One battle that Facebook has been unable to win is convincing users that their data tracking practices help businesses or users alike. It should come as no surprise since both Facebook and companies have been abusing this unrestricted access to user data to the point of alienating users away from the platform and turning against advertisers.
With the arrival of iOS 14.5, Apple is handing back users control over their privacy, up to a certain extent. Users get to decide if they want Facebook to track them outside of their platform in other apps, and if you want to find out what the opt-in rates have been amongst iPhone users since tune in, you probably won’t be surprised.
While the impact of iOS 14.5 is limited to Apple users, its rollout is initiating an era that users are speaking out and putting privacy ahead of convenience. However, the question that is yet to be answered for how long will it last? Join our conversation as we explore how to navigate law firms’ Facebook advertising under the new fourteen-point five-era.
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Liel: [00:00:00] Until now, apps such as Facebook have been able to rely on Apple’s identifier for advertisers to track users for targeting and advertising purposes with the launch of iOS fourteen point five mobile apps, mobile apps now have to ask users for permission to gather tracking data. I’m Liel Levy, co-founder of Nanato Media and this is In Camera podcast, and we’re coming to the rescue of the one hundred and eighty five billion dollars from the mobile advertising industry. Welcome to In Camera podcast, Private Legal Marketing Conversations, Grace. Welcome back.
Grace: [00:01:04] How are you, Liel?
Liel: [00:01:06] I’m good, Grace. I’m going to be very honest with you. I was happier when we were able to record this just side by side and now we’re back. Each one at our own place at our own set up where we record our podcast every week. But you know what? I’m grateful, no matter what, the fact that we get to have this conversation is always good news to me.
Grace: [00:01:26] Same, I was excited to be in person. Unfortunately, we got to go back to reality. But it was definitely enjoyable to finally be in person after such a long time,
Liel: [00:01:37] Such a good expression that you say going back to reality because it’s kind of really felt like a dream, right? A little bit like everything, the surroundings, being able to tell from the sudden be again in an environment where you could just meet up with people that, you know, meet new people. It was just a really nice kind of escape, a little bit of what life has become for the past year or such. And even during regular circumstances. Like all of these conventions. One of the nice things that it has is that they do kind of create these magical moments where you just get to have conversations and experiences and interactions with people that just don’t occur on a regular course of business days. Right. It is just very unique for those moments, these regarding whether they’re happening at the end of a pandemic or they’re happening on any other year. They’re always fun.
Grace: [00:02:30] Yeah. And Google even calls them micro-moments. Right. And so I feel like that’s kind of what happened. This became a microbubble rather than just a moment, because over a course of X number of days. But, yeah, it definitely felt like a bubble of outside of what is happening outside of the world. We all got to hang out in our little bubble of NTL. And this is what’s going on here.
Liel: [00:02:53] Yeah, absolutely. And so now outside of the bubble, right. It’s getting caught up. It’s always a challenge coming back after almost a week and just getting caught up on what was left fending for before the convention. And another great thing to deal with is actually following up, right with all of those meetings and appointments that were set up during the actual conventions. So that’s another nice thing to look forward to. But at the same time, it’s just work. So I think it’s fair to say that both you and I have been pretty busy this week. Right.
Grace: [00:03:30] So busy.
Liel: [00:03:32] And the next one is pretty much looking the same. But Grace, you know, we always said it’s a great thing to have in a good problem to solve. So, Grace, let’s have a conversation today about one of the changes that we’ve been talking about for the last few months. We’ve been seeing it coming, but really it became to the full friction, if you may, very recently, which was the implementation of iOS fourteen point five, which is the dreaded update from Apple on their iPhone devices that really comes to completely disrupt the Facebook ads model. And so Grace just for those who are hearing or listening about these for the first time. Let me try to explain in the most simple terms that I can possibly come up with. Why is that happening? So what iOS fourteen point five does is it allows users to opt-out from app data tracking. So what does app data tracking means? Well, it means that users are telling Apple to share less information with. In this particular case, Facebook. So Facebook gets less chances of creating a behavioral profile of you. And obviously this will limit Facebook in being able to allow advertisers to target you. And obviously, that is a big problem for Facebook, because one of the things that Facebook has strived big time over the past few years is by giving advertisers access to its entire network in a very granular segmentation manner. You could very well target people based out of user behavior, interest and so forth and so on. And now with this new privacy policy or preferences that Apple is giving there, it’s allowing users to make and decide on themselves. Facebook is just being put upon a situation where it’s very limited now in the type of targeting and segmentation that it offers. Right. Just to name a few of the limitations. And that is, in a nutshell, what these have vcost.
