The introduction of the anti-profiling pop-up on iPhone, the one asking if you want to be tracked for advertising purposes by the app you are using, was a hit.
Arrived with iOS 14.5 in spring as the latest of the privacy initiatives announced by Apple at WWDC 2020, the Tracking Transparency App has collected very high subscriptionsAccording to data from the analysis agency Branch, which studies the growth of mobile apps, only 25% of iPhone owners accept ad tracking.
It is a general figure obtained indirectly and can change depending on the app, because it is possible allow tracking on one application and block it on another. If for small developers who do not base the business model on user profiling the impact was negligible, for digital advertising giants like Facebook and Instagram the news has instead made itself felt. At least, this is the opinion of the experts in the digital advertising sector.
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According to the analyst’s estimates Eric Seufert, if 80% of iOS users blocked Zuckerberg’s app profiling, the group’s advertising revenue Facebook could experience a 7% drop. In the worst case scenario, that is, if only one in 10 people left app profiling active, the drop could reach 13.59%.
Facebook, moreover, had alerted investors already during the last quarterly, explaining that the iOS news could affect the company’s revenue in the future. This impact has not yet been officially quantified and analyst Seufert’s numbers are the best estimate available to date. However, only one hypothesis remains, based on the aforementioned popularity of the App Tracking Transparency e on the fact that the adoption of iOS 14.5 is already very high: About 75% of those with an iPhone that have the latest version of the operating system installed on the device.
Apple’s update arrived in the middle of the second quarter and therefore the numbers of the second quarter, which Facebook will unveil at the end of July, may not yet provide an overall picture. To see the estimates confirmed or denied, we will have to wait until October, when Zuckerberg and shareholders will disclose the fiscal data for the third quarter, which is the first to be influenced in its entirety by the privacy news introduced by Apple.
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That the App Tracking Transparency has put a spoke in the wheel at Menlo Park advertising machine, however, it is a fact that can already be deduced from other sources. Many large advertisers, especially agencies running multi-million dollar advertising campaigns on the platform, are noticing a progressive deterioration in the quality of Facebook reports. The Zuckerberg system is appreciated by advertisers because it allows to analyze in a very precise way the result of the campaigns active, accurately recording the sales of products made through the various platforms. If the iOS apps do not have access to cross profiling data, however, the system lacks the raw material to feed the algorithms.
In the case of large companies, a media buyer a Bloomberg, Facebook is now only able to report 64% of sales, while it drops to 42% for smaller companies.
While not revealing how much the Apple’s pro-privacy news have had an effect on business, Facebook has been fighting back for months now, taking very tough positions against Cupertino: according to Zuckerberg’s company, Apple’s choices mainly damage small companies that use Facebook ads to attract customers. The social network is even got to buy whole pages in the newspapers Americans to tell his version of events and denounce the decisions of Tim Cook’s company as anti-competitive.
Meanwhile in Menlo Park they are still gearing up for rethink the advertising system in order to measure the success of campaigns using less profiling data. It is certainly a possible path, so much so that Google began to walk it long before Apple announced the recent crackdown on protecting its customers’ privacy.
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