BONUS - The iOS14 Update - What Marketers Need To Know (W/ Mario Filho)

Listen up, mo foes. Here come the Flow bros.

It's Matt and Joe's show, so let's go.

This is an intro, intro, intro, intro.

Hustle and Flowchart with your boy Matt Wolf and Joe Fierce.

Hey, hey.

Welcome back to the Hustle and Flowchart podcast. This is a special little bonus episode. The other day, Joe and I, we did a live stream to our Facebook channel or our and our YouTube channel. So if you're not in those groups, make sure you're following those groups. Over on Facebook, we're@flowchartgroup.com over on YouTube, we're @hustleandflowchart TV. So make sure you're subscribed to those two places because we often do really interesting live streams outside of the podcast and this episode is actually from one of those live streams. So there's been a lot of talk lately about the iOS 14 update. You probably heard the news that Facebook, Facebook was complaining that Apple was being unfair to businesses and trying to hurt businesses with this new update because they're going to stop allowing these third party tracking pixels. And all of this sort of stuff is going on in the marketing and advertising world where people are kind of freaking out about this iOS 14 update.

So we decided let's bring in an.

Expert, let's bring in a data scientist to talk about what's going on with this iOS 14 update, what you should know about it, how it's going to affect your ads, what you should be doing to prepare for it, and all.

That sort of thing.

So we dove in on that topic on this live stream and because it's sort of a timely topic, this iOS14 is a very new thing. We wanted to release it on the podcast as well. So anybody curious about what's happening there can listen to this episode and kind of get more details about the update that's happening. If you listen to our Rand Fishkin episode recently, we talked a little bit about the Pixel, but Rand wasn't an expert on it. He told us you really should bring on somebody that, that knows what they're talking about with it. So who better than a Datto scientist? So we have Mario Filho joining us on this episode today. This is from a live stream from just a few days ago, and he's going to really kind of deep dive into what this Pixel Update is, what.

It means for you.

We're going to discuss what you should be doing to sort of account for it and be prepared. And it's a really sort of in depth conversation on this one. Specific topic of the iOS 14 update and retargeting and what you should know about it. So, again, this is a special episode. We don't normally release episodes on Saturdays, but this was a timely one and I wanted to make sure it got in as many ears as possible to help as many people as possible with this upcoming update. If you're not an Evergreen Profits member.

The video version of this will also.

Be available there in addition to our YouTube channel and our Facebook group. So, again, make sure you're in the Facebook group, flowchartgroup.com make sure that you are subscribed to us on YouTube hustleandflowchart tv, and you will be able to.

See all these video versions of these.

Live streams that we're doing.

We're doing quite a bit of them.

These days, so definitely make sure that you're paying attention in at least one of those two places so that you get access to these live streams as they go live. We won't be making all of them into podcast episodes, so check those places out. And let's go dive in with Mario Filho.

We're live, and this is a session that's going to be very timely, I would say, and it's won by popular request from our podcast, is essentially what the heck is happening with this iOS 14 update by Apple and how is that going to affect tracking and ads and not only Facebook, but probably these other platforms. Affiliate marketing, potentially. Matt, I know you have some deeper thoughts or you have your hands in the weeds and that kind of stuff. Any ways you'd want to kick this off?

Yeah, it's kind of interesting because I'm typically more of the tech guy who's in the weeds with ads and pixels and retargeting. But I think on this discussion, Jo, you might actually know more than me about what's going on with the retargeting pixels in iOS 14. But really, the point of this call is I just want to, you know, I want to learn myself what the deal is with the iOS 14 update. You know, how this is going to affect our advertising. You know, we do advertising on Facebook, we do advertising on Google. You know, a lot of what we do right now is retargeting, and we know a lot of that kind of stuff is going to be pretty impacted by this new update that's coming out. So that's really where I want to take the discussion is just, you know, what, what should we expect? What sort of changes should we be making in our business to account for what's going on and, you know, just kind of see where the conversation takes us on in that area.

Perfect.

Yeah.

And yeah, it's rare that I know a little bit more of what's happening. I just listened to a couple of podcasts, that's all. But Mario, so you're probably wondering who this gentleman is in between us on camera here is Mario.

He.

So you reached out. Well, you're muted right now, but I'll give you a little background. You reached out to us because on the Rand Fishkin episode we recorded, Rand actually asked if we had anybody talking about this yet on the podcast because it's pretty timely. And we said, no, we don't know anybody. And then Mario actually reached out to us in support because he heard that and he's a data scientist for what you said seven years, I believe he said seven years. Seven years machine learning. I mean, you've been hands deep in all the tech and all this stuff that we really don't know much about. We're just the marketers over here using the tech. So you said you have a lot of insights and you're, you're here to serve. You just want to give your insights from what you're seeing. You also do marketing as well, so you do have that overlap. But give us maybe a quick, you know, 30 second recap of who you are and maybe things I missed and how we can get going in this.

