Episode Description:
Apple’s latest iOS installments with iOS 14 and iOS15 have introduced a variety of new privacy features that the news is screaming will completely break Facebook advertising! The good news is email marketing and Facebook advertising is still alive and well despite Apple’s new features. In fact – for many small businesses this may have little or no impact on your bottom line!
Action you can take right now:
- Determine how or IF you will be affected by the changes made by Apple in relation to Facebook ads.
- Determine how you will choose to construct metrics of success and KPI’s with your email marketing campaigns.
Episode After-Thoughts
There is a lot going on right now with changes in the landscape of privacy, advertising, children, Facebook, YouTube, etc. For the most part, the average small business advertiser won’t see much of a difference in their ad performance or how the changes would affect advertisers. On the other hand, if running ads and especially if relying on ads as the sole or top channel for acquiring new customers, than it’s very important to keep tabs on what is going on in this space – and learn the information that goes beyond this episode of the podcast.
Episode 30 Transcript:
Justin Varuzzo:
Apple has released their new operating system and now Facebook advertising is broken.
Except that’s kind of fake news. That and more coming up on the marketing and service.com podcast.
Hey, Justin Varuzzo here from marketingandservice.com podcast, the podcast designed to help you grow your business by creating incredible customer relationships. And in today’s episode I want to discuss a little bit about Facebook.
In how Facebook advertising and Apple’s new operating system go together, there’s also some other things that Apple has added into iOS 15 that are privacy related that are going to make some things in digital marketing not work anymore.
But the good news is it’s not quite as bad as everyone is making it sound.
I’m not quite sure why there’s so much, seemingly misinformation, but what brought me to this was I actually saw a post on a Facebook group where someone said about half of my business comes from Facebook ads.
And being that about.
Half the people are on iPhone.
I’m going to lose half my business, but that really just isn’t a reality, nor is that even possible with what has changed, so I thought it would be worth taking this episode to kind of deep dive into what Apple has changed and how it actually really affects Facebook advertising and how it might.
Effects some other forms of digital marketing that your business might partake in.
So the headline that’s gotten a tremendous amount of attack.
Is the fact that Apple has added privacy settings into their phones in iOS 14 some of the start in some of the later updates of iOS 14 which allows you as an iPhone user to block Facebook’s access to certain things on your phone which they used to have?
Access to.
Something like GPS for example.
By default Facebook would know exactly where you were using Facebook when you were using it on a phone, and now Apple has made it so you have to give permission for Facebook to see where you are now.
As a consumer, this is a fantastic thing, because do we really need Facebook to know exactly where we are at every moment?
Of the day, as an advertiser, this is not an ideal situation, but it doesn’t make Facebook advertising unacceptable or impossible to use like Facebook has made it out.
B Now one of the reasons Facebook has done this is because they were hoping that they could create a huge wave of backlash towards Apple with the hope that Apple might repeal the decision to allow the consumer to choose what they do and do not share with Facebook.
However, that whole strategy kind of backfired because most people.
Respect their privacy and they appreciate the fact that Apple is making it easier and more transparent for you to decide what you would like to share.
So how does this affect you as a Facebook advertiser?
Well, here’s the thing.
The things that are blocked would be your GPS score.
They can also conceal your IP address, your IP addresses, the number that links you to the Internet, and there’s some things you can tell from someones IP address.
It’s not entirely specific, but you can usually tell what network they’re on is the the most common, so if you have home Internet, for example, if you have Time Warner, your IP.
Address that websites. See would easily be able to link back and say you’re probably in New York and you probably have Time Warner now. It’s never been 100% because they’re.
There’s VPNs and there’s IP relays, and there’s all sorts of ways you can obscure your IP address, although it’s not very common in the mainstream, but nonetheless companies do use IP addresses very very often to determine all sorts of things, and you yourself may use IP addresses to segment email lists or other things.
Of that nature.
So now let’s say you have your new iPhone.
