What is Conversion Tracking?
Measuring What Matters
The best tool for accurately measuring campaign results is conversion tracking. Conversion tracking uses a pixel for recording actions a person takes after clicking or viewing your ad.
Tracking can happen on multiple devices, from mobile phones to desktop computers. No matter where it's happening, conversion tracking clues you into people's behavior after they've encountered your Facebook Ads.
What Is a Pixel?
A pixel is snippet of code placed on a website designed to record conversions from Facebook ads and build targeted audiences for future ads. It works by placing and triggering cookies to track users as they interact with a website and Facebook ads.
What Can Your Pixel Do?
Create a pixel and connect it to your website to:
Ensure your ads are shown to the right people: By understanding how people use your website, you can predict what they're likely to do next. This helps Facebook deliver ads to the people most likely to take the action you want them to take.
Build effective advertising audiences: You can show your ads to people based on how they've already interacted with your website. You can also target ads to brand-new people based on their similarity to established visitors and customers.
Unlock additional advertising tools: Web conversion campaigns, Custom Audiences from your website, dynamic ad delivery, and metrics such as cost per purchase or cost per conversion are only available to advertisers who've installed a pixel on their websites.
Better evaluate your return on ad spend by more precisely attributing online behaviors to your Facebook and Instagram campaigns.
Learn more about installing the Facebook on your website here.
What Is a Conversion?
A conversion is when someone completes a specific action after seeing your ad.
That action can be anything: visiting a website, signing up for an email list, viewing a video, making a purchase, etc. When tracking a purchase conversion event, you can assign the value of the purchase to that event. This allows you to track the monetary effect of your Facebook ad campaigns.
Now you can measure your ad's return on ad spend(ROAS) to determine if you're making money.
How does an ad get credit for a conversion?
Facebook uses a last-touch attribution model, which means they'll attribute full credit for a conversion to the last ad the person clicked or viewed within a certain period of time.
Many advertisers wrongly assume that the conversions attributed to a campaign include only the people who click the ad and immediately convert.
Most conversions actually occur without a click. According to an internal Facebook study, 85% of buyers never click on an ad.
Viewing a webpage is a simple action a consumer may perform when they're interested in learning more about what the ad is offering.
But many actions, such as a decision to purchase, are often more complicated. It frequently takes more than just one click, day, or even week for someone to buy or convert.
The number of days between when a person views or clicks your ad and subsequently performs a key action is called an attribution window.
Conversions that occur outside your attribution window will not be credited to your ad campaign.
Important Update: Facebook's New Rule
Due to Facebook’s recent changes for iOS 14, the best way that advertisers can continue to leverage the benefits of the Facebook pixel and conversion tracking is to own their domains. Otherwise, campaigns will default to link click optimization. While you can continue utilizing all features on ToneDen without owning a custom domain via a "Link Click" objective, we believe that taking the steps to get a custom domain up & running will help see you better results in the long-term.
While all campaigns on ToneDen are able to run using a "Link Click" objective even if the user does not have a custom domain synced up, owning a domain maintains the ability to run conversion campaigns. What does this mean for your ToneDen ads?
Without custom domain: Growth Suite Playbooks, Promoted Smart Links, and all other Advertising campaigns will only be able to report back on the # of link clicks happening on your ads. This may exclude important info on everything that occurs after viewers click on the link. Prior to the iOS 14 changes, users were able to optimize campaigns for conversion events (ie higher value than a link click) without needing a custom domain attached to their campaigns. Running link click campaigns, which don't explicitly bid for higher converting individuals, means you may need to spend more to reach relevant parties.
With custom domain: Growth Suite campaigns, Promoted Smart Links, and all other conversion campaigns will be able to measure events a step above the "Link Click" objective such as View Content, Lead (for pre-saves), Purchase (e-commerce), etc. ensuring that you are reaching more engaged audiences.
We've included a video & step-by-step guide of how to set up a custom domain below:
Key Takeaways
Install the Facebook Pixel to utilize conversion tracking, build custom target audiences, and optimize your campaigns for a specific user actions.
Use conversion tracking to determine your campaign's return on ad spend, high-performing target audiences, and most relevant ads.
Conversions are attributed to your ad campaign by users clicking or viewing your ads within the attribution window.
You have to own your domain to run conversion ads.
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