Sure. Just a 30 second introduction. I'm Mario and I have been building machine learning systems, AI systems.

In the last seven years. A lot of things about recommendations. So customers who bought is also about that or those kind of the same stuff that you see that actually ranks your newsfeed or those try to find which people should see your ad. Of course, I did not work for Facebook, but I have been building these types of systems that try to customize a little bit more the content that you should send to achieve a given objective. And one thing that I'm really fascinated is actually making this understandable in plain English because that is a lot of technical complexity, but you don't really need to understand it to actually know how to use it better.

So you're talking our language then, because. Yeah. And most of our audience, I doubt, are deep into the data and all that stuff. So if you can give it to us in plain English, layman's terms, it's probably best. And then from there everybody can explore deeper as they wish. So I guess give us the overview of what's happening because I think this was back in late December that This started kind of becoming an issue on everybody's radars.

Sure. So I look at everywhere I could about any details, both from the developer perspective and from the marketer perspective. So I went to the Apple forums, everything, try to understand what is really going on. And the big problem that I see, so that we understand a little bit what's going inside Facebook is that the matching of the data will be a little harder. So today if you have some behavior in an app, the app records this behavior, it will still record the behavior, but matching this behavior to a Facebook profile will be harder because right now we have the IDFA that you can just say, oh, this is the same device. Okay, this person is doing that. But right now, in theory, people from apps would not be able even to share this data with Facebook. But we know things are not as clear like this. So how this probably will impact marketers. The biggest problem will be to retarget on the audience network inside another app. So there are two basic things that will go on here. Cookies. We can go into more discussion about cookies, but I think cookies are not as heavily affected right now. It's more about how do you show ads to the right people when they are using cookies, an ad when they are playing a game on their cell phone, and how can Facebook get this data and use it as, let's say in their backend to actually improve their models to send you new ads when you are in their platform or in the audience network. It will mostly be for audience network and for retargeting. Okay, now please interrupt me anytime. Okay, so the other thing is the app installs. So right now Apple will act like a middleman for the app install. So instead of the app telling Facebook who is using the app and then Facebook recording the attribution, etc. Apple will act like a conversion reporting broker. So the app will first talk with Apple and then Apple will decide how to send this event of conversion. Let's say, oh, someone actually installed and used this app after clicking on the ad in this other app, it will do this intermediation through the SK ed network. If someone has been seeing these names around, these are the two biggest, let's say impacts the retargeting but not always lost. Before we had idfa, there are lots of, let's say efforts in machine learning to do this cross device fingerprinting. Let's say we already have some pretty good models that can through IP geolocation, time and behavior. Facebook has lots of internal date about you so they can actually statistically try to understand, okay, this log that I don't know who actually uses this app in this way, but based on this behavior that people, that these people follow, the time, etc. I can tell pretty sure this is the profile I should match. So I particularly don't think it will be really something that will break Facebook advertising or something like this.

So let me ask you this. So if somebody is on their iPhone, right? And let's say they go to our Evergreen Profits website on their iPhone traditionally because they visited on their iPhone, I don't totally know how it works, but there's something called like a mobile ad identifier, right, that's attached to pretty much every single user. And so if they're logged in on Facebook and they also visit my website on their iPhone, their iPhone is going to say, okay, this user is connected.

To this Facebook account.

Now when they're on their computer later on, they might see a retargeting ad for Evergreen Profits because it matched this iPhone to this person. So is that still going to take place? Is Facebook going to still try to do that matching? It's just not going to be as accurate as it used to be, or is that going to be gone?

Yes, if you allow Facebook to use the adfa, it will know that it's the same device that's accessing. So it will be able. If not, Facebook already tries to do this with your ip, your browsing information, and other behavioral information. So it will be still possible, but it may not be as accurate as it is today. That, oh, this is clearly met. That was looking at this website.

Gotcha. That makes sense. And I guess my next question then is we're hearing a lot about this in like the Facebook retargeting world that when you know this is going to have a big impact on Facebook. Facebook pulled out a whole, like, news article, I think, in the New York Times, whining about how Apple was being unfair to them and all that junk. Right. But how come nobody's talking about Google retargeting? How come this isn't going to impact the retargeting over on Google as much as it's going to impact the retargeting on Facebook?