Grace: [00:05:58] I think with all the different changes happening, as you mentioned, Facebook and iOS, I think you covered the initial basis of what our conversations going to be about, right?
Liel: [00:06:11] Exactly. So this impacts, obviously, law firms, marketing campaigns on many levels. One of the initial issues here is going to be doing the reporting, the way that you can measure sure click-through rate, view-through rate, and in general user attributions. So. Instead of having a 20-day historical data that we had, we were now going to have one-day to seven-day windows. Any legacy campaigns that you’ve had or historical data from previous campaigns that have already ended will still be there available for you. And the important thing there is that you can actually use that then to have a benchmark as to what to expect for your future campaigns. That’s really important. So keeping in mind that the data, keeping it available, and understanding it’s going to become very beneficial for those who have kept good on the lyrics of their Facebook ads performance for forecasting performance on their upcoming campaigns. Now, Grace, I think some of the issues that are a little bit that’s a little bit more technical and some people may see it or not as a disadvantage, but I think the more challenging issues are going to be specifically the targeting ones, because since right now we’re going to be very limited to target users based out of behavior. It’s going to have to be more based out of actual demographical segmentation. And that is going to put law firms back into place where they’re going to have to have a very clear understanding of who their buyer persona is. What do you think?
Grace: [00:07:53] Yeah, that’s actually exactly what we came across as we were talking before we started the podcast. I’ve been looking at this for a while. And honestly, you and I both kind of know the ones that are already interested in what you have to provide are a lot easier to get a hold of than somebody that is you’re targeting as part of an ad external to what you’re doing. So I’ve kind of always geared it that way. But I agree with you. I mean, it’s that’s weird to me where the issues are going to Lai’s when you’re trying to target people based on demographics. If you don’t know who your customer is, who your avatar, whatever you want to call them. Right. Because they have all these terms for who your customer is. If you don’t have a very clear idea as to who they are, you really need to get that and listen to go listen to some of our previous podcasts and just get an idea of how you can get to that point. I don’t know. What do you think about that?
Liel: [00:08:51] Yeah, totally, I mean, it’s going to be pretty much fundamental for the success of your campaigns to be able to do segmentation in a way that you are targeting more based out of your by your persona is going to be for your law firm looking at things like their age group, their interests and those sort of characteristics, things that are a little bit more descriptive of their persona as a whole, rather than by trying to target interests based out of places that they have visited on the Web. And that’s really going to be a challenge for many law firms. Now, there is the other issue, Grace, here, which is the use of pixel. So Pixel is just going to be a little bit more limited, what you can do with it, but you can actually still use it. And we’re just going to have to, as a whole, become a little bit more strategic as to which actions and what are we trying to target with pixels. So, of course, it’s always been recommended to have one pixel upside, not to create conflicts. But I think just it’s going to be a matter of being more strategic in terms of what are you targeting. Now, Grace, I know you’ve had recently a conversation about a campaign that you were running, particularly, I believe it was your videos, your social videos. And what is it that your guys are doing in terms of circumventing these new limitations, these issues?
Grace: [00:10:27] So we’re you know, we tend to throw a lot out to external right to, like you said, behavioral rather than demographic necessarily, because we find that that usually works the best in terms of our ads to people that don’t already know us on our website or that came from the Facebook page, rather. So what we’ve been doing for our social stack ads is, again, one, targeting the behaviors rather than demographics and to really shifting as much as we can to the people that have either already visited our page or like their page or something having to do with our Facebook page and seems to have mitigated some of the issues with the, you know, the updates that have been made.
Liel: [00:11:14] Right. Because that’s within the data that you can actually target. Right. What it becomes challenging is when you’re trying to target users based on actions or sites or behavior that they’ve completed outside of the Facebook platform and that it’s not related to your actual brand. And that’s what a lot of advertisers have been doing and being able to leverage in order to access particular user types or personas now that it’s being way more limited like the segmentation is way more limited than it was before. This can be very challenging. And you can actually turn out to be also very, very inefficient. Right. You can end up realizing that you’re actually targeting the wrong type of user. So that’s why the historical data is going to be very important here, to be able to see which audiences have performed best and try to look not just at the performance of your Facebook campaigns, but actually at the clients that you’ve generated through your Facebook campaigns. If you can pinpoint them out to that level, which you should be able to do so to try to build your local audience based on data on that already existing data that you have. So it’s going to be a little bit more manual, Grace. It’s going to be a lot of testing, trial and error at this stage. I still think Facebook is going to be a very powerful platform. I just think what we need to realize here is that it’s changing to a more linear mode in which you advertise there. You can no longer build on tracking as much as we were before. But the reality is that this same trend is going to continue. I can share I was actually looking at an article yesterday that was measuring the opt-in rates for Facebook’s tracking, and they are extremely low.
