mparr4

> niche brands are not a thing of this century alone

Sure, but targeting ads enabled a massive increase in volume of niche brands.

In particular, brands whose target customer is fairly specific (so totally untargeted ads, like TV commercials, magazine ads, etc, wouldn't have positive ROI) and whose product isn't already known to the customer (if it were known, then content marketing/SEO could work).

> Couldn't you advertise or sponsor user groups, forums, clubs, etc

Yes, just like before. However targeting ads dramatically expanded the audience and effectiveness of marketing spend. Finding the right clubs/groups and figuring out how to advertise to what are probably unique groups is hard. Flipping a switch on a FB campaign is easy. And not everyone is in a club, but just about everyone has a FB account.

> Also don't forget..

I'm not saying anything about who is leading or whether it is good or bad, just that the iOS14 change was like taking a sledgehammer to many businesses like mine.

Prior to the change we had tried a handful of sales channels and only found positive ROI in FB ads. And those FB ads experienced a step change w/ the iOS14 release. Judging from the D2C/PPC communities I'm a part of, my experience was not unique.

Like it or not, FB targeting enabled a certain category of businesses to exist, and now that category is reduced. As I said in another comment, this isn't a judgement about whether we as a society are better or worse off, just that this is the cost of that decision.

Thank you for the clarification. Obviously I did not know that about Safari & IDFA.

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.

I don't agree with you that ruhdgjns is not engaging in good faith. He's engaging with my comment. Given that I am a D2C business owner and therefore a modern advertiser, that's a pretty reasonable view for him to consider.

Re: "go back to fundamentals" and "not necessary", I wish it were so simple. In my comment I mention that it makes selling niche products much harder, which is absolutely the case. Some businesses just can't exist without good targeting. Maybe we as a society don't want those businesses to exist, and that's fine, but it's not as simple of a matter of these businesses needing to be better at advertising. With good targeting a business can exist that only has a small subset of customers in the world. A business like this likely can't afford to acquire customers via traditional advertising.

This makes many D2C businesses much harder and a subset of those businesses won't be able to succeed at all in this climate. Again, I'm not passing any judgement on whether that's a good thing or a bad thing for society, just that it is the case. Good targeting is absolutely necessary for some businesses.

Apple made accessing a devices IDFA (device fingerprint) a permissioned resource. Needless to say it is not a popular permission to grant.

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!

FWIW I run a D2C brand and the iOS 14 change hurt badly.

We are able to attribute something like half of the sales we used to. The main consequence of this is the FB models can't learn who our customers are as well, resulting in an increase in our cost of customer acquisition.

It makes selling niche products much harder.

It’s actually a custom form (not canned) and we had previously had an additional field for area of interest but it lowered the conversion rate of the form so we dropped it.

Getting emails is more important to our business than knowing where folks want to see. We also don’t want folks to have the expectation that we’ll make a map because they requested it. Each map takes a lot of work and in our experience requesters rarely become purchasers.

(Also, we see the page you submitted your email on, which is often a search query that was not successful, which tells us what you were looking for!)

That step could certainly be its own post of greater length than this one.

For this particular map it involves separate curve adjustment layers for the water and land. We generally increase the steepness of the curve (increasing contrast) and then adjust individual color channels to get the color balance right. We also do some localized burning (darkening) in areas where pushing the curve resulted in some pixels getting too bright.

I’d love to put together a post with lots of pictures and details about how we do this. It is motivating knowing there is an audience for it.