Yes, this is where we may go to a speculation of why is Facebook so worried about this? But actually Google has Chrome and has Android, which is pretty, pretty big and they have even more data than Facebook. It's the famous paradox. Google is much more like privacy invading, let's say, in a sense than Facebook. But everyone puts the blame on Facebook. So it will affect them. But like I said, these statistical models probably are already working. They will just work a little, a little bit better. It is just, let's say.

A different way to match really. But I'm quite sure that we still be able to match. Maybe Apple is planning to sell something to add networks. But it is really strange, both from modeling and from knowing some data scientists, that they would just take away this type of targeting of matching.

It seems like, at least from what I've understood, is that it's like a delay with the matching that could maybe throw off conversion tracking a little bit with ads. Is that the case?

Yes. When you are talking about using machine learning to do it, you have to always be running the software again to actually find the current patterns, because patterns change a lot in the behavior. So what may help you match people to behavior last week may not be what is matching today. So this will require computation which has billions of users. So it will have to run these models constantly for all these users and all these new data. So this may be. They have probably they have a lot of layers to actually improve the match with more fidelity that we call. So every time you get a little bit better accuracy, but with more accuracy you need more computation. So this may be the case. One thing that may be a bit more concerning is that cookies will expire faster on the browser. So if Safari knows that a cookie is coming from another network, it will in theory only last 24 hours. So this, I think it's a bigger problem, actually, I think ad blockers are a bigger problem than all of this because they really affect us.

But this is the problem. Of course, server side, you can still match on IP on geolocation and if you have logged in users, you can still match via email, via phone. So we have these alternatives. Just a question of looking for alternatives in this case.

Yeah, and that's what I've heard is so Ryan Deiss, one of the founders from Digital Marketer.

He always does the big predictions for the next year. The big thing and his was email in 2020, in December when he said that. And he's like, yeah, you find that a little funny, but it's been around a while. But kind of to your point there, you have that conversion data now on your own list, either as a subscriber or a paid customer. And like you said, it's just going to allow you to track much better. So it just shows more of the power of actually having an email list and making that a big importance.

It looks like yes, you basically need some data that you share with the platform. So if the platform has an email and you have an email, it is almost solved because you can match the data. But when you don't have any data to match is the big problem.

Yeah. So people will still be able to pretty effectively retarget customers and things like that. Because worst case scenario, you should have a list of your customers that you could constantly be adding and updating in Facebook and that can become your retargeting list. And as marketers, we know that our customers are going to be our best next customers, more so than cold leads. So yeah, I mean, a lot of people have asked, like, how come we're not as concerned about this as it seems like we should be? And I think that's really the reason why is because we are still collecting email lists, we are still capturing customers on a list, we are still collecting our own data and that data can be passed back to Facebook and Facebook will be able to match based on the data that we're sending them. So we're still going to have fairly accurate data. It's just going to be a little.

Bit tougher to get the sort of.

Random visitors that come in through Google Search, visit our website and then retarget them on Facebook. That kind of thing is going to get a little bit harder, but there is still going to be some matching going on. Now. Yes, I'm not sure I'm interpreting. Felipe. Philippe, I'm not sure how to pronounce your name first of all, but.

Felipe. Yeah, so I'm not sure I'm interpreting this question correctly, but is this going to impact the browsers inside of Facebook and Instagram? They're kind of native browsers. Or is it only going to affect Apple, Safari and that sort of thing?

Yes, if the browser. I tried to look for more information of how these browsers are, let's say implemented, but it was not clear to me. If they are having to go through some layer of Apple, I believe. Yes, they have to go through. So probably you will see these, let's say, browsers affected. But it's only IDFA cookies still work. Even if it's a Safari that is opening inside Facebook, cookies will still work. And probably Facebook or the apps can actually track the sites that you visit when you open a browser through their apps. So I would not be so concerned about this part. Cookies will be available. Cookies and UTM are actually the best solution right now to really try to avoid this. But like I said, it's more audience network.

Yeah. And like you Said too. I mean ad blockers have been around for years now and those have been a bigger menace on our advertising than iOS 14 update that's coming, right?

Yeah, no, no, just that ad blockers. I was trying, I installed some edit blockers to actually try and see what was going on and they are really the big problem because they actually.

We will need to move to some server side solutions to actually try to store this data and probably we will see apps going more towards having the users share some information before they actually can play a game or something. Just because of this, because of the tracking.

