As you may have heard, Apple is making significant changes to the way music, sports and entertainment companies can use Facebook and Instagram ads. These changes for events, in particular, could mean millions and millions of dollars of lost ticket sales.

Brian Bauer, President of Bauer Entertainment Marketing (BEM), is here to help explain these updates. He will also navigate you through a step-by-step guide to ensure your Facebook and Instagram ads can target the right people and you can properly measure your return on investment.

Apple’s update is going to have a major impact on the way you run your advertising campaigns. These changes allow users to decide how their data is tracked by apps.

Similar to granting an app access to your photos or permission to send you notifications, users will now receive a prompt about “App Tracking Transparency.” This prompt will be visible to Facebook app users on iOS 14 devices, and it will ask them to either allow or deny the app’s ability to track their data. You may think giving people more control over their privacy sounds like a great idea, and there’s some truth to this. However, this choice is going to significantly impact how you can reach people through advertising. Specifically, it creates a problem regarding how Facebook receives and processes conversion events from Facebook’s advertising pixel.

In simple terms, conversion events are actions that occur on your website or mobile app and are most commonly known as purchases. A pixel is a piece of code installed on your website or app that tracks visitor engagement and sends the info back to Facebook.

If your business uses Facebook advertising to optimize, target and report on conversions, it’s very likely that you’re going to start running into problems with your campaigns if you haven’t already.

One of the biggest changes is that you’re now only able to optimize and track conversions through verified website domains. For example, if you’re sending potential customers to a third-party site like Ticketmaster, Eventbrite or other ticketing platforms using a domain you do not own, then your conversions may not track correctly. Unfortunately, the implications here for your business are massive.

Next, real-time reporting will no longer be supported by Facebook. Data may now be delayed up to three days. Also, for web conversion events, statistical modeling may be used to account for conversions from iOS 14 users. With less data available about iOS 14 users, Facebook will use benchmarks and probabilities to estimate conversions. Note that Facebook’s reporting dashboard will indicate when a metric is modeled as opposed to being exact.

Another big change to Facebook Ads reporting is that there will no longer be audience breakdowns. ‍For both web and app conversions, breakdowns such as age, gender, region and placement will no longer be supported.

Lastly, ad attribution settings are now significantly different. Before, you could attribute a conversion event to an ad based on as much as a 28-day click-through and 28-day view-through window. These are no longer available. Rather, the maximum is now seven-day click-through and one-day view-through attribution.

Clearly, there’s quite a bit of change happening. Our team at Bauer Entertainment Marketing has been conducting extensive research ever since Apple first announced this update. Even though we’re at the forefront of this issue, things are still evolving. As we see it now, there are several steps you can take today to make sure your ads maintain proper targeting and tracking.

In part two of this three-part video series, Brian will show you how to verify your domain, plus offer some potential solutions for tracking conversions occurring on third-party ticketing sites. In the meantime, if you have any questions about anything shared so far, please message BEM. 

This article was sponsored by Bauer Entertainment Marketing.