Apple’s ATT update, which has seen many people block social media apps from tracking their activity, has caused major disruption in the digital ads sector, with Facebook and Snapchat, in particular, highlighting significant losses as a result of the change.

Though, really, Apple’s update had been a long time coming, with evolving data privacy laws and regulations also looking to help ensure that people are more aware of how their personal information is used, in order to help them choose who and how such data is accessed.

As such, advertisers need to evolve their strategies – and recently, Meta partnered with Deloitte to provide more insight into exactly how brands can do just that, with a range of best practices and advice, based on industry experts, to help navigate the new normal of digital ad targeting.

The notes are included in Meta’s new, 35-page ‘Signal Resiliency’ guide – which is called ‘signal resiliency’, but could just as easily have been titled ‘How to negate the impacts to tracking restrictions’.

You can download the full guide here, but in this post, we’ll look at the key highlights.

First off, the guide outlines the scope of the challenge, with a range of illustrations on how signal loss is impacting the digital ad targeting flow.

The guide also provides a broader overview of the elements that could be impacted, which highlights the importance of updating your approach.

And it’s only going to get more challenging in the years ahead…

As noted, it’s not just Apple’s update, there are various elements at play which will increasingly complicate the data tracking process, and in turn, limit your capacity to reach the right audiences with your ads.

Which is why you need to start investigating alternative tracking options, and incorporating them into your process.

Marketers love a funnel, don’t they?

The guide outlines a range of key steps that you need to take, or at least consider, to mitigate data loss, and the impacts they’ll have on your campaigns.

I mean, some of these are not an option for all brands. You may not need a steering committee, as such, but the concept is that you need to understand the impacts from all angles, in order to then come up with alternate means to navigate the new data privacy waters.

And there’s a heap of more in-depth tips and notes in the final third of the guide.

Planning, in this respect, is key, and you do need to have a defined strategy in place to combat potential data loss, or at least, to understand where you’re losing out, and how you can best manage your own data collection processes to maximize ad effectiveness.

Because really, that’s what these changes do – they put more onus on each business to collect their own data, with their own consumers’ consent, to then build that into their targeting and retargeting processes, as opposed to relying on the platforms which increasingly won’t have the same level of insight.

Each app and network is working on its own systems to counter the same, but it’s definitely worth taking note of these tips, and considering how you can manage the same internally, in order to improve your ad targeting process.

And really, the more you understand about such, the better your targeting will be anyway, so it is worth investigating these notes and considering their potential impact.

You can download the full ‘Signal Resiliency’ guide here.