Wix eCommerce | iOS 14 Privacy Changes and Their Impact on Facebook Ads

Hey, everybody, My name is Melissa and I lead the E commerce community here at wix. I'm so happy to have you join us. Today we're going to discuss a very, very hot topic that's been in the community and across the industry, and that is the iOS 14 update and how it's affecting Facebook ads. Today we have actually two expert guests with us Door from Facebook, as well as Danny from our WIX Promote team who are going to discuss those changes, what they mean, how to make those adjustments in your strategy, and what WIX is doing to help you with those changes. So our agenda today, we're going to be reviewing, like I said, Apple's privacy changes that has affected the whole world, including WIX itself, all business owners across the world, those key actions advertisers need to take. And of course we'll have a live Q and A. Dora, I'm going to pass it on to you so you can tell us a little bit more about what that means. What is the iOS 14 changes and how they're affecting advertisers.

Thanks, Melissa, for having me. And hey everyone, super excited to be with you all. Thank you for joining. So we're gonna talk about the changes coming from iOS, the hottest potato recently. So I'm Dora, I'm a client solution manager at Facebook and I guess you've been hearing a lot the new buzzword iOS14 and wondered what is that? And most importantly, how is that impacting my business? So together with the awesome wix's team, we came up with digestible content to walk you through the fundamentals of these changes that are most relevant to you. So I'll start by providing some context into these changes and also provide a brief overview about what to expect and how you could prep. And obviously you should note that this is a highly complex topic. It involves a lot of moving pieces and also Apple didn't provide a lot of guidance and communications on that, so a lot of is still unknown. But we won't be able to cover everything today we'll touch on the most relevant stuff, but you should expect to receive more detailed resources by tomorrow from the wixys team for ones that want to double click on that and understand even further. Having said that, let's start and dive in. I'll start presenting because I haven't done that already. It all started in June 2020 when Apple announced in its developer conference and introduced actually three new major changes in their app policies. The first one, which is not strictly related to today's topic, is the need to Introduce a data nutrition label for each app in the App Store. So each app should disclose their data use practices within the App Store. That started to be enforced in last December. Now, the other two major changes that are more relevant to us, the first one is the tracking transparency prompt. So starting in early spring, quote unquote, all apps in the App Store will have to pop up a prompt asking for the users to actively approve the ability for that app to track users across third party apps and websites. So this includes obviously Facebook and Instagram, and this is the reason that we are here today. So the third one would be the framework in which the data is being processed from Facebook and other platforms, from these websites and apps to Facebook and other platforms. And this new framework is actually restricting, aggregating and delay the data that is being received. Now, in terms of timing, this could happen any day. Now, in the latest communication from Apple, they indicated that this will be rolled up as part of the 14.5 version and they say it will be in early spring. But no further information was provided in that context. So we're still waiting just for you guys to understand. This is a part of, this is only like the recent example, but it's a part of an evolving landscape of the digital ads coming from both regulators and legislators, but also from private sectors. So if we look on the timeline here, so we know that in 2018, GDPR was introduced, followed by additional legislation in California, for example, and in Brazil, but also private measures from mobile device OS providers and other browsers that announced policies that requires users to opt in for tracking. And we also expect that this is not the end of it. And we do expect that by next year, most web browsers will no longer support cookies. So this is just as part of that movement that we see in general now doubling down into Apple's changes. So we talked about the prompt and here on the right you could see an example of how this would look like. As you can see, the wording is not that inviting. This is why we expect that the share of users that actually will accept tracking won't be significant. And this is why we also expect significant impact for all advertisers that use our platforms. Now let's understand this further. So as you can see here, this is the flow of the data that is being processed for the two scenarios for users that will opt in and opt out. So starting from the time that this will be enforced, each user that will go into Facebook or Instagram will be pushed with this prompt asking for permission for tracking. In this case, we have two scenarios. So for opt in users there's no like, generally speaking there's no change to the data use. Whatever, whatever you guys are familiar with at this point will generally, generally speaking will stay the same. But for opt out users, we will limit the data use about conversion events such that it will be restricted, aggregated and delayed. So this has a major impact and let's understand this further and break it down to the specific areas of impact. So again, this applies to all advertisers, iOS, Android, or both. All advertisers should expect major changes in three main areas. So the first one would be around business tool setup, the second would be optimization and targeting, and the third one would be reporting. Now let's understand each. So for business setup, the two key action that need to be taken in order to comply with Apple's changes is domain verification and the configuration of the eight conversion events. Now Danny will dive deeper into that and explain exactly how you should comply with that through wix's solutions. But just to give you more context on why this is being required. So in order to prevent granular data sharing between platforms and websites, Apple requires that each domain will only have eight events available for optimization and that only one event will be passed back from opted out users. This is why you set only eight events, and this is why you should prioritize the events. I will show you an example just in one more slide, but just to explain the logic behind that, another important thing to note here is that those limitations are source agnostic, meaning that same limitations apply to Pixel Server or customer list. Regardless of the source, that data is being shared with Facebook and Instagram. This is important because I know it's a bit confusing, a lot of people thinking that sending events directly from your server should bypass that and that should be a workaround, but that's actually not the case for iOS 14. We still highly encourage advertisers to start sending events from the server through conversions API and I will touch on that later on, but that won't mitigate the impact for iOS 14. So for business side I do or

