End of SMMA?! iOS14 Update - What It Means!

Ladies and gents, before I say anything else, I'm going to start off with two words. Don't panic. And I'll explain why shortly.

Now this is a highly, highly requested video, and this is a very big topic to cover today. We're not just discussing what iOS 14 means for online marketing agencies like you and me. We're also discussing what this means for the future of digital marketing, as we know it.

And if you stick around until the end of the video, I'm going to be giving you the five things you need to do today to stop this, having an impact on your business. Oh, and if you've been living under a rock for the past few weeks, let me give you a quick preview of what my DMs, my emails and my YouTube comments look like recently, people are panicking and everyone's talking about this change being the end of Facebook, advertising and the digital marketing space, as we know it. And to these people, I say don't panic, but before I reveal just why let's quickly go over what we know, what we think is going to happen.

And when it's going to happen, we see back in June, Apple made a revolutionary announcement. Soon for the first time, they would require apps to ask for permission to track their users. And this isn't actually that unusual for awhile.

Various legislation and policies have meant that companies have to ask for permission for things like location tracking, as well as push notifications. Facebook got angry, really angry. In fact.

They went on an all out offensive against Apple taking out multiple critical full-page adverts in major newspapers like the New York times wall street journal and Washington post, and even released a dedicated website to fight back against this change. But why, why is Facebook so angry about this? A little pop-up notification appearing on I-phones simply because it could destroy their business.

Remember unlike Apple, which makes money from its iPhones, iPads and Macs, app store and streaming services. Facebook has no physical products. They have nothing to sell.

Well, strictly that's not true. Senator, we run ads. They sell you.

Facebook makes tens of billions of dollars every year, selling your data to advertisers and space on their platforms for them to advertise. But the big difference between Facebook and say Twitter, Snapchat, or tick talk is the incredible amount of data. The platform holds on you.

You see, when you use Facebook on your computer or phone, Facebook is able to track the websites you visit and the apps you use, even if you're not using their app. So not only can advertisers serve you adverts across a number of different platforms, it can track important events. Like if you visited their website, registered for an event or bought a product, the reason that they can do this is because when you use Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, you automatically opt into having that data share.

But Apple's tiny change means that for the first time you're going to have to manually opt in. Now here's the question. Will you, well, we actually know the answer to that.

Remember those opt-ins I mentioned earlier location tracking and push notifications. A study that came last year found that globally around two thirds of people opted into push notifications. Good news for Apple.

Right? The only problem is that in the same study, it found that only 7. 7% of people opted in to have their location tracked by apps.

So on the forefront, this looks scary because technically you could extrapolate from this and assume that if people opt out of having their location track, they'll probably also opt out of having their data tracked. So that would mean that 90% of iPhone users will opt out of being tracked. But, and there's a very big, but remember earlier, I told you not to panic.

There's a very big reason why that Facebook, they like money. In fact, Facebook has already sprung into action and has created a series of changes to its advertising network and practices to ensure that we'll remain compliant with Apple's privacy policy. But what will these look like?

First of all, Facebook is introducing something called the aggregated event. Measurement. I'd love to sit here and explain all that that entails, but quite frankly, I don't know.

And Facebook hasn't explained it to us yet. What they have revealed is that there'll be using an algorithm to help measure campaign performance in a way that is consistent with consumer's decision about their data. In other words, they're going can keep tracking your data, but they'll randomize it.

Of course, that doesn't mean that things aren't going to change for us advertisers. In fact, we're about to see a whole host of changes to the advertising work. Some of which to be blunt, aren't very good for advertisers.

First up the 28 day attribution window, and most Facebook will now attribute purchases from the last seven days. So what that means is that if you're anything like my agency and you charge your clients on a Roz basis, which basically means a performance basis, you're going to have to seriously reconsider your pricing model. Next Facebook is limiting the amount of conversion events for each domain by eight.

Now for 99% of marketers, this isn't, and shouldn't be an issue, but for some, they're going to have to make some tricky decisions about which of these events to prioritize. These are inconveniences every single one of these little changes that Facebook introduces is a bit of a headache. And if I'm being honest, I'd rather not deal with them.

But here's the thing about being a marketing professional. It's your job to be aware of these changes and implement them. And look, maybe I'm just not that concerned about these changes because I saw the entire frenzy that went on in 2018, the whole GDPR scare, and everyone worried that this'll be the end of email marketing and Facebook ads and Google ads.

And technically on paper, I consider that to be a much sort of scarier change or legislation put in compared to what Apple has done. I mean, it's really as a blip in comparison to that. And all I can say is that was two, three years ago, and nothing has changed.

Like I'm being honest, really nothing has changed. So you're going to want to take some precautionary measures, which I'm going to outline very shortly. But as I said, I've yet to see a single change that should have us running around like headless chickens for the mountains.