And you select and you choose not to share anything about your IP address or your GPS location with Facebook.
Here’s why this is not a huge deal as Facebook makes it out to be, which you will probably see them start to change their tune, because they probably realize that there’s some advertisers.
Like the person in this group.
That feels that they will now not spend money on Facebook ads because they don’t think they’re gonna get a return on that investment.
So my guess is that Facebook very soon will start to promote the idea that they’ve found work arounds and that it’s really not that big of a deal after all, and it won’t really have a negative effect on their advertising platform because after all if it genuinely.
Did Facebook would see a huge hit in ad sales?
The reality is that this doesn’t make a big difference and here is why.
By Facebook gets a lot of the information they have on you from you.
You tell them where you live.
You tell them where you work.
You tell them who your friends are, you tell them where you went out to eat last night you tell them where you hang out with specific friends.
You tell them.
What types of things you like to buy?
You tell them all sorts of things that you may not even realize you’re telling them, but just assume anything you tell anyone on Facebook.
Whether it’s a post or a private message or anything like that, you are also feeding that information to the Facebook.
Even just by sharing a photo, you may not realize how much geodata could be linked to that photo showing when the picture was taken, exactly where the picture was taken.
So simply sharing a picture can reveal where you are, who you were with at what time you were there, and information like that.
That’s not so obvious.
So if you have an established Facebook account.
They already know where you live, they know where you work, they know what region you’re in and it’s really not that big of a deal.
They can still easily serve you customized ads that are specific and because you’re on Facebook on your phone, you still have to sign into your Facebook account so they know it’s you.
They just don’t know exactly where you are at that moment.
But chances are they’re going to be pretty darn close and to.
Prove that this is.
It’s not a big deal.
I would draw attention to traditional snail mail marketing.
If you’ve gone to a major retail store, you may be asked what is your ZIP code when you make a purchase?
They won’t ask for your name.
They won’t ask for your address, they just ask for a ZIP code and then that doesn’t seem like a a very revealing piece of data to provide.
So most people simply provide that at the counter when you make.
Purchase here’s the thing, though.
The credit card companies will provide your name, they won’t provide your address.
But when you use your credit card to store, that machine will capture the credit card number, the expiration date, and your name.
These are things that are critical to make sure the charge goes through, and if there’s ever a problem or a charge back, or you need to be able to interface that back to the actual customer.
So you can work that out so fair enough.
Now add the ZIP code component.
Now you know someone name.
You know the credit card they have.
You know what they purchased and you know a ZIP code.
There are services that will very effectively tell you what the addresses of that person.
So for example, if you are me, Justin Varuzzo and you live in New York and I give you my zip code, then you’re going to find that there’s no one else in my town with the same.
Name which makes it 100% certain that if they send a piece of snail mail to Justin Varuzzo at the expected address of the Justin Varuzzo, that’s.
Public that they’re going to be successful in delivering that piece of mail.
Now if my name is Mike Smith, that’s going to be a little bit more challenging because there might be maybe 40 or 50 Mike Smiths in a certain zip code.
Now, of course, it depends.
If you’re in a city, it’s going to be a lot different than if you’re in a suburban or rural area, but let’s assume you’re in the city.
And there’s 200M Smiths in the ZIP code. What most marketers will do is take that and they will mail all 200 of those knowing.
That there’s 100% chance you’re one of the 200 and they will take the risk knowing that the other 199 it’s going to be an irrelevant piece of mail and they’re going to throw it away.
So take this same exact strategy that’s been in play with traditional postal mail advertising and now apply it to digital and you’re going to see kind of the same.
Thing so you’re not going to know someones IP address when you’re on Facebook and you’re running an ad and you’re not going to know exactly where they are, but it’s easy enough to link.
Their Facebook account and their preferences and their likes and all the information that they give voluntarily to target an ad pretty well.
Now there’s going to be a few exceptions.
If you are running ads for a gas station that’s within a five mile radius, and you have someone who’s traveling across the country and you hope to capture them when they drive by.
