Voice, tone, and style may sound like the same thing, but they’re not. They work together to define what your brand sounds like and how it’s perceived. So what’s the difference?

• Voice – Consistent brand personality your organization uses in its communications, includes word choices, pronouns, punctuation, and more
• Tone – How you communicate and the attitude you convey depending on the topic or situation—similar to your speaking tone—and the impression it leaves on your visitors
• Style – Guidelines to ensure you present a uniform brand experience using defined language choices and writing mechanics

If you already have a voice, tone, and style guide, make sure you use it consistently because these elements make a difference in a user’s engagement on your website. They help your organization’s content connect with your website audiences by:

• Making you stand out from your competitors
• Building trust through shared values
• Delivering relevant messages that convey your understanding of their needs

Discover & Use Your Brand Voice

Voice is your health care organization’s brand personality. Your voice helps you establish a relationship with your website visitor and should be consistent. If you don’t have a documented organizational voice, you can start discovering it by examining your brand standards. Don’t have brand standards? Then consider your organization’s mission, values, and key messages. These provide the foundation to guide you and your stakeholders as you create a well-defined voice that connects with your audience.

Hospitals and health care systems often use variations on authoritative, conversational, or supportive brand voices.

• • Authoritative – Formal language that carries a sense of professionalism, experience and persuasive thought leadership.

Benefit Health leads the Midwest in the diagnosis and treatment of cardiovascular disease. You can trust our cardiac and vascular teams—composed of highly trained heart, vascular and thoracic specialists, nurses, and technicians—to provide comprehensive care.

• • Conversational – Informal language with a more natural, familiar approach that seems caring, informative and respectful.

Stay close to home while benefiting from exceptional heart and vascular care. At Benefit Health, you gain access to highly trained specialists and the same advanced treatments available at the nation’s most elite medical centers—all in a caring, comfortable community hospital setting.

• Supportive – Casual language filled with personality, enthusiasm, willingness to help, and sometimes slang that seems relaxed, like talking to a trusted friend.
  Put your heart in our hands. If you need a heart care doctor, call on Benefit Health’s heart and vascular specialists. You’ll have access to the latest technology and experienced staff who will be with you every step of the way.

Review these three organizations to see the impact of voice on content about the same condition – depression.

• Mayo Clinic – Uses an authoritative, somewhat formal, matter-of-fact voice in its health information to describe depression. Content functions similarly to an encyclopedia entry. Even though the content is written in second person (“you”), it’s serious and projects little personality. The advantage of this type of voice and defined structure is that it’s easy to create and update. The disadvantage is that the voice may seem too clinical and detached for the readers looking for a more personal, compassionate touch to patient care and health information.
• WebMD – Reflects a casual magazine-like feel. Depression content is straightforward and respectful, but written in second person for a more conversational and personable voice. The advantage of this type of voice and content is that it’s credible, but with a more casual approach that invites the audience to develop a relationship with the organization. The disadvantage is that to achieve the brand voice, the writing style must maintain a careful balance between communicating information that’s medically accurate and understandable to a patient audience. This consistent balance can be hard to achieve.
• Health.com – Adopts a supportive voice with sympathetic and friendly content. The depression information is informal, yet courteous, avoids jargon, and answers consumers’ questions about the condition. The advantage of this type of voice and content is that it’s enthusiastic, warm, and encourages interaction. The disadvantage is that this voice may sound too casual or unprofessional for some readers looking for a more formal voice.

For many health care brands, a conversational voice written in second person is appropriate because it can convey empathy and respect, and it’s able to be more or less enthusiastic or emotional as needed for the subject. Decide which voice best conveys your organization’s personality and then commit to using that voice consistently across all communications.

Your Tone Matters

Tone is a part of your brand voice. Voice, however, stays the same in speech, while tone changes naturally depending on the person or situation. It’s the same principle for written communication—your tone may differ depending on the type of message you want to convey. Tone is more than just words. It’s the way your organization communicates about what it does and who it is. If your tone is right, it can influence patients and prospects to feel the same way you do about your health care brand.

