By Rebekah Rauckman
iOS14 has thrown a wrench into social advertising. Remarketing performance and scale have shifted significantly for many advertisers.
While some aren’t seeing a dip in performance, they are seeing reduced scale along with a spike in CPMs. This is due to limited tracking of iOS14 users. Fewer users are being included in retargeting audiences, so the cost to reach them is going up.
Historically having well-defined audience segments was essential. We would exclude all site visitors and past purchasers from our Prospecting campaigns. Each step of the funnel would have its own exclusions to isolate shoppers with different levels of purchase intent.
But in this post-iOS14 world, we’ve had to re-evaluate this best practice because it’s no longer driving the best performance.
Solution:
Move to a unified acquisition targeting strategy, instead of strictly segmenting Prospecting from Remarketing.
This sends the network as many consolidated signals as possible, while including the most efficient purchasers in each audience, whether or not they’ve visited your site already.
Explanation:
Acquisition includes all net-new site visitors, plus people who have been to the site but who have never purchased. Think about these audiences as New Customers.
With this new audience setup, you are either looking for New Customers (AKA Acquisition) or you are talking to Past Purchasers (Retention). While this requires serving the same messaging to consumers who have already visited your site, as to those who have not, we’ve observed a minimal impact on performance, relative to the gains from consolidation.
Customizing ads for Remarketing is a thing of the past. Talking to Past Purchasers vs New Customers is where you should be customizing your message.
Conclusion:
This audience setup has found success in several verticals since the iOS14 rollout. We highly recommend you give it a shot because we consistently see the same or better performance using acquisition!