That they’re going to stop at your gas station to fill up because an ad just happened to pop up, right?
At that moment they were looking for gas halfway across the country and you were going to give them a coupon.
Yeah, that’s not going to work anymore, but let’s be honest, we usually don’t see those types of ads, and that’s not all that prevalent, and it’s not going to have an impact on most.
Businesses and their ability to advertise on Facebook.
So now iOS 15 comes out and there are three new privacy features that are now part of the operating system.
One is what they call a private relay.
What a private relay is is.
Essentially it’s similar to the concept of a VPN if you’ve.
Heard the commercials for VPN.
Essentially it hides your IP address.
Now we’ve already said in previous versions of iOS you were able to not share that information with Facebook, so this is kind of makes no difference in terms of Facebook and advertising.
Now it does make a difference in terms of a lot of other web marketing functions that you may encounter.
But for the average small business, this is not going to be a big deal.
Essentially what’s happening here is your IP address is being shared with Apple.
Apple then goes fetches the information you’re asking for using a spoofed IP address or their own IP address.
However you want to say this and then they relay it, hence private relay.
They relay that information back to your IP address without ever allowing the end connection to know where that data is going.
This means that.
When I’m on a private relay, you will never see my actual IP address when I connect.
Now we’ve already discussed the implications of what concealing your IP address and how that can affect how advertisers can reach you and how you are affected as an advertiser.
The second feature in iOS 15 is a hide my email Now this one a lot of marketers are freaking out about and again, I’m not entirely certain that this fundamentally changes the game of email marketing because here’s the thing with the hide my email function.
What happens here is that when you go to a website, let’s say you have a website.
You’re selling something one of your customers comes.
They sign up for the website they purchase the product at checkout.
They’re basically going to provide you a fake email address.
It’s an email address that Apple is generating on the fly that will only be used for this single transaction.
And things that go to this fake email address will get forwarded to your real email address.
This way you’re never revealing your real email address to a business or anything for that matter.
But here’s the thing.
They are going to forward the email that goes to the fake address to your real account.
So if you have a typical.
E commerce websites set up where someone signs up.
They say yes opt in.
I want to receive emails.
They give you this we’ll call it a fake email address.
It’s really more like an email relay.
Service what’s going to happen is the order confirmation, shipping confirmation, and then all the future marketing emails are going to get forwarded to that person.
Real email address anyway, so for the people who are truly connecting with your brand and for the people who are engaging with your content and with your emails, nothing is really going to change here.
You’re just not going to have an email address.
They’re using for other things, so at the end of the day, it just makes it a lot easier for an end user to opt out.
It also makes it impossible for companies to share your email address.
This is something we never want to do anyway.
But the truth is, a lot of companies do it.
They share your email address with different companies and different people and they sell the lists to people who will pay for it.
This avoids that by having this one time use email if it gets shared or gets kicked around, you can easily say I don’t want to use this anymore and you will stop receiving those emails.
So again, but the consumer.
This is a great function for the honest marketer.
It really shouldn’t have that big of an.
Impact at the end of the day, you’re still going to get your emails delivered, and if they’re good and the user is engaged with your brand, they will still respond to them.
So this goes to the third step, which is kind of linked to number 2, and that’s a feature called mail privacy.
What this does is generally, if you’re a marketer and you’ve ever sent an email.
You will see one of the stats is in.
Open rate, and if you’ve ever wondered how the heck does MailChimp know how many people opened in email?
If they didn’t actually click on anything, so usually no matter what email program you’re using, if you’re using any of the big ones, Infusionsoft keep right MailChimp, constant, contact all of these services.
They usually always.
Have this ability to show you data as in how many people have opened the email and how many people clicked a link and then from there how many people actually converted to a purchase.
And this is really good information to have, especially if you’ve listened to previous episodes of this podcast.
You’ve heard me talk about how important testing is.