Just how important is tone to creating valuable content? Consider an experiment by Nielsen Norman Group (NNG), a leading user experience research group. NNG found that “different tones of voice on a website have measurable impacts on users’ perceptions of a brand’s friendliness, trustworthiness, and desirability. Casual, conversational, and moderately enthusiastic tones performed best.”

The experiment’s findings also suggest that those perceptions “significantly influence users’ willingness to recommend a brand.” That means the tone is important.

Put together a brand identity with a well-defined voice and tone, and you have a powerful message. Here’s an example of these elements working together:

Benefit Health Brand Messaging:

1. Together, we’re taking good care of you.
2. The right care, in the right place, at the right time.
3. Access to high-quality care close to home.

Voice

• Approachable clinical expert

Tone

• Straightforward, warm, welcoming, easy to understand

Sample Copy
As the largest employer in the region and its leading healthcare provider, we interact every day with people we know and care deeply about—neighbors, friends, and family. The thread of Benefit Health is woven through the fabric of eastern Iowa. Our patients feel the personal connection and extra compassion from being cared for by a neighbor or friend.

Now that you’ve seen what voice and tone can add to your copy let’s look at style.

Why Do We Need a Writing Style?

Content represents your health care organization best when written with a consistent style. Your writing style guide helps your team use your brand voice, tone, and editorial style uniformly across all communication channels. This consistency can aid your organization in becoming an identifiable, credible leader in your health care market.

Your organization’s writing style guide should include:

• Reference to a preferred common style manual, such as The Associated Press Stylebook or another resource, and dictionary along with notes about your organization’s exceptions
• Industry-specific terms, for example, do you prefer robot-assisted surgery, robotic-assisted surgery, or robotic surgery?
• Organization-specific terms, such as department or location names
• Voice and tone, with examples of sentences that do and don’t match it
• Formatting guidelines, such as when and how to use bold text and bulleted lists
• Guidance on meeting accessibility and readability standards
• Web writing practices to help maintain user focus and engagement

Document Your Brand Voice, Tone & Style

If your healthcare organization does not have a voice, tone, and style guide, it’s worth your time to develop one. You’ll benefit from creating and using brand voice, tone, and writing style because it makes it easy for anyone working for your organization—internally and externally—to communicate consistently with your website visitors. These standardized elements will help your team:

• Align messaging in all content
• Increase productivity as they find answers to their questions quickly
• Produce quality communications with fewer drafts
• Strengthen your brand through content that engages your audience

Make sure you’re helping your patients and prospects get to know your organization’s personality, so they feel comfortable getting services from you. Use your voice, tone, and style guide consistently across all communication channels.

Need Help?
If you need help shaping your organization’s voice, tone or setting up style guidelines, contact the writing experts at Geonetric. We’re here to work with you!

Changing CMS platforms

Selecting the right CMS for your organization is an important decision. The platform you choose can either help or hinder your internal team’s efficiency. Its ability to integrate can make or break your other martech-stack investments. And at the end of the day, the features and functionality it offers changes the experience your site visitors have on your site.

According to Geonetric’s recent 2020 Healthcare Digital Marketing Trends Survey, 25% of healthcare provider respondents indicated they recently completed a platform change, are in the middle of a change, or are in the planning stages.

In that same survey, the respondents listed core capabilities such as a provider directory along with conversion opportunities in the form of bill payment and appointment scheduling as the most important features of healthcare websites. Video visits and other features that enable telehealth continue to gain importance. Up-and-coming capabilities — such as chatbots, mobile apps, and Alexa Skills — are not currently seen as important components of healthcare digital experiences.

10 must-have features for hospitals, health systems, and medical clinics

Let’s review some of the must-have features that are the foundation of impressive digital experiences in healthcare, looking deeper at capabilities survey respondents mentioned, as well as the administrative features that make doing the work easier.

