Managing Facebook and Instagram Ad Campaigns Without Knowing Age and Gender
Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ve probably noticed that the whole marketing world has been shaken by Apple’s recent iOS 14 update. Nobody quite knows how to react. Marketers are in disarray and Facebook has been fighting against Apple. Since it seems Apple won’t go back on the change, we think that the best approach is to act quickly. While competitors and other advertisers refuse to alter their campaigns (or remain unaware of the update), it’s up to you to maintain an effective marketing strategy through the turbulence.
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What’s Changed?
What hasn’t? This might be an easier question to answer. With the release of Apple iOS 14, users of Apple devices are now prompted to either allow tracking or reject it. According to some early studies, as many as 60% will tap the reject button and this leaves apps without critical data. If you advertise on Facebook or Instagram, you’ll have fewer data points to work with when creating and optimizing ad campaigns.
Advertisers are now logging into their accounts and seeing a very different landscape. As well as less data, you might also notice a drop in performance. One of the advantages of choosing Instagram and Facebook in recent years has been the targeting capabilities, but these will shrink as more and more people tap against tracking.
This begs an important question; how difficult is it to manage Facebook and Instagram ad campaigns without knowing the age and gender data? All sorts of rumors are circling around the motivations of Apple. Some believe that they want to make advertising less effective so that apps are forced into earning revenue through payments and in-app purchases instead. Why? Because this pockets Apple considerably more money.
Either way, you have a job to do as an advertiser. Especially if you run an advertising agency, clients will be looking to you as the expert in this area. So how do you manage ad campaigns now that data isn’t so readily available?
Dealing with the Data Gap
It’s impossible not to look back at recent years and see them as a golden period. With the sheer amount of data that we could use on Instagram and Facebook, we could target the narrowest of audiences and find people with a sincere interest in the business. Now, there’s a data gap that’s constantly growing as more and more people stop Instagram and Facebook from collecting and sharing specific data.
Third-Party Tools
First things first, know that the Apple update doesn’t mean the end for all of your advertising efforts. Just because you may have seen some dramatic statements online, you don’t now have to pull all funding from these two platforms. Instead, one solution is to use a third-party tool like Trapica.
Among a plethora of valuable services, Trapica offers marketers an opportunity to get insights into their audiences (including gender, age, location, placement, and various other conversion attributes that contribute to an advertising campaign). If you need placement, demographic, or geographic data, this is one of the best ways to achieve it.
Tools like Trapica automatically compile data and spot patterns and trends so that you can learn more about your audience. In terms of Facebook and Instagram, the right tool will even implement the insights automatically using machine learning and artificial intelligence. As long as you set the parameters and goals, the platform does the rest.
Even after the iOS 14 changes, high-quality tools like Trapica keep the business on top of all gender, location, age, and other data points for advertising purposes. Therefore, don’t think that all advertising is now redundant on social media.
Since this guide is all about managing Facebook and Instagram ad campaigns, there has never been a better time to start talking about advanced ad optimization tools. Not only will you access essential data, but your marketing will also get help. They don’t need to keep spending hours staring at metrics and trying to optimize campaigns because clever technology does this automatically. Therefore, it makes sense to utilize a third-party tool for two reasons: to stay on top of limited data and to optimize campaigns across social media platforms.
Remember, if around 60% of people stop Facebook and Instagram from tracking them, this means that around 40% will allow it. Of 2.7 billion active monthly users on Facebook, this still amounts to a significant number of people (especially when you consider that Android devices are unaffected). Therefore, you’ll still learn about your audience and you’ll still access a significant chunk of your audience.
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Other Tracking Opportunities
Furthermore, the tracking changes from Apple can’t take away from what you already know and the information you glean from customers. Apple can stop apps from tracking users, but you still have plenty of opportunities to gather this data from your website and current customers. You can still access website data from people who choose to allow tracking, you can still access customer information already held by the business, and you can even ask customers to learn more about your audience.
Read More: Everything You Need to Know About Website UX
Fixing Campaign Errors
Just because your Facebook and Instagram campaigns have stopped converting, it’s negligent to immediately blame the Apple update. Just as we experienced in the past, it could be a variety of factors causing problems for your campaign.
For one thing, you might not have the right bidding strategy. Often, businesses and marketers find that the lack of clicks and impressions actually comes down to a mistake in bidding. Firstly, we bring you back to our earlier suggestion of utilizing artificial intelligence and machine learning to optimize bidding and always stay on the right path.
If not, choose the manual bidding setting rather than letting Facebook or Instagram automate bids. As well as finding the balance between price and impressions, you should also experiment between the pay per click and pay per impression settings.
In the previous few weeks alone, we’ve already seen businesses blaming their poor performance on iOS 14 when their ads are terrible. Regardless of what happens with iOS 14, you still need to create engaging and click-worthy ads. Since Facebook and Instagram are visual platforms, you’ll need ads that grab their attention as they scroll through their feed. Play around with your image, CTA, and message before then comparing different versions of the ad against each other with A/B testing.
Now more than ever, this last point is essential, and something with which Trapica and other ad optimization tools can actually assist. As long as you create the different ad variations, the tool will use artificial intelligence to continually improve the ad and ensure that you’re always using the best-performing features.
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Segment Audience Targeting
If you’re looking for immediate steps to prevent harming your ad accounts, we recommend segmenting all campaigns so that you target only Android devices. Remember, this is an Apple update, so it won’t affect Android users. While you work on long-term solutions for iOS users, keep all campaigns advertising to just Android devices — this should prevent a drop in performance and an increase in budget wastage.
Use Value Optimization (VO)
If you haven’t seen this feature before, VO is all about targeting those most likely to convert, whether this is buying a product, signing up for a newsletter, or performing another conversion action. With the recent Apple update, Facebook has opened VO up to more users, so your previous ineligibility may now not be a problem.
To enable VO, you’ll need to have either an active SDK (software development kit), pixel, or product catalog. Furthermore, you need to prioritize purchase events, have over 10 distinct purchase amounts in the last week, and over 100 optimized purchases within the last 10 days. As soon as you’re eligible, head into the Events Manager and you’ll have the option to enable VO.
When activated, you’ll bid for the users with the highest value and those most likely to convert.
Update the Facebook SDK
Next, Facebook has updated the SDK to account for the iOS update and it recommends that you do the same. After iOS 14, you should have version 8.1 or higher with regards to the Facebook SDK. As well as Facebook itself, you might advertise on apps that use Facebook login. If this is the case, you should look for version 9 or higher. With this simple update, it’s much easier to deliver personalized ads, even to those on an iOS device.
Summary
Managing a Facebook ad campaign without gender and age data is difficult, but there are steps you can take after iOS 14 to protect your conversions and profits. For example, ad optimization tools like Trapica will keep you informed with valuable insights to keep your ads on the right path.
Read More: How to Use AI For Ad Targeting, Automation, and Analytics
