MBA1739 Did The Facebook Ad Apocalypse Happen With the iOS14 Update?

Let me tell you about Intuit QuickBooks. When I was starting out my business, I remember sitting at my desk late at night not working on my business but cleaning up numbers, tracking and reconciling.

Payments and wondering how this became my life.

But once I automated the admin side of things of my finances, those nights had disappeared and I felt a whole lot better. Outdo it with intuit QuickBooks QuickBooks is the trusted end to end solution that businesses rely on for getting paid, managing finances, paying employees, finding new customers, and more. QuickBooks provides a team of AI agents and trusted experts, so doing it yourself no longer means doing it alone. Their payment agent gets you paid faster, their customer agent finds leads, follows up and secures more sales, and the accounting agent automates and categorizes transactions. Get your critical business jobs done with QuickBooks on the Intuit platform. Ready to save on new Tech? It's time for Dell Tech Day's annual sales event celebrating our customers with fantastic deals and benefits. Perks include Dell Rewards, free shipping, premium Support and more. PCs like the Dell 14 with Intel Core Ultra processors will help you do more faster and with a premium suite of monitors and accessories, you can upgrade your whole setup with amazing savings. Visit Dell.com deals.

Hey O welcome to the $100 MBA show where it's our business to help your business get more business every single day with our daily 10 minute business lessons for the real world. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher Omar Zenholm. I'm also the co founder of Webinar Ninja, a self funded software company I started with my partner back in 2014 and in today's lesson you will learn did the Facebook Ad Apocalypse happen with the iOS 14 update? At the start of 2021, many of us heard about Apple's iOS 14 update, which would prompt users on iOS devices if a site was tracking with cookies and ask them if they wanted to opt out of being tracked. This of course is a big deal when it comes to Facebook ads because you know you need to be able to track a user's activity on your website so you can track conversions. When the news broke in January, a lot of people were really, really concerned because iOS is a big market. It's over half of all mobile usage and if you can't track conversions for your ads on those devices, it's going to be really hard to run ads on Facebook and optimize them so you can make sure your money's well spent. Well, it's now March and the dust has settled. Facebook has been With Apple. And I'm here to tell you what is the current status? Is it worth you running Facebook ads? Can you really not track conversions? What does this mean for your marketing spend? We get into all of that in today's episode and more. So let's get into it. Let's get down to business.

Life's busy. Don't let banking slow you down. Whether you're paying bills, setting savings goals, or just splitting the check, Atlantic Union bank makes managing your money easier. With helpful people and user friendly tools, we make sure banking with us fits. You call, visit us online, or drop into an Atlantic Union bank branch today. Atlantic Union bank. Any way you bank.