I don't mean to interrupt, but I think we got a few comments that your voice is a bit low. I'm not sure if you can turn your volume up, maybe on your, on your mic or.

Yeah, sure, now is better. No, no worries. Just let me know if you can hear me. Okay, now.

Okay, it looks like people can hear you. Well now it's fine.

Go ahead, continue. Okay, so just recapping on the business tool setup sect so 2 action needs to be taken by all advertisers and this will be explained in an elaborated manner by Danny in a second. So the first one would be to verify the domain and then to configure the eight conversion events for that domain that will be used for optimization. We understand that only one event will be passed back according to their priority and that only 8 event will be available for optimization. In terms of optimization and targeting, the one thing that will be impacted is that Facebook will receive much less data for optimization such that Facebook algorithm will rely on lower amount of data. Another thing is around targeting. So custom audiences retargeting audience will decrease because it just won't include opted out users. So over time where people will update to Apple's latest version including the prompt requirement, those people will actually be excluded from the retargeting audience. So we should expect those audiences to shrink over time. On the flip side of it, advertisers who use exclusions as part of their targeting routine, those won't be as accurate as before because in the same manner those won't include opted out users. So you could expect those users to be as part of your of your campaign. Okay, so in terms of optimization, our algorithm will receive and rely on a lower amount of data and thus would first stage will be less effective. And in terms of audiences, so retargeting and custom audiences will decrease over time and the targeting exclusion capabilities will not be as accurate as before. Moving on to reporting, so this is a bit tricky. The first point here is about the time of reporting. So conversions from opted out users will be reported with a random delay of 24 to 48 hours. This is another means that was designed to prevent advertisers to understand the exact customer journey. So in that context I would highly encourage advertisers to not optimize their campaigns and performance on a daily basis because this won't reflect the actual results. Another point here is that the default attribution window, the timeframe that is being defined by advertisers to report on conversions will default to 7 day post click. Currently it's 7 day post click 1 day post view. This will be the default going forward since Apple will start enforcing this change. An additional related point on that is that certain attribution window will be deprecated. I'll show it to you in one more slide just to go over everything. This will result in just fewer reported conversion just because some of them won't be passed back because of opted out users and because longer attribution window will be deprecated. So for example, for advertisers who have longer sales cycle beyond 7 day post click, those conversions won't be reported back. So you could expect less conversion in the reporting. And the last point here is about the different breakdowns that we currently offer. So now for each conversion event you could see granular breakdowns like demographics, age and gender, country, etc. So these won't be available for conversion for all of your campaigns starting from the enforcement. So if for example you have a campaign that runs on more than one country, you won't be able to see your results broken down by countries. So this is important to understand. And in this context we do highly recommend advertisers to just download all historical data with all of the breakdowns, so they'll have it if they need to analyze performance by the different breakdowns. All right, cool. So going back to the attribution windows, so here you see all the different windows that were available that are still available and will be available until enforcement and you can see the status post enforcement. So let's go over them really quickly just for you guys to understand. So for one day click through that would be modeled to include opted out users. So in general it should include, I mean that should include as much data as we can offer at this point. For one day view through that would be partial because it won't include opted out users at all. Same for 7 day post click. All other windows will be deprecated and will be no longer available. So again, advertisers that have a longer conversion cycle should be aware of that and prepare themselves as possible. Wrapping up with an example just to illustrate the one conversion that is being passed from opted out users. So if we're looking on Jasper's market as an example for a store, we can see that today the website reports each action that is being taken by their users. So this advertiser has full visibility into the entire sales cycle that is being performed by the users. Once Apple imitation will kick in, the situation will be a bit different. So you can see on the right the prioritization that Jasper Market has configured. So it looks like a pretty normal E Com user journey. So a user starts with visiting the homepage, then looking down on specific content pages, then adds an item to the cart and eventually purchase. So for updating users, once the enforcement will kick in, it will be much of the same as we do today. We'll have unlimited events returned for each action that's being performed by the user. But the major change Here is for opted out users. Because only one event will be returned based on the prioritization, only the last event completed by the user according to the priority will be sent back. Another thing to note here is that only the one event that happened within the 24 hours will be actually returned based on the previous slide. So in this example, if the user has purchased the item within 24 hours and this is the highest priority event, then this event will be reported. Again the reporting will be aggregated. So we won't exactly know who did that action, but we'll have an aggregated reporting for that. If the user haven't completed the purchase or if the purchase took place after 24 hours but the user did added an item to the cart, then we'll report add to cart and not purchase. Two important things to note on this context before we wrap up. So for opted in users the reporting will be in real time, but for opted out users the reporting will be delayed as mentioned before for 24 to 48 hours randomly. But for both opt in and opt out users there won't be any breakdowns for the conversion events.

