how you can set up Aggregated Event Measurement.
Go to your Facebook ads manager and click on the menu on the life side and select Events Manager
Select the pixel that you want to set up aggregated events for and then click on the Aggregated Event Measure tab just below the overview section of your pixel.
Once there click Configure Web Events and Select the domain you’ve verified to add aggregated events for.
Here is where you can prioritize the events you want Facebook to track. Keep in mind that some custom events may not show up right away here on the list or show up at all. We don’t really know why, and this is why we usually stick to the standard events such as Lead, Completed Registration, Purchase, etc…
Duplicate Your Pre IOS14 Campaigns: If you had some campaigns running before IOS14 and they stop working or running then all you have to do is to duplicate them and reselect the conversion objective and it should start working again.
Setup Facebook Conversion API: Finally, if you really want to make sure Facebook gets the most accurate tracking, consider setting up Facebook Conversion API on your server-side. This allows you to send conversion events from your servers directly to Facebook providing more data and accuracy on tracking conversion events.
However, you’ll need a developer who understands both the Facebook Conversion API and your server-side to install it and if you’re using some kind of landing page builds such as Unbounce, Clickfunnels, Leadpages, Wix, or even Shopify chances are you won’t have access to the server-side and won’t be able to install the Conversion API unless the landing page builder companies have done it for you.
Here is the official Facebook Conversion API document.
Step #2: Use UTM and Google Analytics
Unfortunately, even if you have all of the above items checked off and set up properly, you’ll still have inaccurate tracking on your Facebook campaigns and this can cause you tens and maybe even hundreds of thousands of dollars as you won’t know which campaign, ad, or audience is working without accurate data and attribution.
This is why we set up UTM for all our Facebook campaigns, and leverage Google Analytics to track the Facebook ads performance. If you don’t know UTMs. It is basically a query parameter or information that is attached to the end of any URL so you can pass additional information to your server. Here is an image illustration of query parameters.
Technically anything can be used as parameters, meaning you can make up your own such as name=John&gender=female but UTM on the other hand is a specific format of query parameters that Google Analytics will be able to pick up and record data that is being passed with it.
This means that you must use specific parameter names that are designated by Google or else your Google Analytics won’t pick up the data. Here is a list of parameters that you can pass to Google Analytics.
I know this is a lot to remember, luckily there is a free tool that you can use to build UTM URLs: https://ga-dev-tools.web.app/ga4/campaign-url-builder/
Now that you know what UTM’s are and how to build a UTM URL, here is how we use it to track our Facebook campaigns. Typically there are 4 main things we want to track for all our Facebook campaigns, and these are the Traffic Source, Campaign Name, Ad Set (or audience), and the ad id.
| UTM Parameter Name | Data |
| utm_source | |
| utm_campaign | Name of Your Campaign (keep it simple, don’t use a very long campaign name) |
| utm_term | This is where we pass on the ad set name or the audiences you target |
| utm_id | We use this to pass on the ad id. You need to have an effective system to manage this especially if you are running 20 – 50 ads daily and updating new ones very often. |
This is how we set up our UTM but you can set it however fits you.
Lastly, you’ll have to have Google Analytics goals set up properly for all this to make sense and proper attribution to be assigned. If you don’t know how to set up Goals in Google analytics I highly recommend checking this guide here.
Step #3: Have Realistic Expectations and Focus on Strategy
With all the technically tracking stuff out of the way let’s talk about some macro changes you should be made to adapt to IOS14 and that is to have realistic expectations.
I know there are a lot of people and businesses who have essentially built their entire business around the idea of Facebook ads and it is very hard for them to let go and realize that Facebook ads today are completely different from Facebook ads 3, 5, and 8 years ago.
5 years ago it was very easy to get Facebook ads working for your business, there was very little competition, and your CPL (cost per lead), CPC (cost per click), and CPM (cost per 1000 impressions) were super cheap and business was great.
Even before the IOS14 update, CPM has been steadily rising and the cost of acquiring a new lead/customer has probably raised more than 10x in the last 5 years. Competition is fierce and it is very difficult to start and scale a successful campaign on Facebook.
Now with IOS14 everything just got harder…
This means if you still want to continue using Facebook ads as a source of growing your business, you must have realistic expectations. You’ll probably never ever get the same CPL, CPA, and ROAS as you did before and it will only become more expensive not just because of IOS14 but other factors such as inflation, increase in labor cost, etc…
All these factors will affect how Facebook determines their CPM and you have no control over that and if your entire strategy to grow your business relies on Facebook providing cheap leads then you’re probably going to be shit out of luck.