It’s a theme that’s come up over and over and over again with professional marketers and the idea that you are going to test and test and test and really try to find the perfect subject line the perfect content.
And the perfect promotion that will drive someone to open the email and then engage with the email by clicking the link and then ultimately hopefully making a purchase from that.
Email and you’ve probably heard this is still the most effective and least expensive way to get conversions by catering to your current customers with good quality content, you’re going to get an amazing return on the investment.
But with this new mail privacy feature, the mail companies are no longer able to ascertain.
Who has opened in email?
If you are on iOS 15 and you’ve enabled mail privacy?
So this is going to cause some struggle with testing because the reality is it doesn’t ultimately matter how many people open in email.
If they’re not clicking on the links, and if they’re not making conversions, and if the campaigns aren’t successful but opening the email is the first indicator of a successful.
Topic or subject line.
So when you’re testing subject lines, that’s going to be the first thing you look at is say hey, we just need someone to open this email.
Step one, get the email open.
Let’s look at these subject lines.
Let’s test.
51103 hundred different subject lines and let’s see which one has the highest open rate, because once the email is open, Step 2 is to test the actual content of the email, right?
What is the offer?
What is the promotion?
What is the call to action?
What do you want this customer to do?
That is, in the context of the email, you’re going to be testing that.
Against clicks and conversions, right?
So if you get the people to open the email, the next step is to get them to click on something.
That means that they’ve actually taken the time to.
Read it and they were interested in what you offered and then hopefully a percentage of those people will actually make the purchase.
So just like with Facebook, I’m already starting to see articles where mail marketing email marketing is done.
It’s finished.
We won’t be able to do it anymore because Apple has ruined it.
Again, I got to take a step back here and think that this is.
A real dystopian view of marketing that the only way that we can be successful in email marketing is by tracking every users behavior and invading their privacy.
The fundamentals of email marketing hasn’t really changed that much.
If you just rewind maybe 10 or 12 years ago, that type of information was very hard to ascertain.
But companies like Amazon still blew up into some of the biggest corporations in the world with email marketing.
Sure, it’s going to make your life a little bit harder, but as we’ve discussed on this podcast over and over again, a lot of businesses.
Especially smaller businesses out there you are struggling with just getting basic emails out and just keeping that engagement with your audience.
That’s hard enough.
You’re probably not in a position where you’re looking at all these complicated metric.
And and you probably honestly, even though you should be, you’re probably not testing 50 or 100 subject lines and you may not even have an audience big enough to make it worth testing subject lines at all.
You might just be doing it on a month to month basis or a week to week, and that’s OK, but This is why I wanted to discuss it to let you know this is OK, you don’t have to worry, it’s.
Not fundamentally going to change how you are engaging with your audience now if you’re a CMO at a major Fortune 500 Corporation.
Yeah, this is going to have an effect and you’re going to have to work around it, but you will work around it and you will continue to be successful.
You might just have to look at different things and open rate is no longer going to be a metric of a successful subject line, because unfortunately the way this hide my email function works every email.
Is opened by Apple before it’s sent to you. What that means is that anyone with an iPhone is always going to have 100% open rate. So let’s say you have 1000 customers. 500 are on an iPhone.
You are going to see that 500 people open that email no matter what, because even if they never even look at it, Apple has opened the email so they can forward it to the actual users email address without divulging an IP address or divulging what links you clicked on or anything like that. So hopefully this makes sense, I know.
This is.
But we’re kind of in a technical half technical, half privacy discussion, but the bottom line is don’t sweat this and don’t be freaking out and thinking your business is over and you have no opportunity to advertise anymore because Apple has put some of these privacy things into their operating system.
So outside of these deliverability.
Reports when it comes to email and the open tracking, there are some things that are going to be affected as well.
Retargeting with Facebook.
I know I did an episode about the Facebook Pixel and how important that is.
It will continue to be really important, but the Facebook Pixel when you install it on your.
Website, That’s what allows you to track users from Facebook across the entire web.
