My @mobiledevmemo post for Monday is a deconstruction of FB's IDFA announcement and advertiser FAQ from last week. One interesting tidbit from the FAQ: FB is killing user list uploads for iOS14 campaigns, which effectively renders retargeting impossible (1/X)

2/ Custom audiences are the audience lists that advertisers upload to the platform. As of now, the lists can contain emails, IDFAs / GAIDs, names, phone numbers, etc. FB has a massive bank of data on all users, & email targeting can be 70-80% as precise as IDFA targeting in cases

3/ Lookalike audiences are built from these audiences. The advertiser will upload a custom audience and then construct a lookalike audience (an audience that "looks like" the custom audience) as a percentage of the target country (eg. target up to 10% of the US on a LAL basis)

4/ For FB iOS14 campaigns, advertisers no longer upload custom audiences to create LALs: they simply select an existing campaign or in-app event (which will be mapped to a conversion value from the SKAdNetwork postbacks FB receives) & create LAL on the basis of those "seed" users

5/ That's probably pretty effective for LALs, but custom audiences are how re-targeting is done on FB. Many advertisers thought that IDFA deprecation wouldn't impact retargeting on FB because hashed emails could be used for that purpose. But not anymore: no more custom audiences

6/ This is actually a non-trivial development. For large apps with legacy user bases, and especially in specific content niches (eg. strategy games, social casino) re-targeting might be a majority of ad spend.

7/ Programmatic IDFA retargeting was killed with iOS14, but many advertisers assumed they could simply use hashed emails to continue retargeting on FB post-iOS14. With custom audiences being retired, thats not possible.

8/ Another thing to point out: immediately post-WWDC, it was common to see people proclaim that IDFA deprecation was not a big deal because apps can simply connect users to FB accounts via SSO! No problem, this is a nothingburger, the status quo is preserved!

9/ That was unbelievably naive at the time, yet people are still peddling this wishful thinking, nothing-is-changing narrative. This bullet from the FB FAQ is being promoted (incorrectly) as supporting the notion of SSO for opt-out users:

10/ But that's not what this line means. FB has abandoned the IDFA: what this sentence means is that SSO is the only way of indexing events for *opt in* users. SSO absolutely requires opt in: Apple makes that very clear in the SKAdNetwork documentation

11/ This topic is extremely esoteric. Rough heuristic for interpreting IDFA-related information as an advertiser: if the tone is optimistic or dismissive of the magnitude of these changes, it's either wrong or content marketing