I know this sounds harsh but that’s the reality. We’ve worked with clients of all sizes and the winners have one thing in common: they had a better long-term strategy and were able to have a much bigger LTV (lifetime customer value), so an increase in Facebook ads cost didn’t affect them nearly as much.
This has nothing to do with how good you’re at Facebook ads, it has everything to do with how you strategically plan your business’s growth.
Step #4: Focus On Creatives and Offers, Not Audiences
One of the biggest misconceptions and mistakes that most businesses make when it comes to Facebook ads is that they spend all their effort and focus on trying to find that unicorn “audience”.
Do you know the audience that is somehow going to deliver better leads and more sales?
That’s mostly BS…
Does the audience matter? yes but, it depends on your industry and whether you can even narrow your audiences or not.
For example, if you’re running ads in housing or credit, your targeting option is extremely limited. Sure, there are tactics that you can use to build audiences or use Look Alike Audiences from your current customer list but from our experience, it doesn’t matter nearly as much as the two other ingredients that no one talks about.
Again, I’m not sure why most businesses believe that if they can just find that magical audience then Facebook ads will just work.
That is completely false.
Forget about finding that perfect audience but rather focus on coming up with better offers, creatives, and copy.
Because ultimately it is your creativity, copy and offer that is what’s going to get the right people’s attention and get them to click on your ad.
Most businesses don’t think about their creatives in terms of awareness level, and what their ideal customer will likely be attracted to in terms of creatives. So, they either use random creatives or more commonly creatives that they used 10 years ago as a newspaper ad.
In all honesty, if it didn’t work that well for you in the newspaper, what makes you think it will work on Facebook ads where on average a Facebook user sees 10 to 30 ads daily.
For example, think about your most ideal customer and most importantly awareness level they are at for your service/product. If they’re highly aware of your service/product then it comes down to the offer and differentiation. Use creatives and imagery that show the cast how they would feel and experience after working with your company.
On the flip side, if they are very low on the awareness level, meaning they may only be aware of their problem but not yet know the solution (your service/product) for their problem then you want to use imagery that nudges at their problem and use copies that talks more about their address their problems rather than your service/product.
If you want to learn more about using better creatives for your ads, here is an article we wrote on how you should approach creatives based on different awareness levels.
Step #5: Leverage Video View & Retargeting
Another cool little tactic that you can implement to improve your Facebook ads results after IOS14 is to leverage video view and build up audiences who watch specific content video 75% or more.
This works great because, while IOS14 causes major discrepancy when tracking events from Facebook pixel it doesn’t affect Facebook internal attract and video views is an internal event.
What you would do is create 5 – 10 pieces of content that your ideal customer would be interested in and run a video view campaign for about $5 per day or less per video per ad set.
This would allow you to build up a sizable audience of everyone who has watched these videos for at least 75% pretty quickly that you can run retargeting ads to them specifically.
A great little tactic that allows you to build up a highly targeted audience who are interested in your service/product and build trust with these audiences at the same time, and most importantly it is completely not affected by ISO14.
Step #6: Diversify
The final step to bulletproof your acquisition from IOS14 issues is to diversify your channels and traffic sources.
Even before IOS14, we’ve been telling all our clients to diversify their media buying on multiple different platforms such as Google Search, YouTube Ads, Twitter, Pinterest, or even Linkedin.
This prevents your business from taking a major hit from being over-relying on one specific channel like Facebook.
I want to stress that this is not something we recommend doing because of IOS14 but this is something you as a business owner should do to protect your business from an event like what occurred on Oct 4, 2021, when Facebook had a worldwide outage and Facebook, Instagram, and Whatsapp was offline for about half a day.
Many businesses were left wondering what happened that day and suffered major losses in sales, while others simply dial-up their spending on the other channel and continue to grow.
What You Should Do Next
IOS14 sucks! We get it but you and your business don’t have to continue to suffer. I know some of the solutions and tactics I’ve mentioned above can be a big challenge to implement and honestly a lot of work that you currently may not have the resources to implement quickly.
This is why I want to make a shameless offer here…
If you’re interested in fixing this whole IOS14 issue for your business and continuing to rapidly scale and grow your business then book a 100% free consultation with me or someone on my team below.
We’ll jump on a quick call to understand your current situation, challenges, and your goal and figure out whether we can help you and whether we’re a good fit for each other. To book your free consultation all you have to do is click here or the big button below. Hope to talk to you soon!