1. Intuitive content editor

How important a content editor is to your team may depend on the skillsets of your individual team members as well as how many different teams will be adding content. Choosing an easy-to-use content editor makes it stress-free for any content administrator — from novice to expert — to find, author, edit, preview, and publish web pages. Be sure your solution allows you to easily create pages on the fly without extensive HTML knowledge.

2. Strong workflow features

Governance is key to a successful CMS platform. Content needs to be reviewed for accuracy, and organizational protocols need to be respected in terms of reviews, approvals, and change notifications. Be sure to find a CMS that offers sophisticated workflow management and permissions that allow you to share the work of creating quality content while maintaining control over brand standards.

3. Robust provider directory

There’s a reason the provider directory was the number one feature listed in terms of importance in the Healthcare Digital Marketing Trends Survey. According to McKinsey & Company, 84% of health consumers view digital solutions as the most effective way to search for a doctor. If you can select a CMS that already has a built-in provider directory with all the necessary features, you’ll be one step ahead. If not, you’ll want to ensure you are integrating with, or building from scratch, a sophisticated provider directory.

Regardless of whether it’s built-in or being built, be sure your provider directory: integrates with your credentialing system; offers provider search; allows you to build engaging provider profiles that display insurance accepted and other important details consumers use in making decisions; adds Schema.org markup to profiles; and, of course, offers ratings and reviews integration.

4. Other healthcare-specific modules and directories

Although provider directories top the list of must-have features and functionality, a good web experience helps consumers find the content they need regardless of how they start searching. That why other core directories such as locations, services, and calendar and events are also important. Outside of directories, be sure your CMS solution also offers other modules and functionality, such as wait-time indicators and clinical trials.

5. Dynamic content and personalized experiences

Creating customized experiences is a popular trend among healthcare marketers, but according to our research, personalization on the web still lags behind email and print as an area in which marketers are actively investing. Although only a small percentage of respondents said they are personalizing content — predominantly around geography-based personalization — those that are doing so are finding it successful.

As you evaluate solutions, you’ll want to ensure they will support your needs if you decide to offer personalization based on geography or user behavior. What’s most important is that your CMS offers a way to put site visitors on a path to a conversion point (schedule an appointment, etc.) through the use of dynamic content. For example, Geonetric’s VitalSite platform offers personalization panels that connect provider, service, location, and calendar and events directories — as well as any other pieces of structured content on your site — and cross-promotes the information your site visitors need, regardless of how they navigate your site.

6. Flexibility and scalability

The makeup of your organization today might look a lot different in the future — mergers and acquisitions are on the rise. Healthcare mergers and acquisitions had a record year in 2018, up 14.4% from 2017. 2019 and 2020 were also very active years in terms of merger and acquisition activity, although the disruptions caused by COVID-19 certainly impacted the second half of 2020.

Regardless, today’s healthcare marketers need a platform that will accommodate the acquisition of a new medical clinic or hospital on the fly. From easily adding new doctors to the provider directory to folding in new facilities into the location directory to managing multiple sites under one platform with one login, make sure your CMS is scalable and offers multi-site support.

7. Healthcare-level security — in forms, too

Healthcare organizations are held to high standards when it comes to security due to protecting personal health information. Make sure the solutions you are evaluating incorporate high-level security that controls access to content, uses a role-based security model, automatically encrypts sensitive information, and meets HIPAA compliance standards.

Forms are another important aspect to consider when looking at your CMS solutions as they are the critical conversion point for site visitors indicating they’d like to engage with your organization. Make sure your CMS offers a way for you to easily create, manage, and deploy online forms and enable workflows that follow HIPAA-compliant submissions best practices.

8. Integrations

Your website is only one piece of an ever-evolving martech stack that usually includes a customer relationship management (CRM) system, eCommerce solution, and marketing automation or email platform — all of which are likely big investments for your organization. Make sure your potential solution integrates with your existing technology stack to ensure you can deliver the best possible experience on your site and share data between systems.

