Facebook Vice President Graham Mudd has complained in a blog post that new privacy enhancements on Apple products have impeded its advertising tools. Bowdeya Tweh reports for The Wall Street Journal:
Facebook Inc. FB +1.03% said that Apple Inc.’s recent changes to enhance privacy for users of its mobile operating system are impeding tools that the social-media giant uses to help advertisers measure the effectiveness of their campaigns.
In a blog post Wednesday, Graham Mudd, Facebook’s vice president of product marketing, said the company has heard from many advertisers that privacy changes in the online advertising industry have had a greater-than-expected impact on their operations.
Mr. Mudd suggested that Facebook’s tools may be underreporting information such as sales and app installs, meaning that ad campaigns on the platform are showing better results than the data show. Facebook estimates that its tools are undercounting how often campaigns are driving iOS users to visit a website and take an action, otherwise known as a website conversion, by about 15%, according to the blog post.
Mr. Mudd also said Facebook has embarked on a multiyear effort to develop technologies that collect less personal identifying information from users but still allow it to show personalized ads and measure their effectiveness.
Apple in April rolled out a change to its iOS software requiring apps to ask users for permission to track their activity and share it with other apps or websites. The move has been at the center of an intensifying fight between the iPhone maker and Facebook and other companies that use such tracking technology to sell digital ads.
