Advertisers 'caught in middle' of Apple-Meta battle as traffic from Facebook drops – The Irish Times

Irish ecommerce businesses that rely on social media to win new customers are seeing less traffic to their sites from the iPhone Facebook app and are paying more to advertise to this audience since Apple’s iOS privacy update last year, a new survey has found. Analysis by marketing company Wolfgang Digital found that traffic to ecommerce sites from the Facebook app on iPhones has dropped 29 per cent since the April 2021 update to Apple’s operating system (iOS 14.5) that requires apps to seek user consent to track their activity across other apps and websites. Almost two-thirds of Irish iPhone users do not consent to apps tracking them, according to research conducted in February by Wolfgang Digital in partnership with iReach. The survey of 1,000 Irish adults found that 36 per cent were iPhone users and 64 per cent of those did not consent to being tracked. That makes about 23 per cent of Irish adults “untrackable” for Facebook’s parent company, Meta, Wolfgang Digital said. This has led to greater competition to reach a smaller audience, and consequently sharply higher ad prices. Wolfgang Digital reported a 91 per cent rise in advertisers’ cost-per-click since last April. “It used to be…
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