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Apple’s new privacy controls are having such a marked effect on Facebook advertising that even a former employee of the social-media giant is questioning whether it’s worth continuing to advertise through the platform.
Tatenda Musapatike, who was a Facebook client manager before starting the Voter Formation Project, said engagement and conversions from her new company’s ad campaigns deteriorated so much in the third quarter that she had to investigate.
« We know that privacy changes affected online advertising broadly, » Musapatike said. « Something still seemed off. »
Her findings, published in a recent report, suggest that Apple’s recent privacy crackdown is disrupting Facebook’s advertising business more than expected. The new rules force apps on Apple devices to ask permission before tracking users’ activity across other apps and websites. Most Apple users so far have chosen to opt-out of tracking, leaving many apps and advertisers without valuable data used for ad targeting, measurement, and attribution — the lifeblood of app-marketing campaigns.
This is already causing problems for Snapchat and Facebook. Both have aknowledged so publicly and a Facebook, or Meta, spokesperson admitted ad targeting has gotten « harder » with Apple’s changes. « We’re working hard to help our advertisers reach their customers, improve business outcomes, and deliver conversions, » the spokesperson added. But so far, Facebook’s bottom line has been less affected by the new difficulties, according to its most recent financial disclosure. That could change if more advertisers see the kind of results Musapatike is experiencing.
Before state elections this year, VFP ran two voter « mobilization » campaigns largely on mobile, targeting Latina women in Texas and Black men in Virginia. The ad targeting and delivery was purchased through Facebook. The company spent more than $300,000 with Facebook on different types of ad programs, including lead generation and conversion. The first is meant to generate interest that can create an inbound user in the future. The second tries to get a person to take an action immediately, like making a purchase or registering to vote on a separate site.
Compared with the same period in 2020, when VFP ran similar campaigns, the company saw impressions on iOS devices from its Facebook conversion campaigns drop to 36% from over 64%.
Musapatike shifted spending to other types of campaigns and was able to reach about 1 million people overall. But getting people to convert, or take an action, became prohibitively expensive. Each conversion ended up costing $424, an exponential increase from the previous year, according to VFP’s report. A more normal cost per conversion was about $100, according to Musapatike.
« This year we ran multiple Facebook campaign objectives (Reach, Video Views, Conversions, and Lead Gen) to the same group of audiences, giving us a baseline to compare delivery by device type across different objectives, » VFP said in its report.
« Apple’s privacy framework has caused Facebook’s ad delivery algorithm to suppress conversion campaign delivery to iOS devices, » the report concluded.
VFP investigated where Facebook delivered its conversion ads and found that 20% of non-iOS devices were reached, compared with just 6% of iOS devices.
Given the change in reliability of Facebook ads, VFP is rethinking how to approach advertising next year. It’s considering other platforms, even if that means less traffic to its own websites. TikTok and even Pinterest are options.
« Abandoning conversions altogether isn’t the right approach, » VFP said in its report, « but we can no longer rely on Facebook conversion campaigns to drive them at scale. »
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