By now you may have heard about the new Apple iOS 14.4 Software Update. While we may be prompted to easily update our devices personally, it’s a little more complex to makes sense of how this update around privacy settings will impact lead generation for businesses.
And in particular ad creation and lead flow for car dealerships.
iOS Software Update for Car Dealerships
This iOS software policy update impacts all Apple devices and will allow users to turn on or off the ability for Apple to track movement between apps. Apps would have to request permission or access whenever a new app is downloaded. It’s assumed that many people will opt out of tracking.
Privacy has been a hot topic over the last few years, and Apple is seeking to be known for valuing consumer privacy. This sounds like a great priority for individuals, but may disrupt a businesses Facebook Ads and lead generation during this transition.
How Does This Impact Facebook Ads
For example, if someone has opted out of tracking their movement from Facebook, as a car dealership, you could:
- Begin to see attribution diluted
- See dilution in audience size and availability
If we don’t know where people are coming from and where they are going, it will be harder to build an audience based on those things. In market audience will be a challenge from Apple devices. Of course, not all devices, but at least Apple mobile devices in particular.
Facebook is obviously upset about this and has been vocal to provide alternatives and make some changes.
As a marketing agency, we have already seen a slight disruption in attribution with FB and the software we use, but we are being diligent to manage each account proactively. We are engaged with each account and seeking to avoid as much impact as possible.
The goal with Facebook is to provide even better attribution and a platform that can provide personalized or custom ads to people in the market for certain products and services, such as buying a new car.

Smartbot Keeps Shoppers Engaged on Facebook
Recently, one of the most effective things we’ve seen is the engagement dealers have had using our Smartbot.
Since the Smartbot allows you to instantly engage with a shopper, they don’t have time to jump off of Facebook.
They immediately get their questions answered and share their phone number or email so that a sales rep can get in touch with them in person.
We’ve seen some dealers who have a 63% conversion rate in engagement and collecting contact info to schedule a call or appointment.
Smartbot Conversation With New Car Shopper
Notice how convenient and natural it was for someone to share their contact info.

GA4 Update
Google analytics also had a big update. What has been known as their universal analytics code has now been updated to GA4.
You can run these simultaneously, so if you go into your existing analytics account and go into admin, you can launch your GA4 code simultaneously. We suggest to do this. You can reach out to your OEM rep or us as well. We are happy to help and answer any questions.
They have merged Google tag manager with analytics. This allows you to automatically track events on your website without having to have a separate google tag manager code.
You can create conversions out of those. Conversions will not be url based for GA4, which is a good thing.
We believe this is a step in the right direction for cross channel attribution.
By early spring or summer, we’d love to have all our clients using and relying on the GA4 data, and not so heavily on the universal analytics code. Reach out to us today if you’d like help driving more traffic to your sites via Google Ads. We specialize in helping you protect your PMA.
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