Thank you so much Dora. That was. I think I can speak for everyone in the chat, including myself. That was a lot of knowledge and honestly. Wow. We have a couple of questions that have been the hot questions in the community. So first I want to ask when it says Facebook, is it referring only to the Facebook app or the family of apps belonging to the company of Facebook?

Yeah, so that's a great question. When we say Facebook we actually refer to both Facebook and Instagram. So in both we're going to show

the prompt and this is a question that comes up all the time and I also saw it in the chat here. Will this impact Android users as well?

Cool. Yeah, so this is a really, really good question that comes a lot. So as I mentioned before, it will impact Android but to a much less degree. So the stronger impact will be for iOS opted out users. For iOS opted in users and Android users, the data processing will be the same as today, but we'll have some tweaks that are applicable to all users like the deprecation of the different attribution window and breakdowns that won't be available. So Android users will be impacted as well as part of the entire activity, but their data will, will. Will stay the same.

Okay. I mean obviously it impacts everyone as far as it from the the merchant standpoint like it if this little fact impact all of them, but it will. I guess what you're saying is that the Android users, it's with them opting them not having the ability to opt out or it'll be different. Is that what you mean?

Yes. So. So for Android there won't be any prompt. Android users won't have to accept tracking, so their data will still be in real time in a user level data for Facebook. And all of the limitations that I mentioned before won't apply to them except the ones that are changing in the system, in Ads Manager or in wix's dashboard. Okay, hope that clarified.

Yeah, it does, thank you. And if we have existing ads now, will we have to start them over completely? Will we have to start fresh?

Yeah, no. So actually no. The only things that must be taken care of is the domain verification and the eight event configuration. So as long as you have these, you should be good to go. At least from. From, you know, you won't have to change anything in your existing ads.

Awesome. I bet that's a relief for most of us on the call here. And will my purchase conversion ads stop running once iOS starts enforcing these changes? It kind of is a piggyback on the last question.

Yeah, yeah, I guess that's, that's an important clarification. So as long as as the purchase event is being configured within the eight events, then you again should be good to go. Even if you haven't configured the event then Facebook automatically fill that in for you according to historical data. So again, if you ran purchase campaigns before, you should be good to go. So just make sure that all of the events you use for optimization, whether it's purchase or other events, just make sure that these are being configured within the eight events, as Danny will explain in just a few seconds.

Wonderful. One last question. Descending events through conversions API mitigate the impact.

Yeah, I touched on that briefly. It actually won't. This is an important one. Server events that's being sent through conversions API will be subject to the same limitations as pixel events. But for the long term we would highly encourage advertisers to implement convergence API. I know WIX is working on a great and seamless integration for that, so that shouldn't be a problem in the near future. As cookies will go away from websites, this should be the only way to transfer data to the platform. So yeah, I think that's a smart move to start working on that.

Awesome, thank you. So we're going to actually move on. As Dor mentioned, this is a cross industry change for everyone. Doesn't matter what platform you are on or what your business is, this is impacting us all. And part of this workshop is to share some steps from us from WIX that you can do to implement to help you with these changes. It's not going to be a, you know, fix everything, but hopefully it will help you deal with these changes and hopefully re strategize the way you do your Facebook ads. So I'm going to actually hand it off to Danny from our WIX tradition Promote team and he's going to tell you some, give you some tips and some steps on what you can do and how you can deal with those things. Danny, hi.