9. Built-in SEO

Some optimization efforts are on-page — how you develop content to align with searchers’ queries. But some of it is technical and comes down to how your CMS is built. If you’re not careful, the platform you choose could hold you back. Look for a solution that aids your efforts with built-in search engine optimization (SEO) functionality such as Schema.org physician and location markup, canonical URLs, and metadata. Just the way your site is coded impacts page speed, a ranking indicator, so be sure you choose a CMS that is thoughtful about SEO.

10. Evolving platform

Too often, after a large investment in a new platform, it can quickly become outdated. Be sure to invest in a system that is being invested in, especially in this fast-moving digital world where small changes to a Google algorithm can have big impacts on your rankings if your platform doesn’t comply. (Schema.org markup, anyone?)

Although Geonetric builds websites on multiple platforms, our own propriety system, VitalSite, regularly gets new features and functionality, and our clients receive those at no additional costs.

Choosing the right platform for your organization

There’s so much more to think about as well when it comes to choosing a platform, including accessibility and analytics, but evaluating your CMS options by these 10 features (at a minimum) will help set you up for success today and in the future.

If you’d like to learn more about our VitalSite CMS solution, be sure to schedule a demo, or contact us to learn about how we can help you on other solutions such as WordPress, Drupal, or Sitecore.

If you’re still not sure what platform is right for you, reach out. We’ve helped healthcare organizations pick the right CMS for them based on their unique needs, team skillsets, and technology stack — and we’d be happy to help your organization evaluate potential solutions.

Attend a free webinar that offers an overview of the mechanics and art of writing compelling content for healthcare consumers. Well-written content that answers user questions and helps them complete tasks is essential to a successful digital strategy. The COVID-19 pandemic has only accelerated the importance of clear, actionable, consumer-friendly content that not only meets your organizational goals and stands out from competitors and market disruptors — but also helps improve health outcomes.

5 reasons health systems select Sitecore

When it comes to CMS platforms in healthcare there’s a lot to choose from. Each comes with a list of different pros and cons, especially for health systems. To avoid confusion, it’s important to remember why you are embarking upon the process of selecting a new content management system.

For many health systems, digital transformation and digital front door initiatives are the motivation behind rethinking their digital technology. These strategies focus on creating opportunities across channels — including web, mobile, call center, chat, and more – to connect patients with appointments and services. They rely on data-driven decision-making that is centered around a unified view of each consumer in order to make more intelligent decisions that connect both marketing and clinical operations.

With that in mind, here are the top five reasons healthcare organizations are picking Sitecore Experience Platform™ (XP) to help move their digital strategies forward:

#1: Personalization

Marketing is all about creating emotional connections, so it’s no surprise the idea of creating more personalized digital experiences is appealing. In fact, personalization can be a critical part of creating a user experience that truly coveys the personal, local care that patients can expect. It’s become a necessity for the streamlined navigation of complex health systems with hundreds of care locations. All of this is a key part of why Sitecore is a popular option.

Sitecore XP offers multiple approaches to tailoring the user experience on your site. Rules-based personalization can use a wide variety of available data about each visitor to make decisions about how different elements throughout your site should respond — showing, hiding, swapping, or customizing information as desired. Additionally, Sitecore XP can take some of the manual aspects of personalization and automate it, integrating customer data, analytics, AI, and marketing automation capabilities into the CMS.

For most health systems, the idea of personalization is intriguing, but few have the on-team resources to really invest in it. In fact, Geonetric’s recent 2020 Healthcare Digital Marketing Survey results showed just 21% of respondents were using a personalization strategy on the web. Of those who use it, only 25% agree or strongly agree that personalization has improved their digital marketing. It’s important to realize that personalization can quickly create an exponential demand for new content and creative assets. If personalization is important to your strategy, it’s critical to find a partner that can help to create a plan that improves the user experience, aligns with business goals, and is sustainable for your team.

