Data Privacy Updates, Explained: How to Cope, Ensure Accurate Targeting and Make Ad Campaigns Perform as Good as Before (or Even Better)

Data Privacy Updates
Contents:

Boost your revenue today

Сhat with our expert on how to turn existing CRM contacts into revenue

We’ve entered the new increased-privacy reality and are now witnessing the all-round privacy policy updates. Apple has recently released iOS 14.5, Google is going to implement Android 12, and following that messengers and social media platforms announce their updates one by one.

What’s Special About the Updates?

Let’s dwell on iPhones for now, since the new iOS is already here. iPhone users can now decide themselves whether to allow apps to track their data or not, and what exactly to track. If users are comfortable and click the “Allow Tracking” button, everything works as usual. However, the majority of users are expected to refuse. In which case, access to most user data will be closed forever.

In the light of such data privacy worship, marketers are going crazy. Well, fair enough: the updates mark a drastic change in how companies assign value to this sort of audience in particular and make money from advertising. Prior to that, developers could use various tools to track user data within an app to broadly identify information about a user to accurately target them with personalized ads. Now, it seems like they are going to rely on intuition rather than data.

Tell Me More! How the Policy Update Affects Businesses in General?

Obviously, companies all around the world are facing the challenge of maintaining the same efficiency of advertising campaigns that were previously enjoyed before this policy change. The range of privacy-level options accessible to users was relatively generous in terms of discretion and dependability. It was conceived explicitly due to the initial amounts of static personal information, static and activity-based monitoring.

This allowed them to target such promising clients, ranging from specific individuals to analysis of this particular market segmentation, the basis of which advertising campaigns were built. The primary effect of this imminent change in key privacy policy position is specifically targeted at the level of involvement and strategic approach of Facebook’s commercially-driven members.

Until now, iOS apps were able to collect user data, encrypted email addresses, and the iPhone’s unique Identifier for Advertisers (IDFA), showing what actions users were taking within a particular app. This now unavailable data transparency level offered access to information such as company website traffic, transaction records, installed applications, and all types of valuable activities performed within those apps.

This is precisely the sort of data that comprised user profiles sufficient for the accurate targeting of ads, as well as a more specific and precise evaluation of such strategies.

What are the Particular Challenges for Advertisers?

With all this information becoming off-limits and any previously gathered information becoming less available as it becomes stale and outdated, advertisers will find it significantly harder and more expensive to target their ideal customers.

Let’s have a closer look at what challenges advertisers are now working hard to understand, adapt to and build successful advertising strategies around.

Ad Targeting

With the absence of IDFAs, targeting audiences are likely to become more limited, and as a result, targeting will become more contextual rather than based on user behaviors. So, unfortunately, the inevitable result will be less specific advertising strategies reaching broader audiences who are more than likely less susceptible to the message and ultimately less likely to buy.

Ad Retargeting

Ad Retargeting stemming from the device level will no longer work for users of Apple iOS devices, as they opt out of tracking activities. Their choice not to share valuable IDFA information makes retargeting far more difficult. This will probably make advertisers unable to display sales and marketing-driven information as they could before. They now occupy a ”blind zone” that has expanded and been concealed substantially.

An obvious outcome for users will be that they will be subjected to unwelcome and irrelevant ads far more often.

Ad Exposure

With the absence of an IDFA, purposefully withholding advertising from certain people will be crucial for companies advertising on Facebook. That’s why marketers should be ready for audiences to be overexposed to their adverts. This can lead to audience overlap and higher competition, which is likely to increase the price of CPA (Cost per Action), for example.

Ad Measurement

It may also become quite tricky to measure the performance of conversion-optimized campaigns. Many of the standard attribution windows on Facebook, for example, will no longer exist.

Apple, however, has designed a solution that avoids requests for users’ permission, SKAdNetwork, which tracks the effectiveness of advertising campaigns on users who are denied access to IDFA.

New Target Audiences

The good news is that campaigns for broad, cold audiences will still work the same as before. Facebook still knows enough about its users to allow them various avenues to reach out to large audiences and still make rudimentary attempts to match interests to information offers, just like they were able to do before.

Okay, but How to Ensure a Decent Targeting and Maximize the Efficiency of Ads?

From the pretty simple and general stuff to the particular advanced methods:

1. Basics first: stay informed

First and foremost, keep an eye on relevant news to keep up with what’s going on. If you catch all the coming updates, even the tiniest ones, you can be ready for changes and get the most out of them with minimum costs.

2. Know your customer

While we got used to the fact that Facebook’s algorithms were doing all the hard work in target audiences, these changes have now proved the respected axiom of “know your customer” is still key. If you build a detailed ICP (ideal customer profile), segment the target audience, conduct a profound research on their needs and pain points, it will ease your life while collecting the target accounts.

3. Use all-in-one AI-driven tools for ads automation

Yes, luckily, there is software to help you collect the right audiences with 100% accuracy and ensure efficient targeting even in such unfavorable conditions.

All you need is to describe the audiences you want to target, even if its extremely specific and there are only 5 people in the world matching these criteria. Signum.AI’s team will define a detailed ICP, and then the AI will collect the audiences on social media.

The key thing is you don’t spend a minute searching for the audience yourself, and just get the ready-to-use, frest, and hyper-targeted audience already uploaded to your Signum.AI account.

4. That’s not it: build decent, relevant, appealing, and personalized ads

Targeting relevant audiences won’t work without quality ads you’re gonna target them with.

So once you get the audience, it’s time to focus on ad creatives. Again, ensure you don’t spend much time on it and use AI-based content generation tools to create and test ads to find what works best for each segment. In some cases, audience collection, ads generation, and campaigns setting can be done automatically on a single platform.

As a result, you get 1) hyper-relevant audiences that will help you be one step ahead of any restrictive and strategically important policy changes and 2) powerful ads, which makes ad campaigns as high-efficient as possible.

Conclusion

Let’s be honest: it’s a tough time for advertisers. And this is just the beginning. But there is always a solution: professional SaaS companies are taking audience collection onboard, ensuring the accurate targeting and the maximum performance for ad campaigns. And you simply don’t have to bother that much. Sounds like an attractive plan, huh?

Stay tuned!


More useful content on our social media:

Boost your revenue today

Сhat with our expert on how to turn existing CRM contacts into revenue