With only about 12% of users upgraded to iOS 14.5 so far, according to the most recent data from the mobile-measurement service AppsFlyer, it may be too early to estimate the true influence of Apple’s privacy update — overall and on Facebook. And even by May 9, only 15% of developers had rolled out their privacy pop-ups, according to AppsFlyer. Buyers also said that they’re testing out alternative measurement approaches like marketing mix modeling, and multi-touch attribution, which help clients see which marketing channels led people to purchase, respectively. Another technique is measuring the success of a media buy by dividing the total sales resulting from it by its cost, said Shackelford. The digital ad market is complicated with a lot of moving parts but for the purposes of this battle, the key point is that the more that a company that is selling digital ad space knows about the viewers of those spaces, the more ads they will sell.
But also, the walls surrounding the castles of big consumer tech just got taller. The material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used, except with the prior mark zuckerberg clubhouse apple idfa shops written permission of Condé Nast. Join the Ars Orbital Transmission mailing list to get weekly updates delivered to your inbox. The change is expected to come with iOS 14.5 within just a few weeks.
The change will apply to all iPhone and iPad apps, and it will take full effect in iOS 14.5, which is due out sometime in the next few weeks. As it currently stands, anyone that uses the Facebook app is subject to Facebook being able to see what other applications and websites that user visits. This is done with something called an IDFA, which translates to ‘Identifier for Advertisers.’Every iPhone has a unique IDFA code that companies can use to track user activity in other apps and websites. Facebook takes this information, gives it to advertisers so they can generate better targeted ads on Facebook, and Facebook keeps getting money from companies choosing to advertise on the platform. It’s a system that a lot of people see as invasive to their privacy, hence the excitement around iOS soon allowing users to opt-out of this tracking. The clash was related to changes in the latest version of Apple’s iOS, which includes a tracking transparency feature that Facebook claims will cripple its ability to serve up to targeted ads.
Then again, if people already don’t trust Facebook as regular users, trying to convince them to shop for things through the platform could be another challenge in and of itself. Facebook now seems optimistic about Apple’simpending app tracking change in iOS 14, as noted by recent comments from CEO Mark Zuckerberg in a Clubhouse chat. In a future iOS 14 update that’s expected at some point this spring, Apple will roll out a new feature that alerts users when an app tries to track their activity across other apps and websites — the type of data tracking used for advertising. There’s an option to allow tracking like normal, but there’s also an option to deny the request. While this is a huge step forward for user privacy, it hasn’t been taken very well by certain companies. “This is a significant decision proactively made by Facebook to honor users’ privacy consent, but it has widespread impact on data access and reporting across all of Facebook’s advertising products, and markedly to attribution and targeting.”
IOS 16.3 should be publicly released within the next month or so, and it is possible that more features will be added in later beta versions. Apple will make its first product announcement of 2023 through a press release on its website tomorrow, Tuesday, January 17, according to Apple leaker Jon Prosser. MacRumors can corroborate an announcement is expected to take place this week. The announcement could be one of several products expected in the near future, including updated MacBook Pros and Mac mini models. App Tracking Transparency will impact Facebook’s view-through conversion tracking, which lets ad companies determine how many people saw an ad and didn’t click it, but later made a purchase related to the ad. The IDFA allows Facebook to match up those who buy an item with those who saw an ad, but without the IDFA, advertisers will not be able to accurately measure the effectiveness of Facebook and Instagram ads.
Free trading app Robinhood says crypto trading has spiked to 9.5 million customers in the first quarter. That’s up from the 1.7 million customers who traded crypto in the 2020 fourth quarter. The app industry is as hot as ever, with a record218 billion downloads and $143 billion in global consumer spend in 2020. Facebook continues to see a range of challenges to that astounding pace of ad sales growth. Because of opt-out and fragmentation, this is not nearly as big a deal to them as App Tracking Transparency. Their biggest challenge is regulatory — every member of Congress and all EU regulators seem to have a different beef with Facebook.
A few weeks in, the data looks promising from a privacy perspective. It’s hard to put the reaction to one number but the early data suggests that over 85% of users are not allowing apps to track them via the IDFA. It all stems from the Apple’s 2020 Worldwide Developer Conference or WWDC. This is the conference where Apple announces what’s coming next to Apple platforms for developers.