Thanks Melissa. It's great to have all of you here. Many thanks to Dor for your great introduction. It's really helpful actually. We at WIX work to make this transition as smooth as possible. However, there are actually not many things that directly depend on you as a user. And you need to do two things as Dor mentioned. And we will dive deeply into the WIX infrastructure, into the WIX system, how to set up those things in order to continue sending events to Facebook. And these are actually two actions that we need to do. These are domain verification and also we need to select to choose 8 events. 8 the most important events for your business which is obviously will be different from one user to another. But I will show you the way how to set those events with Facebook and WIX systems. Please. Melissa. Okay, so first of all we are doing domain verification because without verifying your business domain the events will stop coming to Facebook. It will just be rejected. So this is the mandatory step, the that must be taken by every user who tracks events to Facebook. So the two steps of this process must be done through Facebook interface and one step of this process is handled by WIX in the WIX Dashboard. Okay so let's go to the first step to the Facebook Dashboard. Okay, so here on the right you have the URL which says Business Facebook. Com settings. That's the place where you start the process of domain verification. You go to brand safety, you go to domains, you bring up your domain that you are installing into Facebook interface and please select so called meta tag verification method. This is the only one which is supported by wix. So in this screen you will be able to pick up the code, so called metatac code which you need to bring to Wix. And that's the second step. Okay, now you are coming to WIX interface which is like the a step. You're coming to WIX Dashboard. Then next you go to Settings. Okay, in the settings you go to Advanced. There is Advanced section and you select custom code. Okay, in the custom code you add new. You can name it as I just named it, like Facebook domain verification. You paste your code in the designated window and you just save. No more actions are required here. So this is the only part that you do at WIX site and then you need to go back to Facebook in order to validate your changes made at wix. Okay, so that's the next side. Now you're returning to the same screen as you were at Facebook. And you click the green verify button. And if everything went good on the side of Wix, you will get this confirmation. Happy moment that the domain was verified. That's it. This process has ended. Now we can go to the event selection. Okay, events, as Dor already mentioned several times I want to repeat this. These events are fired by the browser that is traditional way so called pixel way to report events and also by the server so called conversion API. So these are the same events the event set. And these are equally impacted by the iOS 14 changes. So Wix has 24 events that we send to Facebook. And if you follow the link on the left you will get to the knowledge base article where we list all the events which are split by the WIX vertical, so called WIX application. WIX verticals. Mostly the majority of our users use stores. But we also have bookings, events, pricing plans. WIX forms login chat and mobile quick action bar which is also functionality that sends events to Facebook. Okay, so here I'm giving you an example what we report at WIX store. So that's good solution if you have only WIX store and nothing else. So when the customer comes to your website, the first thing when he sees your product we fire so called view content event. Then it will be add to cart. Of course this journey is like step by step. At any time the user can drop the journey. Then the next one after add to cart is initial check checkout, add payment info, add shipping details, add delivery method, WIX order placed and purchased. So all in all we have eight events which we fire in the WIX stores process in the buying process. Now if for instance you have also site members some users that have for instance forum or blog and they want that the users will leave comments. They have so called members area and we also report events when users of users. Your users interact with members area, they sign up, they sign in. We can fire for events related to this. Now if you have for instance contact form on your site or get subscribed form on your site, we fire Lead event. So you remember that we have eight events for WIX stores, we have four events for WIX members and we have one event for like for contact form or get subscribed form. So all in all, these are 13 events. Okay? Now you need to choose only eight because 13 will not be accepted by Facebook. Facebook will do some manipulations and they some algorithms will choose those events for you which are most frequently used, most frequently fire and most important. But it's good for you. It's important for you to set those events that are important for you guys, not for anybody else. And this is an example. It's not something that I personally believe that those events will be most important. Like first priority events are docu events. For instance weeks order placed and purchase events. They're extremely important because those are conversion events. Now lead event also can be as a conversion event and sign up success. For those who use like weeks forum or weeks blog, it's also extremely important event. Now the second group of events like second priority of events like view content, add to cart, initiate checkout and add payment info. But there are some white events which are really optional. It is really easy to skip like sign up submit because if you have signup success it will be sufficient for you. But again this is only an example. I would prioritize my events. Any one of you can do it differently and that's in accordance to your to your business needs and your business requirements. Okay? Now when you have selected those events, you come to the Facebook interface. Okay? And over here it's very nicely designated in the Facebook product you go to aggregation section in your events management and in this aggregated section you just add eight events. And as DOR mentioned, it is very important that you will assign priority because for those users who opted out, only the last event will be registered. That's why in this screen you should set up not only the events but also the priority of those events. So some final notes which is really important to say here is that we do not offer mitigation. We we give you a survival guide but you still will be affected by those changes which are related to iOS 14 update. Again, this is industry related changes and they are aimed to be like privacy protection and these rules will impact many business functions. Okay? The tracking data will be reduced. As we know already, events will be registered with a delay and the number of events will be restricted. Okay? The retargeting audience will also decrease over time and the targeting capabilities will not be as accurate as before. The Facebook algorithm capabilities are changing and it will have less data to learn for their machine learning mechanisms from and work with. So we at WIX are doing everything we can and if any changes in Facebook ads will be in place, you will see it in the product. In the product. But as I mentioned, the only things that you need to do at the moment are two the domain verification and setting up eight events. All the rest, we are trying to make it for you.