#2: Content flexibility

Creating and maintaining a cohesive online user experience with the help of multiple content authors and editors can be a challenge. Efficiently reusing and repurposing content is critical to making the most of your content development efforts. The solution to both of these challenges is structured content. Rather than open-ended web pages or “blobs” of text, a structured content approach defines reusable content types with discrete “chunks” or fields that create consistency and can allow for some or all of each content item to be reused in multiple ways and across multiple channels.

Sitecore XP supports the creation of custom content types (data templates) that can help ensure consistency, promote reuse, simplify governance, and drive a user-friendly experience. The platform’s approach is forward-thinking in separating content items from the legacy of web pages, supports a robust taxonomy structure, and fits with a variety of search solutions to ensure your content gets found. It’s a fantastic set of building blocks that, combined with content strategy expertise, can be used to enable your team to create and manage content efficiently and effectively.

#3: Digital asset management

When you think about all of your digital assets – photos, graphics, videos, and more — keeping everything organized and up-to-date is a chore. Especially for health systems with numerous care locations and publishing to multiple marketing channels. That’s where Digital Asset Management (DAM) software comes in. DAM software stores all of your assets in one place and allows you to categorize them for easy search and retrieval. You can upload, edit, or delete in batches and share links.

But, that’s just the start. Going a step beyond basic DAM systems, Sitecore Content Hub is an integrated add-on that allows you to plan and execute content marketing efforts, as well as managing a broad range of marketing operations, reviews, approvals, and projects. Altogether, this creates a platform that keeps your marketing team moving quickly, creating and publishing high-quality digital content.

#4: Mature, enterprise-level features

Large, complex organizations tend to have large, complex needs when it comes to managing their web presences. Features like extensive, detailed user rights and flexible management workflows enable organizations to distribute authorship and management of sites to many contributors from across the enterprise. With an increased number of users single sign-on options can help make user management simple and consistent with your other enterprise systems.

On the delivery side, you need a web platform that supports high-performing, rapidly scalable hosting approaches to ensure a snappy, seamless user experience. Sitecore XP supports multiple approaches to scaling your web management architecture – from splitting web application roles across servers to adding load balancing to better handle surges in traffic.

#5: Microsoft .NET ecosystem

Since many healthcare systems already use Microsoft widely, .NET makes sense from an operational and resourcing standpoint. The .NET framework, along with Microsoft Azure, offers enhanced security and safeguards.

Sitecore XP is built and runs on .NET. By selecting a platform that relies on this well-known, stable framework healthcare organizations can build on their current technical capabilities and create consistency across their selected technologies.

Sitecore brings a lot to the table – but it doesn’t come with strategy
When evaluating all web content management systems and DXPs, there are tradeoffs between what the platform can do and what your team can manage.

To make the most of Sitecore XP and the depth of the functionality it offers often requires a strategic digital partner to come alongside the development and implementation. From developing the personas, journey maps/digital relevancy maps and structured content that make personalized experiences run to creating site content that follows the patient journey for top services, finding a partner who gets healthcare makes a big difference.

If you’d like help deciding if Sitecore is right for your organization, or have already decided on Sitecore and are looking for an agency with healthcare experience to ensure you’re making the most out of your platform, contact us.

The strength of a system-level strategy

Before we examine how to respond to a request for individual doctor websites, it’s helpful to understand the current state of how healthcare organizations are marketing themselves. Over the last decade, there has been a shift to a more system-centric approach for health-system websites. This shift allows systems to leverage their size, reach, and depth and breadth of their services more effectively by making it easier for patients to find this information all in one place, supporting patient-first user experience (UX). It also allows systems to tell a more robust story about their service offerings.

Using multiple websites to communicate this singular story can create search engine optimization (SEO) challenges and lead to issues with the UX for site visitors, resulting in general confusion about what is offered and leading to patient attrition. It also quickly becomes a maintenance nightmare for digital teams.

Those issues, along with a focus on efficiency, are what led to the shift to a system-centric website approach, which has been the approach of choice for most multi-hospital systems for the last five years.

