Andrew Street
So it was April of 2021. We were a year into the pandemic, people were starting to cut loose, the summer of love, but advertisers were scrambling with iOS 14.5 coming out. That was releasing the app, tracking transparency, the “ATT”, which was requiring people to explicitly give permission to mobile apps for that app to track them.

Facebook was up in arms because they were saying that this is going to damage small businesses (which was the first time I’d really heard Facebook cared about small businesses) but, thank you, Facebook. And once it was released, mobile apps began asking people permission to start tracking them and advertisers were panicked that they weren’t going to be able to track conversions, grow their retargeting audiences, what were the real implications going to be, and they started getting really scrappy and coming up with workarounds.

I am Andrew Street with Dealer OMG. I’m joined by our Technical Lead, Jasmine Goodsaid, who just got done with NADA.

Okay Jasmine, two years in. Two years in, two years into  iOS 14.5 (we’re at like 16.3 now, I believe), what have we learned? 

Jasmine Smedley
Number one is [dealerships] have to prove that [they] own [their] own assets. So Facebook had to make some changes so they could communicate to Apple that [dealerships have] a real website, [they’re] a real dealership, and that [they’re] not going to do anything “weird” with the information that [they] track and [they’re] not going to track more than is [theirs] to. What Apple was really trying to do was make sure that third parties, like websites that have no business / apps that have no business tracking [users] around with everything [they] do, don’t have access to that information. Now, the good news is anything that happens on [a dealership’s] website is [theirs] to use, and Facebook helps mitigate recognizing that.

Andrew Street
So, with the tracking, what was the big difference– was it an attribution window? Was it the ability for people to be able to track offline conversions? Or, was it all the way to tracking people going into the shopping cart and thank you pages?

Jasmine Smedley
Yeah, it was pretty much everything. So one, the attribution window narrowed. It also went from the ad account level to the ad set level. So originally, [dealerships] had like 28 days [of attribution] and then with iOS it went down to like seven days of attribution. Also, again, the process of saying that [dealerships own] a valid website, that changed. So now, Facebook’s requiring that you verify your domain with them so they can go back to Apple and say like, “Hey, [this website is] legit”. Also, [Facebook is] requiring that [dealerships] be way more mindful about what’s important to track. For example, they’re limiting how much, how many conversions [a dealership] can track when a person goes to [their] website. So now [automotive dealerships] have to figure out “Okay, what are the eight most important things, and in what order are they important?”

All of that was part of the sweeping changes. 

Andrew Street
Okay. Here’s always been my experience. So, so we run an ad agency that works with car dealerships, but it’s the same with every industry. When there’s this sort of disruption and cataclysmic changes, the playing field’s always the same. Everybody has the same restrictions. There’s an opportunity for the advertisers and the brands to be the ones to really help to navigate the rapids and end up at the bottom as one of the few that didn’t capsize or just abandoned everything together. You were mentioning that Facebook restricted tracking capabilities; how many different, I guess, actions can people track now?

Jasmine Smedley
To be clear, technically, you can track an infinite amount of events, but if you want to reporting on them for Apple, iPhone users, then you’re limited to 8 that you can optimize and accurately report the aggregate numbers on. 

Andrew Street
Okay, but you’re manually setting up those eight actions that people are taking on the website to report back to Facebook’s Ads Manager, right?

Jasmine Smedley
Right, so [dealerships would] set up the [website] events the way [they] did before, except now there’s the added step of going into something called Aggregated Events Measurement (AEM). Then, yes, [dealerships] have to specify “Okay, for this pixel, for this account, this is the specific event that we are trying to optimize [for].” And again, it goes even further where it has to be in the specific order that [dealerships] find it important.

Andrew Street
Cool. Okay. So there’s steps, it’s not just anybody who can start setting this up simply. And there is an opportunity right there for a brand to be the first (and maybe the only) to start setting this up in their market or in their sphere of competitors to be the ones that are going out there and proactively figuring out how to. Like with Facebook, it’s still the most cost-effective paid advertising platform (in my opinion). With Facebook (paid Facebook, paid Instagram), if you are one of the brands that’s  pushing to maximize the capabilities [of Facebook’s tracking]. So, attribution’s been squeezed for everybody, but you can still measure and start to optimize campaigns based on these types of events, and arguably your competitors are not. Is that right?

Jasmine Smedley
Oh, yes. I would definitely agree. We see so many people whose domain is not verified. It means [that dealership is] clearly not optimizing for or measuring iPhone users if [their] domain isn’t even verified. Much less figuring out the specific events and prioritizing it, you know?

Andrew Street
Yes!

Jasmine Smedley
I see it mostly with independent dealerships. So if you’re an independent dealership, and you’re competing with others, there’s a strong possibility that you can really stay ahead of the curve and overtake your market just by doing that simple step [of verifying your domain].