That makes sense. Yeah. And I guess that's an adapt, an evolution really for app developers or really everyone is collect some of the data up front and maybe give a good value add as to why you're asking for the data up front. So I'm sure your customers don't understand what's happening in the back end here, but I'm sure like are there ways that you would recommend to do that or you know, from what you've seen work like adaptions or ways that we can kind of evolve to make sure. Obviously growing an email list and collecting data seems like probably the biggest one.

Yes, the traditional utms, if you can actually make them. Actually Safari will try to expire cookies in one day if they see that you came from some website that has the queries, the tags in the URL. So this can be a problem. But there are some ways that you can try to store the data from your cookies cookies in an external database. So you may have people, the same people coming from different IPs etc. But you can try to, let's say, match behaviorally. But I think that as long as you have a Facebook or a Google Analytics pixel, they will do it for us. So what I am implementing my own products. I'm using UTMs and one thing that I have seen right now is, is that I just saw it on Twitter that Facebook is rolling out an update that they were testing some time ago about ad keywords. I don't know if you saw it around, so I have even let me share you the link here in the private chat. So it is a Twitter from this guy. It's the screen of.

Probably a new type of targeting that you will be able to do that is more specific. This is the fun thing because we were going through something that was, oh, trust the machine learning algorithm, just target broadly and it will do its thing. But it seems that Facebook will actually.

Have to go more specific, allow us to target more Specifically, and from what I read from where I got this.

Let'S say this information, it is a website called Stacked Marketer.

I think I have Stacked Marketer.

Yes.

Can pull it up on the screen, Joe, the tweet.

Yeah, that's why I was just getting it up here. Let's see here. Share screen.

So there was this Facebook advertiser that his rep actually told him that, for example, if you add keywords such as Oculus Rift, virtual reality, or augmented reality, a person who took the following actions would likely be prioritized to receive your ad. So if someone visited the Oculus Rift webpage. Sorry for the accent. Join the Facebook group about virtual reality. Watch the video about augmented reality glasses and of Facebook activities that involve the keyword you loaded. So maybe this is on Facebook side. They will actually work on this targeting, let's say, more specifically.

Yeah, that's interesting because, I mean, that's what I was kind of hearing from the podcast I've listened to is just like, you know, Facebook always has something up their sleeve. Like, there's. There's gonna be a solution here. It's not like they're just gonna say, oh, nope. I mean, obviously, they're under the gun for a lot of privacy stuff with government and society in general, like you said earlier. So. Yeah, I mean, what are other good resources? So you said stacked Marketer. I'll pull that up here as well.

Yes. This is just one I found right now. Let me send you the link to the specific article that I saw.

Actually, I just. I am trying to hit more and share more about this data side about marketing. But. But like I say, I'm still a newbie in this area.

Well, you're a newbie in the marketing area.

What's really nice is you have all the implications that are happening behind the scenes that we're not really paying attention to.

Yes, yes. Yep.

This is the article you said to check out here.

Just below.

It has a Facebook in a blue.

Okay, so Facebook, let's hear.

Yeah. So this is the first information let's say that we have about this.

I like to follow, let's say.

Yeah, interesting.

I don't have. Let's say. Something that I follow for the data on Facebook. I follow mostly the engineering blogs, the AI blogs that are more technical. But if anyone wants to. To talk about something about this. Yeah, just reach out.

Perfect. Yeah. And I'll put this in the chat here, I think. I don't know Facebook if this post. But here's the other link Mario just shared. I Think it's going to YouTube but.

I'm manually pasting them into the Facebook comments as well. So if you're watching on Facebook, the link should be in those comments too.

Sweet. Thank you. Thank you. Yeah, and I was reading also Mario, or I was hearing that is that Facebook's documentation is actually pretty good. Good on this whole rollout. Like it's actually something I've heard is what everyone should probably read if they're really curious about this stuff.

Yes, yes, Facebook.

I tried to find for example for this new targeting something about it. What I saw from the IDFA new matching and stuff was mostly for people that actually have the apps and want to show the ads. So I did not find much things still about. Let's say for us what really is important is if you can implement the conversions API because it will solve a lot of the issues with tracking. Even if the Pixel still work as before, it will probably be a better option.

Okay. Yeah. It really does sound like it's affecting a lot more of the app creators and those folks a lot more just because it's pulling data into their apps and people unknowingly are getting their data collected and then all that stuff is getting spun around without them knowing essentially. It seems like that's probably the biggest problem here.

Yes.

Okay, here's something Felipe's asking. He's talking about checkout page retargeting. So he says. One thing I'm worried about here is our checkout retargeting which we mostly do using website visit audience. But I think we'll need a two step checkout to collect the user email first and then make the retargeting using the list not just based on the pixel checkout. Do you think this is a good idea to prevent losing retargeting audience of checkout? I mean I think off the top of my head that sounds like the best solution to make sure that you're safe.