Although the system-centric approach has typically been well-received by site users evidenced by increased site sessions for those organizations who made the switch, internal stakeholders have been harder to convert.

Enter: doctors.

What leads doctors to want individual websites?

No matter how hard you work to ensure a cohesive brand online, you will inevitably have certain doctors or service lines asking to move their business from the main site to a separate microsite. Top reasons for this include:

• Feeling under-represented or lagging the competition. There may be a legitimate mismatch between their direct competition’s online marketing and how their services are presented within the health system.
• Idea of personal brand. Often providers are accustomed to having their name as the headline (or face on a billboard!) and they crave that specific attention. Especially if they were part of a group that was recently acquired or merged with another system. Beyond that, providers (along with everyone else these days) are inundated with encouragement to create a “personal brand.”
• The promise of results. If a doctor’s schedule isn’t full, they may think marketing is to blame.

Once the issue is raised (or you discover a rogue microsite in the wild), the best approach is one focused on bridge-building: Take an honest look at how their individual, practice, and specialty information is presented compared to the alternatives options that health consumers would be considering and see if opportunities arise. It’s still good to be firm about your organization’s website governance policies (you have those, right?), but look at this as an opportunity to create an ally for the long term.

The risks of stand-alone sites

Often, doctors like the idea of having a stand-alone website for their practice. They often see the microsite as a way to build out more content, be more visually interesting than the health system website, or even distance themselves from the overall health system brand. In short, it gives them more control.

And they believe that, with more control, they can get more traffic, tell a more compelling story, and bring in more patients.

Unfortunately, reality rarely works out that way for a number of reasons. Here are the top three:

1. Fragmentation: Separating different parts of your organization’s story from your offerings makes it harder for consumers to find what they need, and when they do find it, what’s there is often less compelling. Over time the stories across these sites often diverge, creating an even more confusing experience for healthcare consumers.
2. Optimization: Microsites can have a variety of challenges when it comes to SEO, for one, it splits domain authority. Google uses a wide array of factors to determine domain authority — a metric used to predict the ability of a website to rank in search engines, including inbound links, content depth on a subject, click-through rates, etc. Microsites split off these features, undermining the authority of both the microsite and the health system’s main website. In addition, a new microsite will often force you to “start over” with domain/page authority, which is a very difficult score to build.
3. Duplicate content: When content is copied verbatim Google can penalize you, assuming that one site or the other is stealing the content or otherwise attempting to game the system to improve rankings. There are ways to avoid these penalties but they harm the SEO of one of the web properties involved, create more work, and can be a real burden for the long-term management of the sites.

How to move forward

Assuming you win the battle to keep the doctor from spinning up a new site or microsite, there are ways to keep your stakeholders, users, and search engines happy, all while protecting the system brand and system-centric approach you’ve worked so hard to build.

• Reinforce the system strategy of the organization – the reason the physician is there is to make the most of her unique expertise.
• Give the provider’s profile a different look and incorporate branding by having a designer create templates with unique styling that still complements the main site so as not to confuse site visitors.
• Encourage the doctor to work with you to develop robust, localized, focused content around a niche topic that may have a positive effect on SEO and drive interest in their specialty. Connect that content to their official profile as well.
• Understand where your competition is focusing their optimization and paid advertising efforts. Competitive analysis coupled with keyword research and user testing can put a huge spotlight on a doctor/service line while still being part of the main site.

At the end of the day, these conversations are difficult. The request from a provider can come across as de-valuing your marketing expertise or your organization’s overarching strategy. Plus, you’ve likely worked hard to get and keep a centralized marketing budget and requests to siphon some off for side projects doesn’t help your cause.

Geonetric works with growing health systems day in and day out, helping them create system-centric digital strategies – and defend them when needed.  It’s all about putting the users first and being committed to that focus, even when doctors or department heads disagree. The good news is, there are many viable paths forward to keep both users – and doctors – happy. If you need a digital partner with a proven track record, contact us.