Liel: [00:13:11] Right. So since the rollout of iOS fourteen point five, users are not allowing Facebook to track them outside of their platform in all their apps. Right. So I believe the opt-in rate was around five to six percent. Now, that’s really, really dramatic. And what this is telling us is that the users have spoken out. They don’t want Facebook to access their data. And what I think we’re going to see here is that ultimately advertisers are just going to have to up their game. What’s going to happen here? Is that potentially better advertising. We’re going to start seeing in these platforms so you can really capture the attention of users, and that’s a good thing, Grace. That’s a good thing. I think a lot of us feel and have felt for a long time that Facebook was really, really becoming a very spammy platform with the type that ads that they were showing. And we’re not just talking here about the advertisers themselves and the products or the services that they were selling. It was just the actual quality of the ads themselves. There were very mediocre and they were not actually there was not a lot of effort being put into them. So I think this one’s going to, this set of changes will actually have an impact in that. And we’re going to see now that advertisers, in the interest of actually being relevant and getting the attention of users and standing out, will actually very likely going to improve as a whole the quality of the material that they’re putting for as they’re promoted content ads in the platform. What do you think about that Grace?
Grace: [00:14:55] Yeah, no, I mean, you know, they have with Google, they have the quality score, right, for the ads in Facebook, they didn’t really have that before. So I feel like they may be just trying to make sure less people are able to see things that they don’t want to see. And that’s what all of this is kind of happened in the way that they’ve done it. Right. I mean, Google’s done it where that they qualify your score on the ad. They don’t show it to certain people. If it doesn’t, you know, you know that kind of style. Whereas I feel like Facebook has done it kind of in a different way. But the same goal, right, where they’re not trying to serve up ads to people who don’t want to see it.
Liel: [00:15:38] Just a very good point that you bring up there. I think Google has been a little bit more proactive in letting you know where you could do better with your ads and give you some more specific feedback and tell you do this, change that. Facebook has its own way as well of giving, but it’s a little bit more like its algorithm is a little bit more kind of a behind-the-scenes unknown thing. And so we know, obviously, that it will favor content, that it already sees that it’s performing well over content that it’s not. But at the same time, there is a lot of opportunity in people’s scrolling. And so your ad will potentially be seen at some point or another. Now, how quickly can you get seen or not will depend on that, on how it has performed with other users. And Facebook will take that into consideration. But you don’t necessarily know whether your ad can be better or not. I think right now people are just going to see that if they want to continue seeing results in Facebook particularly, they’re all just going to have to up their game as a whole, Grace. So that’s one of the, and very, very important here for us to remember that every time that we’re talking Facebook, Instagram is exactly the same thing, because obviously Instagram is part of Facebook ads and it’s the same ecosystem. So you need to keep that in mind that exactly the same impact is being had on your Facebook strategy,that has your Facebook ads will affect your Instagram ads. Grace, if we were to have to break this down into particular takeaways for this exact issue, since you’re just gone through it, what are some things that you think we could be doing here?
Grace: [00:17:35] So, I mean, first and foremost, if you don’t have your customer clearly defined, you need to go look at your analytics and Facebook and historical data, just like you said at the beginning of this whole thing. Pay attention to that, because it’s going to shift and it’s going to shift significantly, particularly if you’ve only been doing it demographically without any thought to the behaviors because that is to me, that’s the biggest shift. Everything is shifting towards behaviors. Right. So if you don’t know how your clients behave when they get to you or they get to your Facebook page, you’re going to lose out significantly and you’re going to be potentially spending money on ads that don’t work or nobody sees
Liel: [00:18:20] Definitely understand how to build your audience, understand the limitations in which you now have to build those audiences, understand that you’re very limited in the types of behaviors that you can actually follow, but make sure that you leverage whatever data you already have from your audience and build your campaigns as much as possible. As Grace said here, tracking and targeting behavior from reading the platform, from Facebook itself, from engagements that you’ve actually had on the platform itself that will allow you to then be effective in the way that you’re running your campaigns. I think, Grace is one of the things that Facebook will never stop being a good platform for is brand awareness. And, you know, when you’re a law firm and you’re trying to build up your brand, you know very well already from the get-go who is more likely to be a suitable client for you. So you may know their age group. You may know where they live. You may know other things, such as what would be most likely their profession or their income level or whether they’re single or married. Right. Or it’s a lot of qualifiers here that you can still target based on the data that Facebook already has from within its actual platform.
