iOS 14: Our Performance Findings
BGR and Flurry Analytics have indicated as little as 3%-4% of iOS users have opted-in to app tracking. This is a staggeringly low percentage, and lower than Facebook predicted.
According to Statistica 47% of people in the US use iPhones, however, across our portfolio of clients, roughly 53% of traffic comes from visitors on iOS.
Due to these facts, we have seen declining results compared to previous time frames on the FB Ads Platform. And they have no doubt been coupled with the attribution window decline YoY.
What the data for our clients show us is ROAS (Return on Ad Spend) in July MTD (month-to-date) is -28.9%. The commonalities between the clients who are experiencing less severe ROAS performance declines is that they are all spending over $40K/month. Which speaks to larger media budgets insulating the impact because they are giving the Facebook Algorithm enough audience liquidity to figure out how to maintain results.
We analyzed cross sections as well:
What industry the customer is in
Price points of their products
% of spend against prospecting vs remarketing
% of prospecting spend against lookalikes vs broad audiences
Types of creative variations at play, etc.
While we were hopeful there were deep similarities in the performance to help thread the analysis together, we didn’t find much. The reality goes back to new privacy practices that are indeed impacting everyone. For those brands who are able to spend more, they will feel fewer effects.
We encourage all brands to focus on looking at Blended ROAS (Total Site Rev/Media Spend) as a KPI going forward to establish benchmarks.
On the bright side:
We have found that Blended ROAS for our clients is consistent MoM
Client topline revenue projections are still being met for their overall business
We are seeing day-over-day improvements in ROAS performance during the month of July
In summary:
Work on paid media channel diversification and look at the whole eCom story, not just the ads platform story.