What’s wrong with Facebook’s tracking and attribution?

What's up with Facebook?

‍The month of April 2021 has caused a bunch of sleepless nights for marketers around the world. And since then it’s only gotten worse.

So what’s been going on?

1. As of April 2021, Apple users can block Facebook Ads Tracking with the iOS Update which has been the biggest downfall so far.
   

2. Third party cookies have already been massively restricted. And there is no end in sight since Google has said to also restrict those cookies in their Google Chrome browser. Luckily, Google announced that this restriction will now only happen in 2024 instead of 2023 but it only delays the problems ahead of us instead of fixing them.
   

3. On top of that, Ad Blockers are growing further in popularity.

The reason why this is so important and most importantly nerve-wrecking to marketers is that every restriction leads to some incomplete data in the Facebook Ads Manager. And this in turn means that it’s getting more and more difficult for you to advertise on Facebook.

But let’s specifically focus on how the iOS update has changed Facebook’s ability to track and attribute.

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‍Facebook before the iOS update

Before the iOS update in April 2021 Facebook worked fine with their Facebook Pixel. The FB Pixel basically tracked all of the conversions, clicks and other events that were happening in Facebook.

So once a web user clicked on your ad, Facebook was able to track the conversion path of the events “view content”, “add to cart”, “initiate checkout”, and “purchase”. With all of this data Facebook could build a full conversion path which helped you to make correct assumptions about your ads and see whether the ad was performing well with your target group or not. And this was the key to ad optimization.

So what changed?

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‍Facebook after the iOS update

Since the iOS update Facebook has had some major issues when it comes to tracking all of the events listed above.

As we already mentioned, Apple users now have the ability to opt out of Facebook’s Ad Tracking which means that Facebook can’t track all of those events like they could before.

Instead of a complete conversion path, Facebook can currently only track the purchase event for Apple users. And that’s a big problem.

While the tracking might still be somewhat correct for non-apple users, Facebook mixes the collected data from Apple devices with the data from other devices to create an average picture of your performance, called data modeling.

The problem with this is that it’s not at all an accurate picture of your ad performance, but just a probability of how your performance might be. And that messes a lot with your ad optimization.

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‍Organic conversions that are too good to be true

One of the changes we also noticed was the increase in organic conversions which just seemed too good to be true.

If you’re using Facebook or Instagram on your mobile device, you have probably gone through this cycle:

You watch an ad, you click on it, the ad opens in the Facebook mobile app and you might open the ad in Safari or another browser because it’s more comfortable this way.

The problem with this scenario is that the conversion coming from this click will most likely be recognized as organic because Safari blocks third-party cookie tracking by default.

So now you need to support cross browser attributions to make sure that your attributions are correct.

And this wasn’t the only problem that came with the changes of the iOS update!

So how can you get around problems like this?

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‍OneTrack as your fix

We at OneTrack have developed a tracking software that relies on multiple tracking solutions and first party scripts instead of third party cookies. So you don’t have to solely rely on the Facebook Pixel anymore.

We’ve spent the last couple of years developing our software even further just so you don’t have to worry about all of the new regulations and updates that make tracking more and more complicated.

All you have to do, is let us do our jobs so you can fully focus on your advertising.

Try it out yourself and you’ll be surprised about how good it works! Why wait? Schedule your free consultation today and stop wasting your money on ads that don’t work anymore:

‍‍https://www.one-track.io/pricing