German Music Marketer Philipp Lützenburger Explains Why Tracking is So Important Even After iOS14

Apple introduces the “App Tracking Transperancy” (ATT) framework in April 2021 & turns the entire online marketing world upside down. Large corporations such as Meta or TikTok are gradually having problems accurately tracking campaigns and correctly modeling the data obtained. Quite to the detriment of advertiser customers. CPCs increased, conversions became more expensive. Up to 60% less data flowed back to the platform via previous tracking solutions, such as the Facebook Pixel.

Not only a problem in e-commerce, but also in the music industry. Especially there, where there are thousands of different genres & budgets are mostly not infinite, the campaigns simply have to hit the bull’s eye.

Philipp Lützenburger, founder of the German music marketing agency “SwipeUp Marketing” explains why tracking and using data is more important than ever nowadays. 

Cookie-based tracking vs. serversite-tracking

How was data collected in the past? In the past, the so-called Facebook Pixel sent the information about the web browser, packaged as a cookie, back to the platform. There, users were matched on the basis of browser ID, user agent and IP address and assigned to campaigns that they had previously clicked on. This made it very easy for advertisers to track which ads were performing well and even retargeting.

With iOS14, tracking via third-party cookies is prevented by default. In other words, the user would have to actively agree to tracking on third-party sites. According to studies, this does not even happen in 30% of cases. But how can we still collect data? Through server-side tracking. This is a bit more complex to set up, but if set up correctly, it works like Swiss clockwork. The data is now no longer returned to Facebook via the browser, but directly from the web server. This requires an interface, such as the Conversion API developed by Facebook. 

This can already be used natively with some tools, or connected via Google Tag Manager, for example. 

The nitro injection for your campaign

Now you might be thinking, “Phew, that sounds so complicated, I’d rather just keep using my Pixel & pulling my insights manually from the campaigns.” 

But what if I told you that it’s possible to more than halve your Cost-Per-Click in a matter of days? That’s exactly what the algorithm allows us to do if we feed it high quality data. If it knows not only how many click-throughs there were on the landing page, but also by whom, it can optimize the campaign in a short time. For example, the last few weeks we managed to optimize a campaign that started with 1.50€ per conversion on our landing page to under 0.20€ CPV. This had a massive effect on daily streams & growth on Spotify after only a few days. 

If you still build your ads on traffic campaigns that don’t even measure conversions to DSPs, you’d better not bother with marketing any further. 

The market leaders are still asleep

Unfortunately, the biggest music marketing platforms like Feature.FM or ToneDen still haven’t managed to offer server-side tracking. 

Only LinkFire offers the possibility to integrate the Google Tag Manager, which allows a connection to the Facebook Conversion API. We are currently testing this solution. 

For live projects, however, we have been using our own software so far, which combines extremely fast loading times & clean tracking through direct CAPI connection. This way we offer our customers the highest possible data quality and can deliver significantly better results than other music marketing agencies.

Track this sh*t!

You can find a lot of useful information on how to implement server-side tracking in Facebook’s developer documentation. 

If you have questions about this or need help setting it up, you can sign up for a free strategy call at https://swipeup-marketing.com