Claims to get around Apple's ATT policies? Don't believe the hype.
We wrote this blog post for the Foxwell Founders Membership, but wanted to share part of it here for the entire internet to read.
You've seen the ads. The ones that claim there are these platforms that can save you by retaining all of your customer data so you can know, more accurately, what marketing efforts really drove the needle forward.
Sounds amazing, right? Also sounds a little bit too good to be true, which is why we're taking a closer look at these platforms to understand how they operate and whether they're truth or myth.
It's safe to say that at the top of the heap in these claims is Hyros. To be clear, this is not a pros/cons piece, but rather an effort to help you (our members) understand how and what the platform is and what it does.
What it does
The short version: They claim to help brands see all of their site traffic in one place to better understand the true ROI of their marketing efforts while improving your ad performance.
The long version: They help brands build a database of their unique users by tracking all site traffic via 10 different data points to create a unique user profile. These user profiles can then be utilized to better understand where users came from, when they made a purchase along with building up the lifetime value (LTV) of that user over time. (It should be noted that while user profiles do seem to be void of personally identifying information, one of the data points cited does seem to be an IP Address, so if desired, a brand could do some work to personally identify the unique user.)
Once set up (and there is a bit of set up involved), a brand can then begin to see the the revenue their site is generating and how it breaks down by traffic source. The big claim here is that they focus on revenue from click source so they are able to get a clear picture over Google Analytics or other paid platform dashboards. The point they make is that these platforms do not talk to one another and in many instances they even attribute organic sales to paid media and most commonly, multiple platforms claiming credit for the same purchase(s).
The important thing to highlight is that this can likely show you ad campaigns that appear to be performing on-platform, but are not actually converting at all on the site. The same goes for campaigns that are under reporting (or not reporting) but are in fact outperforming said campaigns that are being attributed with the sale. Obviously, as an ad buyer, this has been a huge concern in the wake of Apple's ATT policy, as it has, in many instances, left Facebook ad buyers not truly knowing which campaigns are performing and which ones are the duds.
Lastly, Hyros says that they can improve ad platform optimizations by being able to pass their data back to Facebook via the CAPI integration so that Facebook can optimize off of the true winning purchase data and not the purchase data FB may be attributing in Ads Manager. Think of it like the scenario above, so if FB is optimizing on an ad set that has 10 purchases, but those purchases never happened/came from those audiences, it's going to be hard to scale that ad set and likely cost wasted ad dollars in the long run.
Want to read the rest of our take on softwares that claim to have a workaround to Apple’s ATT Policies?
The rest of this article explains:
How they get the data
Hyros’ cookie policy
Local storage (and what it means)
How the software *actually* works
Deep-diving into the claim that their AI teaches Facebook how to advertise better
Answering: Does this actually get back ‘lost’ data from Facebook?
Our overall thoughts and takeaways - the good, bad, and ugly
We’ve got this blog and so many more amazingly insightful pieces of information daily and weekly in the Foxwell Founders Membership. Check it out and let us know if you have any questions.