So when someone looks at your ad on Facebook and then later on they visit your website and make a purchase when you have the Facebook Pixel, Facebook can track and say hey we showed this user and add a week ago and now this same user.
Is on your website making a purchase from the product that was in that ad and they connect together and they can say hey look at this, look at the success of your ad.
Not only did you get this click, but we know that that person actually went to your website and checked out and bought the product.
So it’s really good for conversion tracking outside of faith.
This book, unfortunately that is not going to work anymore because now Facebook is not going to be able to see when you go other places outside of Facebook.
And again, this is the whole point of Apple’s privacy concern is hey, should Facebook and companies like Facebook be able to track you on every single?
Website You go to on the Internet and Apple’s take on this is no they shouldn’t, or at least they shouldn’t unless you explicitly give them permission to do.
So so as an advertiser, some of these retargeting features at the web level and some of the pixel tracking at the conversion level outside of Facebook is not going to work anymore.
My guess is that companies like Facebook and Google they’ll start to find some work arounds to better accumulate.
Data, but here’s the thing.
At the core, nothing really changes.
A lot of this.
Involves your ability to measure success, and I don’t want to underestimate how incredibly important that is as part of a marketing campaign.
I’m not trying to blow this off and say it’s completely irrelevant.
Don’t worry about it because it is really hard to judge a marketing campaign if you don’t know how many people are opening your email.
If you don’t know how many people are clicking the.
Things, but at the end of the day you will know that you send an email and you’ll know if people bought things or not.
My advice is instead of focusing on these changes and wondering how you’re going to survive after they’re made and as they’re being made, focus on the quality of the content.
Are your emails relevant?
Emails should be super super.
Relevant and super targeted now. Unfortunately you used to be able to target emails based on IP address because again you can get a region you can say hey I want to take these 10,000 users that have an IP address in this range because I know they’re going to be in the Northeast.
And we’re selling snow shovels.
And it’s it’s winter in the northeast, and that’s a good target to have.
Unfortunately, that’s not an option anymore.
But on Facebook they know where you are, so I can still make an ad for snow shovels.
I can still target it to people who live in the Northeast, and I could probably tie it to negative weather.
Or if there is an impending storm in the next seven days, these are the things that make Facebook so powerful for advertisers.
And it’s why.
They’ve collected so much money from advertisers is because they do allow you to link.
And target your ads to incredibly specific audiences.
So specific, in fact, that is why Facebook was marred in such controversy regarding the ability of companies like Cambridge Analytics to find out all sorts of things despite them claiming to be private.
When you have these elements where you know someone name, you know their zip code.
You know their address.
You know where they work.
It’s not that hard to put the pieces together and.
You’re out any of the blank holes in that equation, right?
If you know someone address and where they work, you’re probably going to be able to find out their name.
It pretty easy if you know their name and where they work.
You’re probably going to be able to find out their address pretty easy if you have an email address and an employer, you’re probably going to be able to find out someones name and mailing address, so it’s just these these gaps and these.
Little holes are easily filled in when you don’t have any privacy protections with the privacy protections that Apple is providing, it’s going to make those types of things a little bit more challenging, but the core functionality of Facebook advertise.
Raising has not really changed, and especially the fundamental core.
Many users on Facebook are just hitting boost posts and getting their message out to a broad peak.
And again, that’s not the best way to do it, but that is how a lot of people are doing it, and Facebook is getting a lot better about guiding new users, especially as to how.
They can best reach their audience and I think what we’re going to see is a lot more development on Facebook’s end to try to make running ads easier and especially make targeting ads easier because we’ve talked a lot about that on this podcast.
That you really need to be able to define a very specific target if you want to have good success with a low cost of acquisition and you want to have a high conversion rate, the better you can target your audience, the better an ad will do, and this is nothing specific to digital advertising or Facebook.
I mean, this is just.
Advertising and marketing.
In general, the more specific you can be and the better you can reach your target.
