Apple made accessing a devices IDFA (device fingerprint) a permissioned resource. Needless to say it is not a popular permission to grant.
Cross-app activity can't be tracked without this permission. So if you see an ad for a product on facebook, then you pop over to Safari, search for the product, and purchase it, facebook can't attribute that sale to that ad.
The consequence of this is that goal attribution (like sales) for ads is harder, so FBs models can't learn as well who would be interested in the products. You'll see less relevant ads and companies' cost of customer acquisition will go up.
It's easy to imagine a world with less effective ad targeting since most media doesn't have effective targeting. Think pharmaceutical commercials on TV.
My own bias: I run a niche D2C brand whose business model got wrecked by this change!
Facebook has never been able to track the user that pops over to Safari to do the final sale. Even before IDFA went away since that is not sent with requests made in Safari.
Apple disallowed third party cookies (like all other browsers) so now your website with Facebook embedded can only tell Facebook "I got a visitor" and Facebook has no data on who that user is (since they look to be logged out). Before third-party cookie blocking was a thing, Facebook could track users if they were logged in on the web, and thus could potentially attribute the sale to an ad that was shown in Facebook itself.
If the user clicked the link in Facebook for your ad, then popped over to Safari by clicking the "open in Safari" button then Facebook can continue to track that because they saw the final click and can add query parameters on the other end that you can send to Facebook upon checkout completion.
What Facebook can't track now is when a user installs Candy Crush, Quit Smoking app, and Instagram... thereby limiting what ads it can show a user in Instagram to just the behavioral data they get from Instagram, instead of knowing the user also has Candy Crush and a Quick Smoking app (and thus would likely be interested in quick games and cessation of smoking stuff).
FWIW I run a D2C brand and the iOS 14 change hurt badly.
We are able to attribute something like half of the sales we used to. The main consequence of this is the FB models can't learn who our customers are as well, resulting in an increase in our cost of customer acquisition.
Similar position here, although we recently launched a new product that so far is only advertised through Facebook. Based on that we believe Facebook can only attribute 40-50% of conversion events.
Facebook is going to have to do something drastic to improve this situation, I suspect they are going to push advertisers to fold their store/checkout into Facebook so a customer never leaves the app. It will be the only way to track all conversion events.
lol Apple knew damn well what would happen. They are a business. This was a good business move for them. Being able to advertise it as privacy just boosted it to a fantastic business move.
It goes hand in hand. First, if you can’t measure conversions and tie them back to advertising, then how can you know if it’s effective?
Second, if you can’t measure effectiveness how to A/B test your approach? Finally, without labeled data how you train ML models?
> First, if you can’t measure conversions and tie them back to advertising, then how can you know if it’s effective?
I don't think Coca Cola needed attribution to know their ads were effective in 1900, maybe we should ask them?
> Second, if you can’t measure effectiveness how to A/B test your approach?
You can still use either time, geographical or UA-based AB testing without requiring attribution
> Finally, without labeled data how you train ML models?
Are you saying the final objective of tracking is actually to feed AGI as most data about our world as possible? That's an interesting point of view, I never thought about ML modeling as an end-goal.
However, I do think your points are moot, and my real understanding of targetted advertisement is that attribution is required only to steal the attention of the people paying for the ads, because unique attributions means you can send new numbers every single day, or even make a new mail at every conversion.
So in my understanding, losing attribution only reduces ad buyer's attention, but it doesn't actually decrease effectiveness.
Edit: But I totally agree that I have a very poor understanding of advertisement, so I'm genuinely interested in hearing more
In the advertising world, there are roughly speaking two major objectives:
- Creative: also known as "brand awareness". Keep the given brand top-of-mind for as many prospects as possible. The hope is that they will then choose products under the given brand at some future opportunity. This is the type of advertising that Coke ads are. They aren't attempting to get you to buy a Coke right now; they are trying to brand "buy coke, it makes you happy" on your brain.
- Directional. These ads are trying to get you to do something as soon as possible. One obvious example is the annoying "you just looked at this thing, still want to buy it?" ads that follow us all around online. Presumably these ads are somewhat effective, otherwise they wouldn't exist.
From this perspective, removing attribution barely effects creative advertising. On the other hand, it is obviously quite destructive for directional ads. Whether this is a good thing is arguable; I personally find the desired objective of "creative" advertising to be more disturbing.
I think the argument is that _you_ are not engaging in good faith, as you are assuming that the _views of the modern advertiser_ somehow appear on anyones list of things to even consider.
The individual you are replying to is giving you good indications that all the things you are worrying about _are not necessary_ for you to do your job. They're a crutch. Go back to the fundamentals.
I don't agree with you that ruhdgjns is not engaging in good faith. He's engaging with my comment. Given that I am a D2C business owner and therefore a modern advertiser, that's a pretty reasonable view for him to consider.
Re: "go back to fundamentals" and "not necessary", I wish it were so simple. In my comment I mention that it makes selling niche products much harder, which is absolutely the case. Some businesses just can't exist without good targeting. Maybe we as a society don't want those businesses to exist, and that's fine, but it's not as simple of a matter of these businesses needing to be better at advertising. With good targeting a business can exist that only has a small subset of customers in the world. A business like this likely can't afford to acquire customers via traditional advertising.
This makes many D2C businesses much harder and a subset of those businesses won't be able to succeed at all in this climate. Again, I'm not passing any judgement on whether that's a good thing or a bad thing for society, just that it is the case. Good targeting is absolutely necessary for some businesses.
Couldn't you advertise or sponsor user groups, forums, clubs etc? Niche brands are not a thing of this century alone. I think there's other ways to reach your audience without having to use targeted ads on generic sites and apps.
