Facebook to use a bookkeeping illusion to improve the optics of its ad business

Facebook, now known as Meta in the corporate world, plans on making another change and this one is more important to advertisers than giving the company a new name. First, we should point out that Apple's App Transparency Tracking (ATT) feature has hurt Facebook's advertising business. That's because the vast majority of iPhone users are opting out of being tracked.

Those iPhone users who do opt-out of tracking cannot be followed by Facebook as the unique IDFA identifier code that is used to follow people around the internet shows a string of zeros. As pointed out by Forbes, without the IDFA code, Facebook won't be able to track users who click on an ad, Google the company, and use their browser to purchase a product. Thanks to ATT, Facebook can't get a handle on how successful ad campaigns are.

Chart of the Day:@Apple’s advertising business has more than tripled its market share in the six months after it introduced privacy changes to iPhones that obstructed rivals, including 

@Facebook and @Google, from targeting ads at consumers.

*A Thread* pic.twitter.com/vhFFXOzHGa

— Patrick McGee (@PatrickMcGee_) October 17, 2021

But it appears that Facebook is going to make a change to its bookkeeping that will make its advertising business look better than it is. In the past, Facebook counted subscribers using both Facebook and Instagram as one person if they used the same email address and the same device to access both apps. When this person tapped on an ad, they would be counted as one person.

But now, Meta is making a change and says that it will count this user as two separate and different people. In a blog post published earlier this month, Facebook (Meta?) said, "If someone does not have their Facebook and Instagram accounts linked in Accounts Center, we will consider those accounts as separate people for ads planning and measurement. Facebook and Instagram accounts that are connected in Accounts Center will continue to be counted collectively as a single person."

You don't have to be a math whiz to understand how this change will artificially pump up Facebook's advertising numbers even though the bottom line is that the same number of individuals will see a particular ad. Earlier this month, RBC Capital Markets analyst Brad Erickson said that App Tracking Transparency could be a sign of Apple's desire to compete in global advertising.

Financial Times correspondent Patrick McGee recently disseminated a tweet sharing a graph that shows that Apple's advertising business has more than tripled in the six months after the company started adding its privacy features aimed at stopping Facebook and Google from sending targeted ads to iPhone users.

The graph shows the increasing share of Apple's mobile app install ads but doesn't include web ads. The figures in the graph show non-gaming apps only which leads analyst Eric Benjamin Seufert to say that while Apple's search ads have increased their market share since the launch of ATT, the data in the graph can be misinterpreted. Seufert has previously said that "personalized advertising is a public good" which is something that this writer happens to agree with.

Still, being tracked while using apps or browsing the internet seems invasive to most people which puts Seufert and yours truly in the minority of mobile users. We don't mind getting tracked if it results in receiving useful information about where we can find a product that we are interested in buying, and where the device can be purchased at a lower price. This isn't an "Apple" thing or a "Google" thing, it is a matter of convenience.