Means the less expensive it’s going to be to acquire new customers and the happier those customers are going to be because they’re seeing content that’s relative to them.
You do not want to be a snow shovel company.
Selling snow shovels to people in San Diego, CA.
That would be really really bad and a complete waste of money.
And I know that sounds obvious, but a lot of people will just.
Click Boost and run an ad that just goes wherever they don’t even know and they’re trying to sell. Snow shovels, but yet they’re spending 70% of their marketing budget on places that never ever see snow.
Now Google.
Now Google has taken this a step further and they’ve refined Google local ads and a lot of Google Adwords.
If you’ve ever used Google.
AdWords, it’s actually much more complicated to set up and get going then a Facebook ad is.
Again, it’s incredibly powerful and if you take the time to learn it and you know what you’re doing, you can do incredible things with it.
But on the surface, for someone there is really no equivalent of just hitting boost and getting a Google ad launched out, but Google.
Has worked very hard to make tools that say hey, what are you selling?
Who’s your audience, who and make some really broad statements where they can help narrow your audience down and narrow your target down.
And I think that’s where we’re going to see a lot of this going in the future is.
That Facebook their entire revenue system is based on advertisers buying ads and advertisers will buy ads when they know there’s an audience.
That’s why an ad for the Super Bowl is so expensive because the advertiser knows.
That there are a lot of people watching the Super Bowl, but if the Super Bowl sucked and nobody watched it then they wouldn’t be able to sell ads.
If Facebook can’t connect your add to their users, they are out of biz.
This, and I think you’re going to see that their revenue is not going to take any bit of a hit whatsoever this year, next year, or the year after I’ll go out and say for the next three years their revenue is going to stay flat or go up despite potentially half the country running iOS 15 or later on a new iPhone.
Or new iPhones over the next three years, so I’m going to summarize everything.
We just said one more time to make it really, really simple.
And you can always go back and re listen if there was something that didn’t make.
But in but in iOS 14, Apple introduced transparencies for what marketers can see, including Facebook.
So you have to give Facebook permission to see your GPS to see your IP address, to share your location and to share any other information on your phone that is going to be permission based.
That’s it in iOS 15, there are three new things that you should be aware of. Private relay. This is the thing that conceals your IP address. #2 hide my email.
This allows users to provide a fake one time use email address, and I say one time it’s not really one time use, just a masked email address that protects your real identity, and then the third thing is mail privacy which prohibits mail servers from knowing what you open and what you click and whether you convert.
So that’s really the whole point of this thing.
Those are the three main features in iOS 15 and plus with the permission based marketing that was put into iOS 14, those are really the four things entirely altogether that you need to know about and just be aware of.
It shouldn’t change.
Change significantly how you do your marketing.
You still want to have captive subject lines.
You want to have incentives and good offers.
Great content that’s relevant to the user you’re sending it to and just keep focused on that.
And if you are someone who just hits boost from time to time, now is the perfect time and this is the perfect excuse to sit down.
And think about how can I do this in a way that will be more effective.
So instead of trying to blast a really wide audience and get around all these privacy protections, instead take a little time to focus and get down to the basics and just be more effective at the marketing you do.
And I think you’re also going to find that you’re not going to see your sales.
Go down, you’re not going to see a negative effect on your business because of these rule changes, but.
You can have the opportunity to do better.
Facebook is going to want to help you do better, and if you’re an advertiser, I would not freak out about these things.
I hope you enjoyed today’s episode.
Please like and subscribe if you really want to do me a favor, leave a review.
It means the world to me.
You can always send me an email.
I’m Justin at.
Marketingandservice.com that’s jestyn at marketingandservice.com. You can always join me on the marketing and service.com Facebook page. I love seeing you.
And I love hearing your thoughts and if you have an idea for an episode or there’s something you want to learn a little bit more about, shoot me an email, let me know.
I’ll make an episode just for you.
Thanks so much for listening and I’ll catch you on the next one.