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iOS 14 Updates Killed My Facebook Ads Since they came in a couple of months ago, iOS 14 updates killed my facebook ads. Shot in early May 2021, this YouTube and matching blogpost goes over the latest Facebook Ads update for iOS 14. I'm writing this post in early July and wow, things are still messed up (for me and many others, at least). Following this update, all Apple users will now be prompted by their device to opt into or out of data collection for each app they use. If permission is denied, apps will have reduced ability to track site and app behaviour via their pixels. Facebook has made changes to pixel implementation and event tracking in order to minimise the amount of data that will be lost. This is referred to as ‘Aggregated Event Management’ and has affected all marketers who use Facebook ads. That all sounds a bit complicated... Yeah, it is. Let's talk about it in layman's terms. How did it affect me and my Facebook ads / Shopify when the updates happened? And, what does this mean for the average marketer and what do we do about it? Over here, Facebook ads were ticking along nicely in April. I wasn't putting 100% effort into Shopify as I was working on other things, but income thru the 23rd was pretty constant : Apart from 3 random 'lower' days on 10/11/12, numbers were pretty much averaging out at about $1k a day. Then, once we hit April 24th, in comes the strange. Bear in mind I kept adspend around the same on all of these days. And look at the difference day by day. Up. Down. Up. Down. I started to get a sinking feeling in my guts. Without rhyme or reason - things totally changed overnight for me with this latest update. On the 29th I didn't even break $100 in sales. Utterly pathetic. Yep. You could say that iOS 14 updates killed my ads. Next month didn't get any better : Thru May it was getting super hard to break $500 a day most of the time. Stats were all over the place. CPM, CTR, CPC, ROAS... everything was being random for no reason. I was killing campaigns left and right as ROAS dropped below the point where it would be profitable. Some of these campaigns I'd had running successfully for 4, 5, and even 6 months. Everything started to die and it wasn't very nice. Furthermore, huge 'holes' started appearing in ads manager reporting. Big chunks of metrics went missing so you couldn't really judge ads properly, or even see what was going on. Then, they'd reappear again. And vanish again. I couldn't get a handle on what was going on at all. With all this going on I ended up scaling right back on ads. What was the point in making new campaigns and spending money for no return? June bombed. Hard. A few months previously I was making this per week, not per month. And you can see how up and down sales were. Ok my adspend was a lot lower, hence a lower amount of sales. But every time I tried to push things up I'd lose money. Some days would kind of work, then on others it was like tumbleweeds. I'll leave it to Gary to tell you how I was feeling by this point : So that's pretty much where I am now with my ads right now going into July 2021. I've temporarily scaled things right back and am working on other projects in the meantime. My YouTube channel, updates to my print on demand course, my blog, I also sell solo ads, am getting into affiliate marketing, crypto, and the list goes on. There's always something for me to do :) To wrap this one up, I'll also say that a lot of other people I've spoken to are also having issues. It's not just me. Over on my private Facebook group, the moaning has been palpable :D This is just another example of holding firm for a little while. I'm sure Facebook ads will 'right itself' before long. I've been doing ecom for coming up to 7 years now and every year without fail there are always 2-3 occasions like this. Before long things will improve OR someone will come out with some new method(s) of doing ads to get around all of this. Sit tight people, my next post is coming soon! In the meantime, check out the YouTube that matches this blog post if you haven't already. Other parts in this series : Part 1 - Part 2 - Part 3 - Part 4 - Part 5 - Part 6 - Part 7 Part 8 - Part 9 - Part 10 - Part 11 - Part 12 - Part 13