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mparr4 | 4 years ago
Cross-app activity can't be tracked without this permission. So if you see an ad for a product on facebook, then you pop over to Safari, search for the product, and purchase it, facebook can't attribute that sale to that ad.
The consequence of this is that goal attribution (like sales) for ads is harder, so FBs models can't learn as well who would be interested in the products. You'll see less relevant ads and companies' cost of customer acquisition will go up.
It's easy to imagine a world with less effective ad targeting since most media doesn't have effective targeting. Think pharmaceutical commercials on TV.
My own bias: I run a niche D2C brand whose business model got wrecked by this change!
ArchOversight|4 years ago
Apple disallowed third party cookies (like all other browsers) so now your website with Facebook embedded can only tell Facebook "I got a visitor" and Facebook has no data on who that user is (since they look to be logged out). Before third-party cookie blocking was a thing, Facebook could track users if they were logged in on the web, and thus could potentially attribute the sale to an ad that was shown in Facebook itself.
If the user clicked the link in Facebook for your ad, then popped over to Safari by clicking the "open in Safari" button then Facebook can continue to track that because they saw the final click and can add query parameters on the other end that you can send to Facebook upon checkout completion.
What Facebook can't track now is when a user installs Candy Crush, Quit Smoking app, and Instagram... thereby limiting what ads it can show a user in Instagram to just the behavioral data they get from Instagram, instead of knowing the user also has Candy Crush and a Quick Smoking app (and thus would likely be interested in quick games and cessation of smoking stuff).
mparr4|4 years ago
If that's the case though, I'm a bit confused as to why attribution got so much worse. I'm seeing 50% attribution dropoff.