 Andrew Street
Right, it’s some work on the front end that’ll reap benefits because [that dealership is] the one that’s driving actual sales of people driving off [their] lot. And, [dealerships] could track some things cause– Okay, with the domain verification, I remember as soon as, as iOS 14.5 came out (I think I got my order right) Facebook was hitting us up, telling all the agencies with a handful of clients that have representation to claim domain verification for all their customers. Do you remember this?

Jasmine Smedley
Yes. Yeah.  

Andrew Street
So we claimed the domain (this is a website domain verification) and got Facebook to approve it for all our clients…and then what happened?

Jasmine Smedley
Basically, we realized, “oh, wait a minute, if all of these domains are verified by us in our business manager, then that takes the ownership away from the business, right?” So then, if the business decides to leave and they’re removed from our business manager and [what is now] our domain, then it means with the next [agency] they work with, [the dealership] can’t optimize for Apple because [that dealership is] trapped. Because all the events that they would normally optimize for are in a completely different account that doesn’t belong to them. And that really, once we realized that, we decided, “Okay, new process, let’s work with the dealer, in their own business manager or create a business manager account for them if that’s what we need to do. Work directly with their website provider, [or] their DNS provider to make sure we get the domain verified for them in their account where they own everything.”

Andrew Street
That was a headache, but we got through it all, and now all of the customers own their own domain verification (which they should ). And they should own their own social media profiles, and have it be owned by somebody who’s going to be there for a long time. 

Jasmine Smedley
Yes. Yes, exactly.

Andrew Street
Okay. And you mentioned something too that I always have to remind myself when we’re thinking about iOS (anything): That is just Apple devices. So everything else this doesn’t apply to–that’s–I don’t even know what other kinds of phones there are Samsung, and Galaxies and Pixels and things. 

Jasmine Smedley
Yes, exactly. There are still a lot of different operating systems for phones that were always able to track [conversions], which is why, as many advertisers noticed, whenever iOS 14 completely rolled out, they were like, “hey, wait a minute, I’m still getting all of these metrics and reporting in Facebook.” And it’s because, yes. You are still measuring it for non-Apple devices—and of course, desktop as well. 

Andrew Street
Okay. So cookies help advertisers track what consumers are doing on websites. They also help build retargeting audiences. So we’ve talked a lot about attribution and measuring events. How has targeting changed? How have audiences changed? 

Jasmine Smedley
If you weren’t tracking those events for iPhone users, then your retargeting audience is not going to be as large or as accurate. So, it could harm your retargeting if you’re not setting up and doing all the things Facebook requires now. So, I’m sure that a lot of [advertisers] probably saw a large decrease in the effectiveness of their retarget audience if they [hadn’t] set up all of those events.

Andrew Street
What are some suggestions for brands like that (but specifically we work with car dealerships)? What can they do to proactively get out and start leveraging some of these advertising techniques?

Jasmine Smedley
Well at this point, it wouldn’t quite be “proactive” because iOS 14 has been out there for a while.

Andrew Street
Okay well, two years reactive. 

Jasmine Smedley
What they can do now is, again, to verify [their] domain if [they] haven’t. And that’s not enough, once the domain is verified, then [they] also have to set up [their] AEM. And one of the good things that has come out of this is that it really does force [automotive dealerships] to be a lot more mindful about what they’re tracking.

It’s no longer “Oh, well, we’ll just track a button click for absolutely everything on our website.” It has to be more of a thought process of “Okay, so what’s important to us? What results do we want to see? Let’s make sure we’re capturing that as accurately as possible, and let’s consider the order of importance for that” (which I’ve spoken about a little bit earlier).

But what I mean by the “importance” is that there are eight events in the AEM, but [dealerships] have to order them because what Facebook has said is…let’s say, somebody  goes to your website. And you’re tracking three different things: a VDP view, a chat open, and a lead form fill. If somebody does all those things, they go to the VDP, talk to somebody in the chatbot, and then they fill out a lead form, Facebook is essentially saying “we are going to track ONE of those actions. Even if [the user does] all three, only one [action/event] will be tracked. Which one do you want us to track?” So a lot of the time, we [at Dealer OMG] order a VDP somewhere lower because someone just going to a VDP isn’t quite the most important thing. It’s all about the lower funnel, like lead form fills—that order. Sorry, I got a little off track. 

Andrew Street
No, but it’s important cause you’re going to assume that you’re tracking VDP views when that person actually filled out a lead form. And you need to attribute that back to the right creative, the right audience, the right copy points, so [dealerships] can continually optimize the ads.

Jasmine Smedley
That is really to answer the initial question of what dealers can do: be mindful. Of all the things that happen on your website, what’s important? What is the most important? What are the eight most important?

Andrew Street
What are a few things that you typically always set up to track with a franchise, new car dealership?

Jasmine Smedley
Definitely VDP views. Even though there are a lot of events that happen on a website, [we do this] because Facebook doesn’t identify VDPs specifically, because [Facebook is] not very automotive specific. If [dealerships] want to optimize [their] ads to make sure that people are going to be going to [their] website and specifically looking at vehicle detail pages, then [they] have to make sure [they] are tracking that very specific type of event.

