FDD and Marketing: How Franchisees Can Get Clarity and Drive Results
The franchise disclosure document (FDD) is a standard legal agreement between a corporate brand and...
In the past few years, Apple has released numerous security features that are intended to protect iPhone and Macbook users’ personal data. However, in doing so these changes have also disrupted the standard methods of targeting and conversion tracking of digital campaigns for franchise brands. Here is a breakdown of these features and what sort of impact they cause:
Desktop (Macbooks):
For Desktop devices, Apple leverages the Safari browser to provide personal security. This is accomplished by removing the cookie ID that websites and marketing pixels use to identify users (typically and on non Safari browsers, the cookie ID remains the same until manually changed by the user). This will occur 24 hours after the user has visited a website. This means:
Mobile (iOS 14+):
For iPhones, Apple operating systems iOS14 and later generations give users the ability to not allow app publishers to retrieve the IDFA (Identifier for Advertisers) from the device. Previously, app publishers and advertisers could leverage using the IDFA to deterministically target users for advertising. Now, anyone who has opted in to Apple’s security will not have an IDFA that is visible to app publishers. Advertisers use IDFA in a manner akin to cookies on desktops; as a means of determining who is converting and/or to place in an audience list.
Both of these security protocols will directly and significantly impact conversion tracking and first-party audience building:
Why should you care?
Beyond the direct impact of these security measures, there are downstream effects which impact several aspects of a digital marketing practice:
To be fair, part of this impact is ultimately superficial - if conversions are still occurring, does it matter whether the ad platform can accurately attribute it back to the campaigns? Even if conversions are still taking place, without attribution, marketers will not know what tactics and combinations of tactics are performing or not performing. This can drastically complicate standard practices like budgeting, media planning, and forecasting.
Once upon a time, it was common to manually bid in Search and Display advertising. That is no longer the case and increasingly so as technology advances. However, these platforms accomplish these feats by ingesting and analyzing user conversion data and considering that alongside other performance metrics. By removing a portion of this dataset, which can be a much larger percentage of total user data for some advertisers, this greatly reduces the accuracy and thus capabilities of these automated operations.
As iPhone users are effectively “removed” from audience pools, this can massively limit the total size of the audience or for some tactics, all but eliminate the entire pool. This may also lead to heavily skewing audience pools towards users of trackable devices (Windows, Android, Chrome, etc) which, for many brands, does not align with their customer base.
What can you do?
There is no sign that Apple will ever retract any of these measures and are instead advancing the reach that they have. Generally speaking, this coincides with a larger industry migration towards limiting or eliminating Personally Identifiable Information (PII) from being used within ad platforms altogether. Taking actions now is imperative for the present and future.
When you group many locations into a single DMA or region you limit your ability to measure results of advertising against real business outcomes. Instead, break out your brand advertising into individual, location-level campaigns - with dedicated budgets, localized creative, custom targeting, and click-thrus to a location-specific landing page. By doing this, you’ll be able to measure spend against metrics like actual sales, revenue, or order size per location.
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