Squarespace, Facebook CAPI and iOS14

Lately, I’ve been getting a lot of questions about this Squarespace and iOS14 development so I wanted to write a quick blog post to answer them, though at the moment there’s not a huge amount to say.

In a former life, I was a Facebook Ad Specialist. I used to focus on eCommerce and frankly, this whole iOS 14 debacle is the kind of reason I wanted to rely less and less on Facebook for my bread and butter.  What can I say, no stamina!?? 

Just in case you haven’t heard about the whole iOs14 story, the TL;DR version is that Apple seemed to go all ‘holier than thou’ and stopped Facebook from being able to track audiences and ads as effectively. What this basically means is that there are now more barriers for advertisers to deal with in order to reach relevant audiences. 

Now, it’s important to remember that targeted ads can be a GOOD thing. I mean, wouldn’t your rather be served ads that are relevant to you instead of irrelevant ones that will just end up irritating you? So this change doesn’t mean the ads will go away, what it does mean is you will get more random ads that you probably don’t want appearing on your feeds. 

But here’s the kicker, Apple announced they would soon be launching their own platform. Maybe they weren’t being quite so benevolent after all?? Call me cynical. If you are looking for a deeper delve into this and frankly a more well-thought and professional explanation, you can read this great article from Nutshell Marketing Services.

How does this affect Squarespace?

Now, there is a WordPress and Shopify CAPI integration but that’s no use if you have a Squarespace website.  At present, there is no solution from a developer perspective as the integration requires server access so we are going to need to rely on Squarespace to solve this one.

After catching up and discussing the topic with others in the Squarespace developer community, there’s certainly pressure being applied and questions asked of Squarespace but as yet I have no further info on if or when that might happen.  After all, if we all jumped as soon as Facebook made changes to their ad platform…well, we’d be flying most of the time.

However, anecdotally there are a number of Squarespace developers who don’t seem to be that bothered about the whole thing as yet.  They’ve reported that the various FB and IG ads they are running (and some of these guys have their main revenue stream as courses, templates and course snippets that they sell) have been UNAFFECTED as yet with the changes in iOS14. So I really don’t have that much more to tell you about as yet but I’ll be sure to update you as and when more information becomes available.

In the meantime, I would make sure that your business is verified with Facebook Business Manager.  You can find instructions on that here.

Let me know in the comments below whether you’ve noticed any difference in your ad results to your Squarespace site and I’ll be sure to update this blog when I have more to tell you!