So that’s one we always set up always. Always (of course) the lead form fills. [Dealerships] want to know, and [they] want to optimize [for that]. Especially for people who are going to go a little bit further, [and] not just visit your website, not just look at a car, but actually submit their information. That’s super important. And for franchise dealers specifically, we also look at “Schedule Services”. That’s really important.

And a cool thing that many [dealerships] don’t realize is that depending on [their] iframe provider, [they] can even track iframe form submissions. And if [they] can do that, then [they] definitely want to optimize [their] ads for something as specific as that and then prioritize that event. So, a little tidbit there.

Andrew Street
Cool! Okay. Here is my quick take on all of this stuff we’re talking about: The iOS 14.5 changes that [came] two years after HEC (which is, any advertising you’re doing that has to do with housing, employment, or credit), [dealerships] can only target [at a minimum] a 15-mile radius around a geographic location. So a big circle and everybody in there. And then that was an opportunity for people like us and brands that are kind of forward-thinking to start figuring out ways to continually be able to target by pulling third-party data. For us, it was DMV records and household income and net wealth and credit scores and things like that to start to narrow the audiences down from just blanketing that radius and also pulling in the dealership’s data.

So people who’ve already shopped us before, people who purchased, but they’re not doing routine services and get them into the service department. So that was a terrible, or that was a horrifying piece of news to come out that translated into being really good for us to have our customer base be the ones who were out ahead of it and immediately being able to really be a lot more prescriptive with their targeting.

And now that we can look back a couple of years, we’re having a similar (hopefully) a similar feeling with iOS 14.5. 

Jasmine Smedley
Yeah, it can be scary, just like it was with HEC, and certainly, there have slowly been more and more restrictions. The most recent [restriction] was, as many people know, lookalikes changed into special ad audiences. And, a few months ago in October (I think it was October),  Facebook essentially said “Okay, no more special ad audiences.”  [Dealership advertisers] can’t even do the fake version [of that which is a] of the “lookalike” [audience]. 

So there are changes, and they can be scary, but ultimately: One, there are (of course) ways of getting around them and still running really valuable ads that lead to conversions and sales while, being protective of [dealership’s] customer’s data.

Andrew Street
Looking forward into a crystal ball of the next three years of digital advertising, especially in the small local business space (and the dealership space for us), what do you think is on the horizon? What kind of shifts? 

Jasmine Smedley
Conversions API is on the horizon. Conversions API doesn’t quite combat iOS 14 because [dealerships] still need to verify [their] domain. [They’re] still going to need to prioritize events. But it does give [them] access to even more of [their] website than the pixel allowed for, because it’s not just pulling from a browser’s data but rather the events that got logged onto [the dealership’s] server and then pushing those [events] back [into Facebook’s event reporting]. So that’s a huge change.

Chrome is starting to push towards no third-party cookies. What a lot of people need to understand is that what happens on your website is a first-party cookie, and Chrome and incognito browsers really are getting rid of third-party cookies. Facebook pixels are very different from a cookie. They function similarly, but ultimately they are different and [the pixels] count as both a first and a third-party cookie, sort of.

But other than that, other than minimizing third-party cookies, I think, um, the future’s bright. We’re still going to find ways to track and overcome while being, better people who aren’t taking advantage of [customer’s] data.

Andrew Street
I agree. And I do also think that with all of these changes it’s going to force advertisers to go back to being creative [with their targeting]. And standing out from competitors and not programmatic and automation completely. And [not] relying on machines to pull inventory feeds and publish the same carousels everybody else on the entire planet are running the same ads. It’s going to require us to step back, come up with some custom creative, use different aspect ratios, start to cut for stories, start to cut for reels.

And, yeah, I agree. I share your optimism for the future. It’s, it’s part my job is to be.

Jasmine Smedley
Yeah, yes, and exactly. And, you know it’s funny because a lot of people are worried that the ads are going to be less tailored now. But I would argue that now they have the opportunity to be even more accurate because you’re not just using generic interest audiences; you’re really focusing on information about the people who are going to buy from you.

Andrew Street
Right? Yeah. And while, while still being able to be a good steward of your data and tapping in responsibly to third party data. For example, like audiences that are working well. Or people who own your manufactured vehicle that is still under warranty, but they didn’t buy from your store. So now we have a group of people who are under warranty who must be doing their services at a dealership, but they didn’t purchase from us; that’s a unique small audience for us to try to pull into our service department and start our relationship with them. Because hopefully, that last dealership charged ’em way over MSRP, and they had a bad experience, and they’re looking to start a new relationship with the dealer.

That’s just my thought.

Jasmine Smedley
Yeah.

Andrew Street
Jasmine, this is great. I think we went into the weeds a lot, because that’s where we live. Whenever my parents are wondering what we do, what I do for a living, I’ll just let ’em listen to this, and they’ll be like, “Okay, this makes a lot of sense.”

Jasmine Smedley
Yeah.

Andrew Street
Cool! Well, thank you. This was fun. This was our first attempt recording something like this, so I hope it’s beneficial for everybody.