But what are your thoughts, Mario?

Yes, yes, definitely, definitely. Because even if you Pixel, let's say 100% of people really well when you send the pixel without any other information, it will just send the IP and the browser and probably some geolocation stuff to Facebook, you still get an advantage in matching with profiles if you have some more information like name and email. Even if you decide to go off Facebook actually it's good to have the emails around.

Yeah, I was going to say just for the checkout. A two step checkout is powerful just because you can do the cart abandonment emails as well. I know that's not necessarily a retargeting thing. But. But you can follow up with people who enter their email but don't finish the checkout and say, hey, you forgot to check out. Was it something I did? Send them the link back to the checkout and then you could wait three days and say, hey, here's 10% off if you check out today and you can do the whole cart abandonment thing, that's going to get you a lot more sales. So I would just recommend going that route regardless of the retargeting stuff.

Yeah, exactly.

For sure, man. This is a good question, Felipe. Thank you. And anyone else I know we've been going for a little bit here and it might be over the heads of a lot of folks. So check out the resources in the comments and if you don't see them, well, they should all actually be in there because Matt's doing it too. So. Yeah, I mean if you have any other questions, I would say throw them in the chat now while you can. Yeah.

It'S good, good questions, Felipe. Other than that, I don't know where, where else to take it. I think we covered a lot. Mario, is there anything else we should know from like that you're paying attention to maybe in the rest of this year to come, maybe other platforms, Google, YouTube.

I'm looking here at my notes and the only thing I think we did not. I would be an optimist about this really because iOS is still the smaller part of traffic and actually I think Facebook and Instagram will be paying more attention to their internal data which is tons of higher, highest quality. I don't know it's higher quality than it, so I think it will be better. They probably are doing adaptations and one thing that I see here, I don't know if many people use it, but one Facebook ads course that I took actually taught me to do it is to use the offline events API. So there is this place where you can just send the data to Facebook about purchases and you can get some better attribution. And here is where email and stuff comes around. So it may help to actually account for more this attribution stuff. One thing that people have been recommending is actually looking at your historical data and see what's the difference between for example, your ROAS from 7 day to 28 day and start this multiplier so that you can then estimate what it will be from now on. So basically this. I'm really happy to be able to share this with you. Really?

Yeah. No, this has been fascinating, man. Thank you. And I think as it continues, let's stay in touch too, because if you're in the weeds on the data, I mean, I know we're not like you at all, so this can be super valuable.

Yeah, Yeah. I think as marketers, I actually kind of enjoy when this kind of problem comes up because I just kind of see it as like a puzzle that gets to be solved now. And I constantly see our business as that. Right. Like, every time something like this pops up, oh, there's a new roadblock. Let's figure some fun solution to work our way around it. So I actually get sort of lit up by this kind of thing of like, how do we innovate from. From here now? Like you said, I don't think it's going to be as big of a Armageddon as everybody makes it. Pixelageddon as everybody makes it out to be. I think it's gonna be not something that too many of us marketers notice. Maybe the people that are doing real, real, real high volume might be a little bit more impacted. But, I mean, when we run ads.

We'Re running on the top end, maybe.

Five or six thousand dollars a month worth of advertising. And I just don't think that this stuff is going to have as big of an impact on our business as I think a lot of people are making it out to. And the fact that we're collecting emails and trying to sort of keep our own data in house as well, I think is going to be a saving grace for us. And so I advise a lot of people do the same.

Yes. That's like.

And diversification, too, you know, use some other platforms. Don't just be all Facebook. I think that's what a lot of people learned.

Like, data diversified, leverage the platforms and. Yeah. So, Mario. Yeah. I appreciate you, man. Is there any way that we can direct people your way? I don't. I know you have products in Portuguese, so I don't know.

Yeah, probably no one is my target market here, but, yeah, like I said, I'm trying to find ways I can help. It's something that interests me a lot. So at mario filio.com like.com on Twitter or Instagram on Clubhouse, I finally got listening some rooms where you are so you can find me there as Mario Filio. So let's keep talking. And I. I am looking for ways to help, really. And thank you very much for the work you do on the podcast. And really, I'm listening a lot and learning, so, so much. Really. Thank you very much.

You're welcome, my man. Thank you. Oh, you know what's funny is Felipe is actually, he said he's Brazilian, so. There you go.

Very nice.

All right, Mario. I appreciate you, man. We'll stay in touch.

Thank you. Bye.

Bye.

Bye.

Sam.