As Facebook confronted weighty issues related to news and politics during the quarter, it also made some important changes to its ad products, due in large part to the upcoming changes to Apple’s IDFA, which will have a more immediate and direct impact on advertisers. Monetization.

Although Apple’s removal of the IDFA will have a large impact on mobile advertising overall, it will have fewer repercussions for Facebook. That’s because of how the IDFA works. The IDFA can only be passed from the phone through an app, not through web browsing. A developer can associate a persistent device identifier (the IDFA) with any given instance of app usage.

Blog responses from the mobile app community fell on a spectrum from “Apple killed the IDFA” to “IDFA is not dead yet, but it’s definitely on life support.”.

TikTok’s new marketing tools focus on customization and commerce: It’s taking steps to make advertisers feel comfortable on the platform and heavily push social commerce.

But that doesn’t mean search is immune to the trouble caused by losing third-party tracking cookies or access to Apple’s Identifier for Advertisers (IDFA). Advertisers do use audience data layered on top of queries in some of their search advertising.

Without IDFA, advertisers will have less information with which to target their ads, and they will have less visibility into the activity that results from advertising.

For Facebook, data loss includes user-level data posted back from IDFAs as well as the Facebook pixel, the piece of tracking code placed on brand websites. As of Q3 2021, iOS 14.5+ adoption among US social media app users had effectively reached full impact.

High-level departures spell more trouble for Facebook: The company’s long-time CTO will step down next year as Facebook addresses a flurry of negative press.

While the CAID was up to Chinese data privacy standards, it directly contradicted Apple’s privacy update, which limited advertiser use of its Identifier for Advertisers (IDFA). That put Apple in a tight spot: either cave to CAID and give advertisers in China an unfair advantage over those in other markets or cut out China altogether.

And over the summer, Apple announced it would also create difficulties for marketers by making the Identifier for Advertisers (IDFA) opt-in. These changes will hamper advertisers' insights into who was exposed to or interacted with ads, as well as their ability to connect data to that of other channels.

AppsFlyer also reported finding that IDFA availability could be affected by the way app developers set up their SDKs to load. If developers make sure to call their attribution SDK a few seconds after displaying the prompt, they can make sure to capture all possible IDFAs.

The situation on the iOS side differs because Apple will soon require each app to ask users if they would like to opt in to sharing the IDFA. Without an explicit opt-in to share an IDFA, app developers and advertisers won’t be allowed to do any type of user-level cross-channel tracking.

Facebook is rethinking privacy: A recent interview suggests that the company knows it needs to retool how it targets ads to reflect a growing privacy-conscious segment of its users.

How we got here: Earlier this year, Apple began forcing developers and ad partners to get consumers to opt in to being tracked, instead of relying on Apple’s Identifier for Advertisers (IDFA) tool. Since the changes have gone into effect, more than 80% of Apple iOS users have opted out of tracking.

The framework will require users to opt in before any app can collect the IDFA, a persistent mobile device identifier. Most in the mobile app industry expect opt-in rates to be low.

Without IDFA, advertisers will have less information with which to target their ads, and they will have less visibility into the activity that results from advertising. Under iOS 13, iPhone users already have the ability to opt out of IDFA, but this Limit Ad Tracking (LAT) option exists in the operating system settings.

Apple has recently been pushing marketers to use its privacy-friendly framework, SKAdNetwork—but the feature has been limited in the past, and marketers didn’t have a lot of incentive to use it while the IDFA was still around.

As the digital landscape evolves, with third-party cookie deprecation on the horizon, and the Identifier for Advertisers (IDFA) becoming opt-in, achieving strong customer connections will become even more challenging.

Mobile games to stop targeting ads to kids: Some major developers and ad tech companies will need to stop tracking children under 13 after settling a lawsuit, limiting their targeting abilities.

Apple plans to roll out a major update to iOS this spring, requiring an opt-in before apps can track users across channels. "Behind the Numbers" host Marcus Johnson turns the tables on eMarketer principal analyst at Insider Intelligence Nicole Perrin to ask about the latest research on AppTrackingTransparency opt-ins, the China Advertising ID (CAID), and how advertisers are preparing.

The alerts are the platform’s first attempt to introduce meaningful, opt-in consent for advertisers using Apple’s unique device identifier, IDFA. Apple is preempting shifts in policy and law by requiring opt-in, rather than opt-out, consent. With its new platform policies, Apple is single-handedly enforcing a paradigm shift that is meant to inform users and give them more control over their data.

Legacy trackers like third-party browser cookies and Apple’s Identifier for Advertisers (IDFA) are being phased out or have changed entirely. Facebook and other platforms have struggled to find new models that satisfy old needs.

(Apple’s imminent changes to its Identifier for Advertisers, or IDFA, a device-specific identifier used for targeting, will make data tracking across apps much more difficult. This change could lead to slower growth in mobile advertising this year.). “Generally, we plan and create for mobile,” said Youri Hollier, director of digital and social media at quick-service restaurant Tim Hortons.