It’s important to understand that making your hospital’s website work with a physical keyboard is less about using the keyboard specifically and more about allowing your website to work for all input devices, such as a keyboard, mouse, switch devices, etc.

By programming your website to work with a keyboard, you are essentially programming it to work for all input devices as those input devices usually emulate or work similarly to a keyboard. You also do your part to meet the keyboard accessibility standard for WCAG 2.1 guidelines, as well as creating a more user-friendly site, in general.

Reasons to keep keyboard navigators top of mind

Here are three use-cases for hospital website visitors that hit home the need to consider how your website interacts with physical keyboards.

1. One of the benefits of responsive design is that users can zoom to get the mobile view on a large screen. This is particularly helpful for people with low vision or those with certain concentration or cognitive disabilities. Zooming to the mobile view on a large screen allows users a more clear, focused, and simple layout.Because there are a large number of people with multiple disabilities who may not be able to use a mouse or touch screen, you need to make sure this mobile view also works well with a keyboard.
2. Some people have tablets mounted to their chairs and operate them not with touch or a mouse, but rather with a switch device or other input device. Again, by ensuring your mobile and desktop sites both work with a keyboard, you are also ensuring they work with most types of input devices.
3. Screen readers on touch screen devices disable the normal touch functionality. This means that swiping left and right would not advance a carousel banner, but instead reads either the next or previous element on the page, or the next or previous letter in a word, depending on the user’s settings. In this situation, you wouldn’t be using a keyboard to interact with the mobile site, you’d be using a wide variety of swipe and tap combinations. By programming your mobile site to work with a keyboard, you also ensure it will work properly with a mobile screen reader.

Inclusive design means excellent user experience

At the end of the day, designing with accessibility in mind makes the user experience better for all users, regardless of ability. If you have questions about inclusive design or are looking for answers to your accessibility questions, contact us. In addition, our team of experts would be happy to provide feedback on your healthcare website. Simply sign up for a free accessibility check-up and we’ll be in touch!

What happened with iOS 14?

To understand the aspects of Apple’s iOS 14 update, and how it impacts marketers, we first have to understand what IDFAs are.

What is an IDFA?

IDFA stands for “Identifier for Advertisers” and is Apple’s persistent ID that gets assigned to individual Apple devices (iPhones, Apple TV, iPad, etc.).

This identifier allowed Apple and, subsequently, advertisers within their platform to create a more personalized experience across apps based on user behaviors. For marketers, this allowed for a more optimized campaign initiative because we can target users a lot more specifically based on their actual behaviors and interests.

When coupled with cookies around the web, these IDFAs — which also allowed frequency capping, campaign performance metrics, app installs, and attribute impressions — we were able to create truly robust identity graphs which could be used for advertising.

Changes to IDFA in iOS 14

So what changed? With the iOS 14 update the IDFA technology went from opt-out and opt-in. The change seems minor on the surface but it aims to recognize a complaint we’ve been hearing for many years.
Consumers have been frustrated with data security because the conditions of their data are buried in the depths of terms and conditions and user agreements. Typically by logging into a platform you’re giving them certain permissions by default, unless you specifically opt out. The iOS 14 update will require users to opt IN to the IDFA technology, which we estimate will be very few.

This change will remove the ability to share user or device-level data with advertisers. Apple will retain full control over any attribution data passed back to ad networks and the data they will pass is minimal. Ad networks can now plan to receive:

• Click-based attributes
• 100 Campaign IDs per ad network
• Batched conversions with a latency of 24-48 hours
• Removal of the date stamp parameter
• A single, fixed attribution lookback window
• Limited probabilistic data
• Deferred deep linking
• Limited demographic data

How will this impact advertising?

It’s difficult to know the exact impact this will have in the long-term, as things are still changing rapidly.

Facebook ads

One of the places that’s already seen a large impact is the Facebook advertising platform. As it stands, Facebook is unable to ask users to provide that IDFA data, even if they’ve chosen to opt in. This means that the entire iOS audience network is lost and advertisers on Facebook will no longer be able to directly target Apple users in any significant way.

