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As the 3rd most visited website in the world and 2nd most downloaded app, Facebook reaches 59% of the world’s entire social networking population. 🤯
Pretty crazy right? So what’s the catch? Why the worrying news then?
With all the huge data restrictions and controversy, businesses are paying over 122% more per advertisement unit on Facebook than they did just a year ago. 💸
According to Facebook, there are over 200 million businesses on the platform.
As everyone has less and less data to go off of, while paying more and more to get their ads seen by potential customers, the market is beginning to see a lot of stress.
While it’s shocking to hear that the pixel responsible for all of your data analytics is going away, what’s even harder to comprehend is what to do now.
But... when you have a better understanding of what’s really going on, all this confusion may not be as surprising as it seems on the surface, and could even be used to your advantage if you read the rest of this! 😉
With Facebook and Google constantly being in the headlines for whatever the privacy concerns flavor of the day is, it’s becoming more and more obvious that something has to change for the future to come.
On top of this, the average person is becoming more aware of their personal data with every new law, regulation, and rule. We are starting to see this concern morph into action. We are almost always asked to allow, deny, or adjust cookie settings when we load onto a site. When we use IOS apps we are informed about data policies and given the option to deny any form of potential intrusion, with Android and Google joining the party very shortly.
While cookies are nothing new, they have always worked in the background. Because of this, the average user is completely unaware of their purpose, existence, or what they really do. 🍪
In short, they’re text files of data that identify you as a user, along with a bunch of information like your IP address, gender, age, etc. These articles of information are extremely important for developing inferences about a business’ user base demographics in order to track them with retargeting ads. 🎯
As big corporations like Google and Apple begin to protect their users and phase out browser-based third-party tracking, many brands will likely struggle to survive.
While these metrics can be unsettling and worrying, it isn’t all bad news. Like with every other curve ball that’s been thrown towards the world of digital marketing, those who take the time to understand what’s happening on a fundamental level will reign victorious.
Coming from a computational data science and engineering background, this is far from a surprise to my team and I. In an effort to combat such an event, we built out a third-party data base with over 3 trillion data points (and over 80% of the US population) that integrates a custom-made pixel into our clients sites to not only track data more effectively, but enrich the data and create completely new custom audiences using machine learning. 🤖
Within the Facebook ecosystem itself, there are is a lot of the data that will be available through other methods. Users will still have access to their Facebook Business Suite, Ads Manager, and Events Manager. Like every other problem, the solution to this exists behind lots of testing! 🧪
A vital piece to this solution is called Conversion API, something we’ve been using at the agency for a while now. It’s a Facebook tool that registers and shares the events happening on our website from our servers to the Facebook servers (hence, taking the third-party browser out of the equation).
There are a few ways the Facebook Conversion API can be set up to get started:
If this is something that confuses you, or worries you for the future, feel free to reach out and I’ll offer any advice or help that you needed to get going in the right direction! 🗺️
Don’t let this discourage you, but inspire you to get ahead of the competition! While many will have to give up on retargeting and data tracking, your retargeting efforts will be a fraction of the cost. 🏆
What are your thoughts on the changes? Do you already have any plans on how you’ll work around this? If you're ever looking for advice from a team of experts that live and breathe digital marketing everyday, then send us a message and we'll be happy to help!
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