Liel: [00:19:46] And so that’s great right. Now. That’s a fantastic starting point. That’s why we say the buyer persona is such a good place to start targeting. Now, you can always start from there. And then as you’re starting to gather your internal data from Facebook, then start using that in order to be able to build lookalike audiences based on the results that you’re seeing from your first campaigns. Grace, just to give it a put it as an example. Right. Start running your campaign. And then after thirty days, if you’re seeing that people are interacting and engaging with your campaign, then build a look-alike audience of the people who are already interacting with your campaigns. Right. And so that will help you maybe find more people that you did not include or you missed out on your initial strategy. And again, I mean, depending on what are your calls to action, you can actually further narrow it down. Don’t just leave it in an engagement. Track people who are actually converting. And if you actually have a pixel, you can actually track and create audiences based out of people who actually convert it on your website, on your landing page. So therefore, giving you more opportunities to narrowing down your audience, right. And then don’t just leave it there, then just take month number three and retarget all of those people who have already engaged with your ads inside Facebook as a platform or on your landing page or website where you actually have a pixel and run a slightly different campaign, where you actually asking them to convert either by initiating a chat, by a phone call or by actually a form submission directly from Facebook platform.
Liel: [00:21:31] So. Facebook continues to be a very powerful platform, and it’s just a matter of how you’re building your campaigns and also how are you segmenting them and what are you doing with your audience after it’s been created that first time? So great. I think my takeaway number two here will be to leverage your pixel, right. Leverage your pixel, because you may not be able to use the data that Facebook is collecting outside of your own website or your own Facebook campaign perse. But you can certainly build on the data that you are collecting from your own website and from your own Facebook campaigns. And that’s very valuable. So one hundred percent leverage your Facebook pixel. What would you say our last takeaway Grace for these back in the studio episode is?
Grace: [00:22:34] So for me, the last one, and you actually said it a few times in the last explanation that you just gave: test, test, test, test, test, split A B test, take what you know, and continue testing further because Facebook and anything any of these platforms, as they change what they do, they have to change. That doesn’t change. You’d still need to continue to test everything you put out there. And like you said, Liel, take that ad that did well or didn’t do well and take what you need to know from it, build the lookalike audience and then continue testing it, because Facebook and all these changes, they don’t change the fact that Facebook is still good for brand awareness. And once you build out that audience and you now know the behaviors that they took to get to you, you are going to call that audience, create a lookalike audience. And just like Liel said, that becomes your new audience of behaviors that you know, you can target because that’s what you were looking for. So test, test, test, test, and keep testing because that’s never going to change.
Liel: [00:23:43] I agree with you, Grace, particularly with the type of conversions that you have. I think that’s a very good thing to test out your calls to action because there are many different types of campaigns that you can run on Facebook. Right. You can actually run campaigns that actually allow you to initiate phone calls directly from the ad itself. You can actually run a campaign that allows you to start on messenger chat and you can also run a campaign that does lead generation. Right. I mean, just to pinpoint some of the different calls to action that you can actually have already in the campaign itself. And you need to see which one your users prefer. At the end of the day, I think traffic campaigns are great. But at some point, you should also try other types of campaigns with the other type of goals so you can see whether you are more likely to encourage your Facebook audience or your Facebook target audience to convert and take that extra step. Because that’s the one thing that we always need to remember, is that the intent on Facebook, it’s not always the highest. So you need to entice you need to create interest. You need to be repetitive. People need to see you enough times to really have that impact. So don’t give up. I don’t think necessarily the changes that we’re seeing here are the end and dramatic in any way. I think Facebook is one hundred percent going to continue to be a platform that can be leveraged for a lot of different things, whether it’s brand building, whether it’s lead generation, it will continue to be effective, is just asking us all to get outside a little bit of our comfort zone and start doing things a little bit more creatively. And I think uping our game, Grace, I think if there is another takeaway to be added to everything that we’ve discussed here is take seriously your campaigns, take seriously your advertising, put an effort to it, because if you don’t do it, then don’t expect your audience to care. Right. Why should they care if you don’t? That’s my takeaway.
Grace: [00:26:03] I’m sure it’s one of the most open things. If you don’t care about your own business, why would anyone else?
Liel: [00:26:10] That’s the thing, Grace. We have so many exciting conversations lined up in the next coming weeks. I cannot really wait, but for now, we’ll have to leave it there and just wait another few days until we’re back with another great conversation
Grace: [00:26:27] On In camera podcast, Liel.
Liel: [00:26:29] That’s correct, Grace. All right. Have a great week.
Grace: [00:26:32] You, too. Bye.
Liel: [00:26:33] Bye.
[00:26:34] And if you like our show, make sure you subscribe. Kill your co-workers. Leave us a review and send us your questions to ask at Incomer podcast dot com. We’ll see you next week.
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