ITP 2.0 and Facebook Advertising

If you are in Facebook Advertiser and you are aware of ITP 2.0, you have the right to be concerned. ITP stands for the Intelligent Tracking Prevention that Apple will be rolling out across all of its devices with the iOS12 update. This new update has a wide impact across all digital marketing. The majority of platforms acted with haste and updated their tracking capabilities to combat this update. Facebook, unfortunately, is slightly behind the curve on this one. ITP 2.0 blocks all Third Party Cookie tracking which is what the Facebook pixel is at its core. This means that you will lose tracking visibility on all of your traffic coming through Safari, which according to GlobalStats is around 14% of all website traffic and around 18% of all mobile traffic.

Luckily, there is good news! Facebook has recently announced that on October 24th they will be releasing a new pixel that will be tracking First Party Cookie tracking. This will resolve the tracking visibility on Safari. You may be thinking, what do we do in the meantime. Well, I have more good news. We have come up with a couple workarounds to combat ITP 2.0 in the meantime and also ways to gain additional insight on the impact it is having on your business.

First, the easiest way you can combat ITP 2.0 is turning on advanced matching on your pixel.

Advanced matching is tracking that is not cookie based. How advanced matching works is whenever a customer inputs user information in a field capture on your site that fires an event it encrypts that user information and sends it back to Facebook to try and match up the information to their database to trigger a conversion.

For example, if John Smith goes to Nike’s website to buy a new pair of shoes and he puts his first name, last name, email, and phone number in the fields in the checkout portion of his purchase, then Facebook takes encrypts that information and sends it back to database to see if there is a match with John’s information and to see if he has seen an ad in the attributable windows. If so, then you will be attributed a purchase. The reason this does not solve the entirety of the solution is because you can only track events associated with users inputting their information and as we know those events are very slim in the user journey.

This makes it so that we lose visibility in other parts of the funnel such as when a user “View Content” or “Add to Cart”. This results in our retargeting efforts not being as powerful especially with DPA ads and it also results in the campaigns having a harder time optimizing. At the same time, it does allow you to see conversions such as lead captures and purchases which is better than nothing until the new pixel is rolled out.

Another workaround that we have found is that you can actually exclude iOS12 mobile device users from your campaigns. This one is a little riskier given the fact that more and more users will opt in the new software in the near future, but it can help combat you muddying your retargeting pools until the new pixel is rolled out. In order to segment out iOS12, you will have to segment by mobile device and then exclude iOS12 in your ad set. Reference screenshot below to see setup:

Lastly, it’s good to see the impact that is having on your Facebook campaigns as a whole. In order to so you are able to check the conversions you are receiving by browser in Facebook Analytics. To do so, follow the instructions in the screenshots laid out below:

You can see from our screenshot, we had a pretty big drop off but the measures I discussed above helped combat it. Hopefully, you are not feeling the impact too much on your campaigns and if you are, hopefully the tactics above will help. The good news is that the new pixel will be here shortly, but these tactics will help you combat the lack of visibility in the meantime.