How Apple's Changes May Significantly Limit Your Marketing Efforts

Apple’s proposed changes will limit your ability to effectively reach, understand and engage people on mobile devices and across the web. They will impact your ability to understand performance, control who sees your ads and make informed decisions about your advertising budgets. As these changes take effect, over time you may see an overall decrease in ad performance and personalization and an increase in cost per action.

Specifically, these changes will limit your ability to:

• Effectively deliver ads to people based on their engagement with your business
• Measure and report on conversions from certain customers
• Ensure your ads are delivered to the most relevant audiences at the right frequency
• Accurately attribute app installs to people using iOS 14 and later
• Predict and optimize cost per action over time and efficiently allocate budgets

Apple’s policy will make it much harder for small businesses to reach their target audience, which will limit their growth and their ability to compete with big companies. Case in point, our studies show that when running ads on the Facebook family of apps to drive sales on their websites, small businesses saw a cut of over 60% of their sales, on average, for every dollar they spent when they weren’t able to use their own data to find customers on Facebook¹. For example, currently a local book store could spend $50 on a relevant and personalized ad and may win 5 sales. Without the use of their own data to personalize an ad, that business would spend $50 and may win only 2 sales. We don’t anticipate the proposed iOS 14 changes to cause a full loss of personalization but rather are a move in that direction.

Without the predictable costs and personalized ads you’re accustomed to creating and running, many new products and services would never get off the ground. We believe in the opportunity for new ad-supported businesses to start and grow, but we do not agree with Apple’s attempt to disrupt the online ad ecosystem and the small business opportunities it makes possible and sustains.