Also don't forget that ads are being minimised as a phenomenon by users, not just by Apple. In Europe tech sites are already seeing more than 50% of visitors blocking ads. Most quote pervasive tracking as the reason.
In many ways Apple is following the trend, not leading it, and trying to take away the reason for user objections to ads.
> niche brands are not a thing of this century alone
Sure, but targeting ads enabled a massive increase in volume of niche brands.
In particular, brands whose target customer is fairly specific (so totally untargeted ads, like TV commercials, magazine ads, etc, wouldn't have positive ROI) and whose product isn't already known to the customer (if it were known, then content marketing/SEO could work).
> Couldn't you advertise or sponsor user groups, forums, clubs, etc
Yes, just like before. However targeting ads dramatically expanded the audience and effectiveness of marketing spend. Finding the right clubs/groups and figuring out how to advertise to what are probably unique groups is hard. Flipping a switch on a FB campaign is easy. And not everyone is in a club, but just about everyone has a FB account.
> Also don't forget..
I'm not saying anything about who is leading or whether it is good or bad, just that the iOS14 change was like taking a sledgehammer to many businesses like mine.
Prior to the change we had tried a handful of sales channels and only found positive ROI in FB ads. And those FB ads experienced a step change w/ the iOS14 release. Judging from the D2C/PPC communities I'm a part of, my experience was not unique.
Like it or not, FB targeting enabled a certain category of businesses to exist, and now that category is reduced. As I said in another comment, this isn't a judgement about whether we as a society are better or worse off, just that this is the cost of that decision.
It’s actually a custom form (not canned) and we had previously had an additional field for area of interest but it lowered the conversion rate of the form so we dropped it.
Getting emails is more important to our business than knowing where folks want to see. We also don’t want folks to have the expectation that we’ll make a map because they requested it. Each map takes a lot of work and in our experience requesters rarely become purchasers.
(Also, we see the page you submitted your email on, which is often a search query that was not successful, which tells us what you were looking for!)
That step could certainly be its own post of greater length than this one.
For this particular map it involves separate curve adjustment layers for the water and land. We generally increase the steepness of the curve (increasing contrast) and then adjust individual color channels to get the color balance right. We also do some localized burning (darkening) in areas where pushing the curve resulted in some pixels getting too bright.
I’d love to put together a post with lots of pictures and details about how we do this. It is motivating knowing there is an audience for it.
Thanks for the explanation! When I read the article, I felt the last step is much more complex than it is said. It seems like you confirmed this point.
I will be very excited to see a post on how these aesthetic improvements are made!
We sell wall art. You likely don't look at a painting by your favorite artist and say "This is overpriced. I bet the canvas and paint only cost $10."
Also, Ramble Maps is a business. We have material costs, shipping costs, advertising costs, rent. We accept returns (and pay for return shipping), spend time making maps, answering emails, and writing posts like this.
And finally, can you let me know where you can get those materials? Those prices are far better than what we pay!
Yeah, no disrespect, I understand you're a business. For example, someone with a little bit of knowledge of GIS and some google skills could create an image of GMTED2010 data and upload it to a printing service for around $260 for a 30"x40". Those with access to printers could do it for about 1/2 that with the right sublimation gear or large format inkjets. I was comparing your 30x45 with 30x40 prints I do of my own works. Granted it's not flyover LiDAR, its space art, but still. I'm not your target customer, but I do wish you the best.
> Realistically, what they are doing is making full resolution prints on commercially available large-format photograph printers, with their effort going into tweaking the shaded relief algorithms and applying photoshop filters to boost local contrast.
Yes, exactly this.
> Marketing copy exaggerates a bit, film at 11.
And yes, also this, ha. We sell wall art, so the article is intended to convey that for something you look at on a wall, we're running up against the limits of what a human can see, with normal vision, at any reasonable viewing distance. It is absolutely true that someone with good vision, the right light, and a magnifying glass could probably see some dots, but that's not typically how wall art is viewed, which is what we design for.
You should probably fix that, because lying about your product in order to get people to buy it is fraud. Even if you don't care about the ethical issues, it could have negative repercussions for you in the future. It looks like it's good enough that people would buy it even if you didn't lie about it, so I think you should capitalize on that. (Maybe you disagree? People who notice the lie will think you don't think it's good enough to sell without lying about it, and they'll wonder what else you're lying about.)
Also 300 dpi is coarse enough that, despite my aging vision, I wouldn't need a magnifying glass or particularly good light to see the jaggies from 300 mm, and I think that is a reasonable viewing distance for wall art. 300 dpi is definitely not a "gold standard" for coffee-table books or wall art. Someone with good vision, the right light, and a magnifying glass can see features at 2400 dpi, 64 times the number of pixels you're using. Why do you think Linotype made 2450 dpi the Linotronic resolution 35 years ago? Perhaps you think they didn't have any experience with printing?
It's a question we often get, but not a product we're looking to pursue. I think it would be prohibitively expensive to do it right and I'm not confident there's a big enough market for it.
I assume you're referring to the azimuth we place the sun for the hillshade? If so, it varies, though it is almost always coming from the top, generally from the upper left.
Exactly where it is coming from depends on the terrain, we'll move it around within a 45 degree window around 337.5 and see what makes the particular landscape look best.
Cross-app activity can't be tracked without this permission. So if you see an ad for a product on facebook, then you pop over to Safari, search for the product, and purchase it, facebook can't attribute that sale to that ad.
The consequence of this is that goal attribution (like sales) for ads is harder, so FBs models can't learn as well who would be interested in the products. You'll see less relevant ads and companies' cost of customer acquisition will go up.
It's easy to imagine a world with less effective ad targeting since most media doesn't have effective targeting. Think pharmaceutical commercials on TV.
My own bias: I run a niche D2C brand whose business model got wrecked by this change!