On April 26 2021, Apple released a update called “App Tracking Transparency” on iOS 14.5 which affects how mobile apps track and collect data.
On April 26 2021, Apple released a update called “App Tracking Transparency” on iOS 14.5 which affects how mobile apps track and collect data on their users.
TL;DR: Using our Facebook Conversion API and Google Ads integrations AnyTrack supports all changes for iOS 14.5 update.
iOS 14.5 Update
Before 14.5, you could turn tracking off for all of your apps by going to Settings > Privacy > Tracking and turning off “Allow Apps to Request to Track”. The new version of iOS allows you to be more specific. To begin, when you install a new app, you won’t have to do anything; you’ll be automatically asked whether you want the new app to track you or not.
Facebook Ads
This change had a major impact on Facebook which relies mostly on ads displayed on the Facebook Apps. Facebook released a set of changes addressing those issues, such as: Website domain verification, 8 preferred web conversion events per domain in Events Manager and some other reporting limitations.
In addition, Facebook improved and extended its Conversion API (initially called the server-side API) to better address these changes, all designed to reduce the implications of the iOS 14.5 update on Facebook’s attributions capabilities.
AnyTrack supports sending all conversion events via the Facebook Conversion API to reduce losses and have more accurate matching scores. Using AnyTrack on server-side mode, our clients reached a matching score above 80%.
Google Ads
As a result of this change, Google Ads stops sending the GCLID parameter for iOS 14 traffic coming from ads on a handful of Google apps (i.e. Youtube app). Traffic from other Google sources will not be affected and will continue to include GCLIDs.
According to google, “You may see a decrease in reported website conversions and in reported offline conversions”. Although AnyTrack sends conversions via server-side we still expect some decrease on our measuring metrics using Google Analytics integration as it currently does NOT support the new tracking parameters Google uses.
Our new Google Ads integration supports the new tracking parameter wbraid for the ATT update and will support all conversion data coming from Google iOS apps.