Opt-in for tracking, pretty please?

Over the past few years social media have gathered quite some reputational damage. While we once were enthusiastic about easily staying in touch with all our friends, we now are more and more aware of the flipside.

Privacy is our number one concern regarding social. Apple has acted on this need for more privacy with its iOS 14 update, making it obligated to opt-in for third party tracking. This has already had grave results. Meta estimated a whopping 10 billion dollar loss in revenue due to this loss in data. So in an attempt to turn things around, they came with an ad campaign of their own:

In the ‘Good Ideas Deserve To Be Found’ campaign, Meta focuses on small, local and green businesses that can be found with the help of personalized ads. The ‘do it for them’ angle is a clever one to use, because it’s not likely people will allow tracking just to help the tech giant make more revenue. Personally I question if this campaign will make people understand what the upside of personalized ads is. In the end it’s hard to cover the data-driven Meta monster behind it. I fear opt-outs for tracking will only increase, which is a real issue for social advertising.

So what can we do? Well, just because tracking outside of social platforms is getting harder does not mean tracking inside the platform is. Therefore I think it’s good to look at solutions that do just that. Want to sell products online? Use social shopping tools like Facebook Catalog. Want to generate leads? Use an in-app lead form. The options are all there and we see more and more platforms offering them.

Though the real next step to take is to be able to pay within the app so also conversions can take place within the platform. Platforms like Facebook, Pinterest and TikTok have already announced the first cautious steps to provide this. And they do need to be cautious about it. Because if people don’t want platforms to track them, will they be willing to give them their payment info? Only time will tell.