Thank you so much Danny. Again, I want to reiterate this for everyone. As Dor mentioned and Danny mentioned, this is something that has affected us all, all businesses across the board. No matter what platform you're using, what platform you're using for your business, everyone has been affected and hopefully Danny's tips here. We are doing everything we can at wix to help minimize that impact. However, it won't be a cure all kind of thing, but we hope as these changes evolve that we'll be able to give you anything you need to help minimize this impact and help you restrategize on how you're doing your Facebook ads and equip you with that knowledge. So actually we have a few questions for you Danny from the community. How does this affect the privacy of my website?

Actually those changes are related to privacy of your site visitors, not of your site. So your site privacy remains exactly the same as it was before. The change is only for the users of users of your site visitors, of your store buyers and so on and so forth.

And how, I mean I know you've already kind of dived into this, but one of the questions is how will this update affect us? Now that's a pretty broad question since we've kind of answered that. But how would you, what would you say? How do you see this happening in the future?

Yeah, about events. There will be limitation, aggregation and delay with the events. These are three things that we need to remember. So. And the two things that you need to do to verify your domain and to choose to select eight events that you will that you want us to report to Facebook and what are the

best events to track with Pixel for a typical store? I'm sure everyone is wondering this question because now that you can only select 8, what are the best ones?

I would say that the most important event is purchase. Of course all events are very important and you know for you is to select the most important for your business. But I would say that do not skip purchase event and do not skip weeks or the place. These are important events that we fire and those are real conversion events. That's why your business Exists you know your business is working for. Of course I would also put very give a very special importance to lead events because those events are fired through WIX contact forms. If it's get subscribers form or it's a contact form or some some payment form, we fire lead event which is also could be very important for you.

Awesome. And how does this affect retargeting ads?

Yeah, again retargeting is usually based on previous data that was sent to Facebook and that's the key of the retargeting. So once the data that we send to Facebook is limited and Facebook is limited to work with these data so of course the retargeting with we will be affected and you know, less population will participate in these retargeting activities in the very, in the smaller time frame.

All right, so we're just going to, I'm just going to. We, I know we dove into this and we talked about this, but I'm just going to do an overview of what Dor and Danny discussed here today. As Dor mentioned, this is a cross industry change and an issue for us all. For every business owner, even wix, it's has been affected by this. And how is this change going to affect you? There's three things that you need to keep in mind. Your target audience, your customers. Audience size will decrease over time because of those users that can opt out. Reporting will be partial and delayed up to 72 hours. So it's important to keep that in mind and you'll have less data to learn from. So keep that in mind with your optimization. Now just before I just want to thank Dor and Dani for an amazing session. This chock full of things that knowledge that we need and we hope that this knowledge will equip you to learn and know how to deal with this, how your Facebook ads have been impacted and maybe to help you restrategize how you are doing your Facebook ads and your advertising. And I just want to thank you all for watching. And again Dor and Danny, it's been a pleasure. If you want to check out any more resources from WIX Ecommerce, please check out WIX E Commerce School. You can find all of our videos and past webinars and workshops there as well as our E Commerce insiders community on Facebook. And if you would like some extra guidance on how to do Facebook ads or you want someone, someone who's an expert on Facebook ads to help you with that, please take a look at our WIX marketplace. If you'd be interested in hiring a partner to help you with those goals. All right, guys, it's been a pleasure. Thank you all for watching. See you next.