In fact, a lot of these changes actually have me very excited for my prospects as an agency, as well as the performance of my client's ads. And I'll explain that to you in a second. You see, for the past few years, it's almost become too easy to advertise on Facebook.

In the old days of media, where to place an advert, you would have to call up an advertising department and read out your copy word by word, or go through some mega agency. Now anyone can advertise. Facebook has made marketing possible just for giants like Nike and Coca-Cola or for anyone from bald trimmers to your local needs neighborhood pharmacy.

Worse than that. It's also made Facebook a cesspool for low quality advertisers like numb. I'm not going to say it dropshippers.

All of this means that for a professional marketer like myself, someone whose entire business depends on getting clients to pay them a retainer or a performance fee to run ads on their behalf because of the last few years, the flood Gates have opened. And as I said, literally, any knucklehead can run an ad. It's meant that it's been harder to justify the price, and it's been more expensive to get results for our clients.

But with this change, what you're going to see is people like the dropshippers people like the mom and pop shop, who just filling up a Facebook ad, they're going to get weeded out. But the people like you and I who run marketing agencies, whether that means that we're delivering the results ourselves, or we have a contractor or a team to deliver the results for our clients. That means that for us, we're going to have less competition.

We're going to have less dumb money flowing into Facebook. Our ad costs are going to come down and the aloof of working with an agency will return to what it used to be back in the old media buying days. We're also going to see a return to the real art form of advertising by this.

I mean, good old fashioned direct response advertising, unlike any lazy marketers who rely on targeting retargeting and funnels the agencies who still understand how to properly combine images, copy compelling offers are going to be the ones who prosper after this change and my own agency, IAG media. We actually have an in-house copywriter for this very purpose, but no, yes. As I promised earlier in this video, if you want to succeed through this time, there are a few changes that you're going to have to implement some come directly from Facebook's advice and some come directly from myself, Danny Lewis and the rest of the team at my advertising agency.

And kind of what advice we can give to you that you only get when you have the level of experience that we do. Now, I'm actually going to go ahead and leave a link in the bio below to a blog post outlining all of this. So don't worry about taking notes.

You can go ahead and click on that and get a more in-depth version. Step number one, verify your domain. I mean, you should have done this already, but it really doesn't take long and can be done by altering your TXT records or uploading an HTML file to your website.

So step number two is, go ahead and, and prioritize the vents that are most important to you. Because remember from now on, you only get eight of them. Step number three is, go ahead and make sure you review your reporting because remember only the high end events are going to be reported and your attribution window is to be significantly shortened.

Step number four, if you are trying to understand in greater detail where your customers are coming from, then I strongly recommend you consider installing a post-purchase survey. Step number five is, go ahead and integrate Facebook's conversion API. This is super easy to do for most prebuilt e-commerce platforms like Shopify.

Then the last bonus step is, as I said, don't panic. This is a big change, but F as a marketer, as we adapt to the times as always, not only will you survive, but you'll actually thrive and come out on top for some of the reasons I listed earlier in this video. Now here's a message.

That's a little bit more specific to the green and see students we'll be releasing everything we know about the changes. We already have some Ninja work rounds. As I said, when you've been in this business long enough and work with the Sora clients that we work with, you get to collect some very serious insider knowledge that isn't available to the rest of the people.

So, as I said, for everyone in GrowYourAgency, we're going to be offering this to you andupdating our programs accordingly. Also, we're going to be offering extra support to actually help you implement some of this, especially for our copy paste agency members. So for all the CPA students, you know that on the Wednesday call, you know, we go for anywhere from an hour and a half to four hours, but obviously there's that call on Sunday.

That's a little bit more ad related and funnel related. So Danny and Luis have already been implementing a ton of stuff with our clients and we're already ready for further changes. So, as I said, he'll be working on a more intimate and one-on-one basis with our copy paste agency students helping you set this up yourself.

So apart from the Wednesday, call with me, make sure you go to the Sunday call with Danny. As I said, that runs anywhere from 90 minutes to four hours sometimes. And to the wider digital marketing community, go ahead and drop any advice you have below any changes that you're implementing in order to prepare for this.

And as always, that brings it to the end of this video. I hope you guys enjoy this one. Go ahead and smash the like button.

If you like these sorts of videos, obviously this takes me a long, long time to prepare, you know, this isn't one of my Q and A's where I can just hit record and go, because I want to make sure that I'm getting as much information to you and packing it in the most poignant way possible. So I spent a lot, a lot of time sort of preparing these videos. So if you could drop a like button that really, I guess, motivates me to do it because it's really takes out a lot of time out of my day from focusing on the tasks for the main businesses.

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So I hope you guys all enjoyed this video. I'll catch you in the next one.