Wall Street Journal Quotes Foxwell Digital

Recently, the Wall Street Journal Columnist Chris Mims wrote a piece outlining some of the ways the changes related to iOS14 could hurt small businesses. We were honored they quoted co-founder Gracie Foxwell after we spoke with him about these changes. Here’s the quote:

“Apple’s privacy changes are well-intentioned, but they do hurt small businesses in a real, tangible way, making it much more confusing for business owners to navigate and stay abreast of rapidly changing rules,” says Ms. Foxwell.

The piece goes on to discuss the overarching issues we deal with every single day as advertisers. Highly recommend reading the whole piece. (Here’s a PDF of it for non-subscribers)

We also gave him a number of other quotes, which we’ve included below to show you what we felt was needed to share.

In the short term, Facebook advertisers will be more dependent on outside tools to make somewhat informed decisions, such as post purchase surveys and analytics tools. Optimization processes will significantly shift as well; since advertisers were previously very dependent on the internal ROAS metric to know what ads to turn up or down. Basically instead of looking at the Facebook Ads Manager for reporting, which most advertisers relied on heavily to make day-to-day buying decisions and looking at the external tools on a monthly basis, the external tools will be more heavily relied upon moving forward.

For DTC SMBs, the downstream effect is that they'll have to be much more patient. Advertisers will be making Ads Manager optimization decisions in longer windows, such as three, seven, or even fourteen days. This shift will require patience amidst unknowns, especially for those companies with higher-priced products where a customer consideration cycle is much longer. For example, we have a client whose average order value is $150+ and they recently started asking customers how long they saw ads before they bought. The answer was 3+ months, which was astounding to the client. With the new Apple rules, Facebook and Instagram absolutely influenced and likely drove this decision to buy, but if that customer has opted out, we'll essentially have no way to attribute that sale to any platform.

Furthermore, there's no doubt, with Facebook sunsetting their Facebook Analytics and Facebook Attribution tools over coming months, the platform will introduce a new tool that provides advertisers estimated data alongside real data to better guide buying decisions.

2. Yes, they're pitching PCM as an alternative, or replacement, for measurement via their network. DTC SMBs will likely be open to testing ads on the Apple network. I think people are looking for any additional scale or channel to test, as it helps with diversification of spend and creates a fuller funnel marketing strategy. But I do not think that the tracking or measurement 'advantage' that Apple is promoting as a value proposition is enough to make advertisers immediately trust it as a true north, or encourage them to test it immediately. The value proposition is just "we're Apple and we have ads." Because of their size and market position, that's enough to get advertisers somewhat interested. However, advertisers have no clear understanding what these ad units will be, what they'll look like, how they'll be delivered, or how they'll be measured. (Unless this has been shared via high level internal documents that we don't have access to.)

I don't doubt Apple ads could be valuable, but as is any channel that an advertiser adds into the mix, you trust what you see in post-purchase surveys, sales lift, analytics tools and top line revenue to really know if something is "working."

3. Where Apple hurts DTC SMBs most in this equation is with the opaque, non-linear data an advertiser or business will receive. If you're a small biz owner and you're starting to invest some marketing dollars on Facebook or Instagram ads, say, $2,000/month sending traffic to your Shopify store, you previously were able to see sales immediately in your ads reporting. Business owners could see the literal return on investment and in turn, spend even more money to scale their campaigns. With these changes, that ROI isn't as clear. Imagine telling a small company "yes, you can invest more but the data is delayed and quite a few sales aren't even tracked, so you'll have no clear takeaways." As such, this kind of story isn't really a winning argument to invest more in a platform with marketing dollars, and small companies will suffer because they are already short on time and expertise in this area. Bigger companies with agencies are more suited to adapt and test different ad types, new creative, etc. Apple's privacy changes are well-intentioned, but they do hurt small businesses in a real, tangible way, making it much more confusing for business owners to navigate and stay abreast of rapidly changing rules. To these small DTC brands, it just feels like another thing added to their plate that they'll have to figure out. But when? How? With whose help? It's burdensome, time consuming, and full of unknowns.