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I got hit hard by IOS14
Hello everyone,
Just a quick message to vent: I’m managing multiple e-commerce and always had great results. (we have clients who invest from 1k to 5k a day)
At the beginning of 2021 everything started to fall apart to the point we are losing too much money.
Yesterday and today we barely got any sales. (From an average of 250/day, to 30; not kidding)
What I noticed is this: CTR went to shit and CPC exploded.
I think Facebook lost so much data that is not able to optimise and find the right people, so it’s showing our ads to random people.
Our creatives (copy and img/video) are great and all of the sudden, the CTR dropped.
Today we are seeing a 0,07% CTR in Broad Conversion Campaigns, previously doing 0,80%.
Same copy, same image, same everything.
Previous ROAS of 4.7.
I launched a dozen new campaigns with fresh creatives; nothing.
The worst? My clients are panicking and they refuse to accept that we (my agency) can’t do shit.
We brought exceptional results for 2 years, helped them grow enormously, and now they blame us for everything.
Today the marketing director of one of them called me (I’m the owner of the agency) and told me:
“I don’t care about this IOS14; tomorrow we must be back to normal.”
I told him that we can’t do shit and that is more complex than what he thinks.
He replied with:
“Better be back to normal, tomorrow…” in a really shitty and threatening way.
It’s just sad. People are fucking unfair and stupid.
4.7 ROAS for two years, grew from 500€/day to 4.000, now they blame me for this and they don’t even listen.
Thanks for reading and I hope you are in a better place than me.
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27 Replies
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This person does not deserve their title of they do not understand the fundamental shift occurring right now and it’s impact on tracking.
As an agency owner, you need to go in the education offensive, ideally with more than just this idiot in the room (ideally their boss).
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Start using a different platform like tik tok maybe?
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save this post for the facebook monopoly class action that should shatter it into 1200 separate companies
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First of all, let me say I’m sorry for what you’re going through. As a business owner myself who runs all of my own marketing, I think it’s foolish for these marketing directors to not understand what’s going on – especially with Facebook in the last 6-12 months. Not to mention in some of the documents that have come out since Facebook is under investigation, their data teams have admitted that their targeting is only 40-50% accurate… Meaning half to most of the audience your ads are showing to are completely random. And this was back from 2016, IMO it’s likely only gotten worse as Facebook has come under even more scrutiny in recent years. For your situation in particular, though, I have a few questions and things for you to consider…
On those new campaigns you’ve launched, have you tried lower budgets? Or are you starting them at high budgets again? I also saw massive drops in performance on Facebook in recent months, to the point that I have stopped using it for cold traffic altogether. But every once in a while I can get a small budget campaign to perform well.
Are you familiar with any other source of traffic? I understand that FB/IG is ideal for your clients but a lot of other businesses are seeing pretty good success with Shopping (as long as you have good images and competitive prices) and Search (as long as your landing page sales copy is excellent). You could also give Google Discover a try, as many businesses who do well on IG see pretty good success with it. Also, Google Display is largely untapped for many businesses. Yes, it’s difficult and yes, it’s hard to convert. But it can be done (and I do it myself) and is – as a whole – MUCH more consistent than Facebook… if you can get it working.
Lastly, I highly recommend that as an agency owner, you make cross-channel converting a top priority. Try like hell to get profitable on more than one platform so something like this doesn’t happen in the future.
Best of luck to you.
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I’m sorry to hear about your situation. Hopefully your clients will soon realize the scope of this update and cut you some slack. If you’ve done good work for them in the past I’m sure you can continue to do good work in the new landscape.
With that said my experience is very different. So far in January my ads are performing better than last year.
I’m not using Broad Campaigns, but currently running a 1% Value Based Lookalike for cold traffic and retargeting 30 day engagement (FB, IG, Website).
I wonder if the privacy update is hitting broad targeting harder?
Good luck.
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People have been successfully marketing long before digital channels. You need to introduce innovation to your client (and your agency) approaches marketing.
If your client want you to wave a magic wand and “fix it” by tomorrow, you may be better off dropping them and letting them figure it out. Find better clients instead of trying to manage yourself out of a ditch.
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I would immediately be putting together a presentation that outlines two main things (and share this across the client base):
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1. Impact of IOS14 on targeting, tracking, and specifically FB/IG if you are running so much of it discussing what happened and the implications (tying into specifically to the client’s data).
2. Present alternatives and pros and cons for each (ie SEM, programmatic, lookalikes, first-party data, OTT, whatever may possibly make sense, and the benefits and negatives of each).It sucks but as an agency, they want solutions and not excuses. I know you are just trying to educate your clients and provide insight, but clients don’t want to hear that, and they will quickly drop you–it’s the “what have you done for me lately”.
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Did ios14 already roll out?
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It’s not uncommon for some business campaigns stop working all of a sudden.
It takes time and lot of work to get back where it was.
I personally don’t believe that Facebook simply lost all of their data now they’re done. Unless it’s app campaigns.
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I know Facebook has seemed to have issues in the past 3-5 months but not sure you can call it iOS 14 issues yet. Apple hasn’t launched the new opt in prompt yet (and doesn’t have a specific date set at this point) so it’s likely more seasonal issues. I have no idea what sector your clients are in but after Q4 retail season wrapping up there is always a lull afterwards. I’d compare to previous years data to see how significant the changes are YoY before you look into anything else. Check outside the platform tools too. Don’t rely on Ad platforms as the source of truth if you can help it. Hard to say it but if a client talks to you that way, they likely don’t respect your work/expertise so might be good to part ways with them. Someone who doesn’t respect your work is not likely going to be a good reference for new business anyways as it sounds like they treat you like people doing the work and them driving strategy
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Influencers. For beauty products, there’s almost no comparison.
Good luck OP.
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Julian @ measureschool just published this great video on this subject: https://youtu.be/PbtEYQcjdIY. Impact for advertisers would not be that big.
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We’ve been flying high doing really good ROAS on our e-commerce store (a healthy 2.0-2.5). Yesterday things took a turn and we are barely cracking 1.5. Today it looks like we won’t reach a 1.0… I know we saw this coming but oh boy this is gonna hurt.
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My ads are doing fantastic (relatively) and I launched them a few days ago, some of them 1-2 weeks ago.
I had ROAS go to shit before though, what helped is, I tried going back to other audiences, trying cold traffic interests or other LLAs.
And those actually did okay.
So that’s my suggestion, try other audiences.
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Uhhh it doesn’t go into affect on the backend until Jan 15.
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