You’ve likely seen changes to your reporting within Facebook already. Demographic information has been cut dramatically (maybe entirely, based upon the operating system breakdown of your audience) and conversions have gotten muddled. With the iOS 14 update only allowing click-based attributes, some landing-page specific conversions are no longer being tracked and are resulting in the appearance of campaigns tanking.

Luckily, Facebook and other platforms that have their own network have already adopted user IDs specific to their platform. Expect to tap into this data more moving forward as Apple continues to restrict the data they pass through to these networks.

Assisted metrics

The two biggest areas we can expect to see the impact fall under assisted metrics and platforms that take advantage of off-site behaviors. Assisted metrics, such as assisted conversions and assisted revenue will see a dramatic impact. These metrics are what allow us to attribute ROI to the appropriate channel. For example, a display campaign that is meant to increase awareness rather than drive conversions, uses these assisted metrics to showcase the impact these campaigns have on pushing users down the funnel into those more meaningful conversions. Without this view-through data, those initial click attributions are gone.

Off-site behavior

Off-site behavior targeting & tracking is an essential piece of digital marketing. How many times have you been startled by an ad on Facebook showing a product or service you were just talking about with friends? This is because other websites and apps share data with each other and advertisers on Facebook (and other display networks) can tap into this data and show you ads relevant o your interests. The iOS 14 update is going to severely limit, if not remove, that data from Apple devices.

On the consumer side, at least on the surface, it seems comforting that you won’t get those creepy ads that seem to be following you. However, those ads work so well because we as consumers secretly like them and click on them. I wanted new shoes, you showed me shoes I like, I bought those shoes.

Silver lining

Looking on the bright side of the iOS 14 update for marketers, those of us who keep our finger on the pulse will dominate the playing field. Across the industry there will be a swift and large drop in targeting power and control which for many advertisers will lead to poor ad placement and optimization inefficiencies. For the rest of us, those that adapt to the new standards and tap into the platform-specific data we have, we can take advantage of those inefficiencies drive down our cost-per-acquisition with competition dwindling. This is definitely not the end of digital advertising.

You also shouldn’t expect to see much of an impact on the PPC (keyword advertising) side, as that relies very little on the user data and more on keyword data. You may see a decline in some of those user-focused metrics you use to optimize PPC campaigns, but that data should still be supplemented by Google’s own behavior tracking across their platforms (Google YouTube, Google Analytics, Gmail, etc.).

What do we do now?

At Geonetric, our experts recommend sticking with your advertising and adapting to the new structure around the data you can expect, as well as the new regulations in place.

Facebook conversions

Facebook has restrictions on the number of conversions you can track. We often see where clients will end a campaign and leave the conversions in place, because they simply won’t fire anymore and you don’t have to recreate them if you were to run that campaign again in the future. Facebook is now allowing only a finite number of conversions to be tracked at a time, so it’s worth revisiting the conversions you have in place and keeping the list clean and up-to-date.

With your team

Have conversations with your team(s) and vendors to ensure everyone is aware and prepared for iOS 14. This is especially important, as outlined above, for anyone involved in Facebook advertising as well as any display advertising.
Revisit your campaign strategy and determine what changes need to be made. Are you relying on that stored off-site behavior data to place your ads? Are you taking advantage of retargeting? Do you have audience segmentation based on demographics? These things are changing and it’s vital that you shift your strategy or those campaigns could decline significantly.

Audit your efforts

Use this as an opportunity to audit your data. This marks a substantial change in the way we look at digital privacy, and other organizations are likely to follow suit. This isn’t the end of digital marketing, it won’t even necessarily make it harder, but it is going to require us to change our strategy and understand the data we have available to us. As one data stream closes, another will open, you have an opportunity to be the first one to tap into that new stream and see your initiatives flourish!

Need help?

If the idea of keeping up with the changing landscape of digital marketing sounds overwhelming, our experts are happy to help. Sign up for a free ads assessment to get started!

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