Facebook ads. And when we say Facebook ads, we also mean Instagram ads. Because, you know, Instagram is owned by Facebook. It's one of the most useful lead acquisition tools. Many people run ads to feed their funnel, to convert leads into customers. All of that. The reason why it's so powerful, why people use it so much, is because of the targeting. So you can target people that are most likely to want what you have. It's also because of its tracking and analytics. So you can be able to optimize your ads based on the performance. And you really can't do that unless you're able to track the movements of the person that once saw your ad on Facebook and then hit your website and either opted into your lead magnet or bought your product or service. So when this iOS 14 news dropped, many people got nervous. Many ad agencies started to wonder if their business is in jeopardy. And many businesses that were using Facebook ads, like myself, wondered, is it over? Is the gravy train over for Facebook marketing? Well, I want to begin by saying it is not over. Okay, the dust has settled and I'm here to give you an overview of what this change means. Okay. What can you can and cannot do right now with Facebook ads because of this iOS update? How does it affect your marketing? Is it going to cost you any more money? Now with this change, what does this all mean? So the first thing I want to talk about is conversions. This is the elephant in the room. Does this mean anybody on an iOS device is untrackable and you cannot track a conversion when Somebody's on an iOS device and chooses not to be tracked? Well, it's not actually black and white. Many people thought that all conversions will not be counted, but in fact, the actual conversion that you set in Facebook will be tracked. So say, for example, I'm running a Facebook ad to convert people and I put my tracking pixel on the thank you page of my opt in, maybe I'm giving away a guide and they put their name and email address and the next page is the thank you page that tracks conversion, or I'm selling a product or service and the page they see after they buy is where they convert. And so I have my tracking pixel there. Facebook will track the conversion, so you'll know if they actually converted based on what you optimized the ad for. But you won't know any of the things that are happening in between prior to this update for iOS devices. Again, this is not applicable to Android, but prior to this update, what would happen is that all devices, when you were running ads, you can actually track all the little events that were happening in between. So if they went to your website, went to this page, then that page, then left your website, then came back two days later, you can actually see the whole journey. And then ultimately the conversion, all those in between events are now gone for iOS devices, but you will still track the conversion, which is really essentially what you want to be able to track because you want to know, hey, how much is it costing me to get this lead or. Or to get the sale? So that way you can know if it's worth the investment to keep running the ad. So that's the big news that a lot of people are happy about. Now, a couple of not so good news. Prior to this update, Facebook would give you new data on how your ads were doing pretty much every five minutes. You can probably track it by the minute to see how many conversions you're getting. Literally, if you did a test sale, you'd see that conversion within five minutes. That's how quick it was to track the data. But because of all these variables and because of this update, Facebook is holding back the information to make sure that it gives accurate conversion data. And it's going to be more than five minutes. It's going to be maybe two to three days Now. I actually don't think this is such a bad thing. Why? Because you do need time before you can say, hey, I need to make a change. Especially when you're starting an ad, I always recommend you run an ad for at least a week before you start tweaking it. It needs some time to learn how to present this ad to the right people and to optimize for your conversions. So this means all your data is kind of delayed. So this actually is pretty good because I am one of the people that used to look at my ad metrics a few times a day and it's a little bit of a time waste. So what you want to do is maybe check every few days now and tweak accordingly. This is going to force you to run longer campaigns and to tweak based on more time. Prior to this, people used to run an ad for a day, see how it goes. If it stunk, they just closed it down, started a new one, or created new ad sets. You just can't do that now. You're going to have to run it for more than a few days. And I actually think it's a healthier exercise. I also want to put in brackets, by the way, Facebook is going to do everything it can to make sure your ad performs well. That's their job. They know that if you get an roi, you're going to continue to spend money on Facebook. So they're going to try to make sure they get your ad in front of the right people. They're going to do everything to optimize it. So kind of trust Facebook a little bit more now. Next, conversions won't be 100% accurate. They used to be, but now Facebook is getting in front of it and saying your conversions may not reflect the actual conversions, and most likely the number they display will be less. So say, for example, you made 100 sales with Facebook ads in the month. It may show 85, it may show 90. It's going to err on the side of caution. This is still a margin of error that I am happy to live with. And it's not a margin that is going to make or break an ad set or an ad campaign. I would still run an ad even with that margin of error, given the debt I'm given now. The big lesson I learned in this whole exercise is that at the end of the day, money talks. Okay, let's get real, guys. There's a lot of money in ads, okay? There's a lot of money, especially in ads that are based on conversions. Entire industries are based on this. YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter. All these companies make money on advertising, and no one's going to use their advertising unless they can track conversions. So there's just too much money in this market for it to be totally overhauled. And Apple understands that, understands that it's not going to totally kill the whole market. And they worked with Facebook to make sure it's a reasonable compromise to offer the privacy they want to offer to their customers while making sure it's not a total loss for companies like Facebook. I can't imagine anytime now or in the near future, five, ten, Years from now, Facebook or any other company that makes money off ads is going to stop tracking or stop using conversion as a metric for success. We are talking billions upon billions of dollars, and there are so many companies that rely on these tools to be able to bring in billions of dollars. So we're talking about trillions of actual value on the market here. And like any news, sometimes in the beginning it sounds scary until the details kind of settle in and things work themselves out.

Thy ticket, lady Jennifer of Coolidge. Well, many thanks, good sir. Here is my disc Discover card.

They accept Discover at Renaissance fairs.

Yeah, they do here. Discover is accepted at the places I love to shop. Geth with the Times.

With the Times. You're playing the loot.

Yeah.

And it sounds pretty good, right?

Discover is accepted at 99% of places that take credit cards nationwide, based on the February 2025 Nielsen report. So I've been running Facebook ads since the update, the iOS 14 update. It's been an interesting experiment. Things are much slower in terms of optimizing the ad, in terms of seeing the conversions, in terms of analyzing the data. But my Facebook ads account, it's a much happier place. Now, I don't visit it that often. I don't check it on my phone. I just run the campaigns I know will work. I trust it. And I visit it twice a week. That's all I do. I visit it twice a week on Mondays and Fridays, and that's it. At the end of the day, your business might be running two, three, maybe four funnels to bring in customers. In each of those, you might be running separate ads or campaigns. So you might end up, you know, with five or six campaigns inside those, a whole bunch of ad sets, a whole bunch of ads within those, like 50 to 60 ads. Having to look at all of them and tweak them every single day, sometimes every single hour before, is a lot of time wasted. So it's good that we're just visiting it once or twice a week now to make sure things are moving in the right direction. Thanks so much for listening to the $100 NBA show. If you love what you hear and you love the show, share it on social, share it on favorite platform. Let people know why you love the $100 MBA show. It's highly appreciated and it's the best way for you to pay it forward and help out the podcast. Before I go, I want to leave you with this. Marketing is such an important part of your business. You have to keep marketing. You have to keep bringing customers a lot of people forget this. A lot of people forget and put their foot off the gas of marketing. They market a lot when they launch and then they wonder why the customers stop coming. Well, because you stop marketing, you kind of bring in that traffic. You got to keep people learning about your business and what you offer. On Friday's episode, I'll be touching on how much money should be spending on marketing in terms of your budget, what portion, what percentage of your spend of your expenses should be on marketing. Can't wait for that one. All right, until next time, which is tomorrow. I'll see you then. Take care.

The Jack Welch Management Institute at Strayer University helps you go from I know the way to I've arrived with our top 10 ranked online MBA. Gain skills you can learn today and apply tomorrow. Get ready to go from make it happen to who made it happen and keep striving. Visit strayer.edu Jack WelchMBA to learn more. Strayer University is certified to operate in Virginia by Chev and its many campuses, including at 2121 15th Street north in Arlington, Virginia.