How Will Facebook’s New Privacy Feature Impact Your Brand?

Innovations / May 29, 2019

Is your website secure? Is your privacy policy up to date? Are you GDPR compliant? How are you storing your clients’ information? Is it a secure process?

With last year’s historic data breaches and new data regulations, these questions have probably been brought up in your company’s corporate meeting (and they should have).

Security and privacy are now more than a nice-to-have, they are a necessity. Customers demand transparency, privacy, and security. Brands need to comply with new regulations in order to stay relevant and trustworthy.

Laws and regulations such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) are reshaping the way in which data is handled across every sector and every platform. In order to respect recent privacy expectations, websites and social media platforms are stepping up their security game and giving users more control over their private information.

The Off-Facebook Activity feature

According to eMarketer, 39% of Facebook users are very concerned about the level of privacy and security offered on the platform. To answer some of these concerns, Facebook is launching a new feature that enables users to see the websites and apps that send Facebook information, delete this information from their account, and turn off Facebook’s ability to store it moving forward.

This last part is extremely important because, beforehand, users were able to quickly delete their browser history which would only disconnect the activity already received by Facebook. This new feature will also disconnect their future activity.

This feature will also let users manage future activity for a specific app or website.

So, what does that mean for brands advertising on Facebook?

This new update could affect your ads’ performance considering that users exercising control over their data will limit the targeting possibilities. We, as marketers, will have to serve ads to users based on their previous behaviours.

That being said, Franck Baldacchino, PPC Team Lead at Bloom, thinks this feature won’t hurt brands’ overall digital advertising strategy if they can be proactive and flexible: « It’s safe to say that this new feature will somewhat decrease the amount of information available and limit remarketing possibilities. For us, it’s all about re-thinking our strategy to be less dependant on information coming from website pixels. »

These kinds of updates will be more and more popular in the near future. This means brands need to start diversifying their advertising strategy and not rely on a single platform only. In addition, a multi-channel strategy will enable our clients to increase the number of touch points with potential end users, therefore leading to more sales and growth.

Facebook’s new tool is expected to roll out as early as June, 2019. Are you ready to face these changes? If you need help with your current digital strategy, contact us here.