One of the primary reasons for bad reporting in Meta Ads Manager is conversion events that were set up improperly. This includes standard events, custom events, and custom conversions.

You should test your events before relying on them in your Ads Manager reporting. If you don’t, this is one of the first steps you should take when you run into questionable results.

Why isn’t Ads Manager reporting your conversions? Are the numbers inflated? Is the wrong event reported? Confirm the answers to these questions by testing your events.

Here’s how to approach this…

What to Look For

When testing events, there are several things to look for…

1. Is the event firing? When someone completes a conversion, does the expected event fire?

2. Is the event firing on the wrong page? Oftentimes we’ll see the final step of a conversion flow fire on the wrong page. For example, Purchase or CompleteRegistration fires when the initial button is pushed.

3. Is the event firing multiple times? This isn’t a problem if you perform an event multiple times, obviously. But do you see an event duplicated? Is it the same event or do you have multiple events set up under the same name?

4. Are parameters set up properly? Passing parameters (details of a conversion) can be tricky, so it’s nice to get confirmation that this information is passed correctly.

Go to Test Events

Within Events Manager, go to Data Sources and then select your pixel.

Now, go to Test Events within the horizontal menu.

You can test website or CRM events. For the purpose of this tutorial, we’re going to test website events.

We’re able to test either server or browser events. For now, let’s test the browser (website) events.

Enter the URL of a page where this event will occur and click “Open Website.”

Go ahead and perform the action or actions that should fire the events you are testing. You should see the standard events, custom events, automatic events, and custom conversions appear in real time in Events Manager as they happen.

You can choose which types of events and activity details appear from the dropdown on the right.

If you ever want to start over, you can click to clear activity.

You can expand an event to get additional details of the information that was passed. This is especially helpful if you pass parameters with an event.

This is useful if you ever create custom conversions or website custom audiences and need to manually enter parameters when creating rules.

Other Testing Considerations

There are other ways to test your events, as well. I’ve used the Facebook Pixel Helper Chrome extension in the past, and it’s generally good for easily troubleshooting while I’m on a page. But I’ve found it’s less dependable than testing within Events Manager.

You should also consider options to test prior to publishing changes, if possible. How that is done will depend upon how you manage your pixel. But Google Tag Manager allows you to preview how tags (your events) fire before publishing your changes. The Events Manager testing option won’t work for a page that hasn’t been published, of course.

You want to catch problems as quickly as possible because changes to your events won’t be corrected historically — only going forward. If you place an event on an incorrect page and get overcounting, that tabulation will continue to exist in your history.

Likewise, if you change the name of an event, the old name will continue to appear in your history and across many of Meta’s dashboards, at least for a period of time.

Watch Video

I recorded a video about testing your events, too…

Your Turn

How do you test your Meta conversion events?

Let me know in the comments below!

The post How to Test Meta Conversion Events appeared first on Jon Loomer Digital.

If you dig into your Meta conversion events, you are likely to notice a problem: Conversion event data doesn’t match up. Why?

I’m not talking about your event data matching up with Google Analytics or other third-party reporting tools (these things will never match up). I’m talking about Meta’s own conversion event data not matching up.

You may be surprised to know that this isn’t a bug or a problem. There is a reason for it. And once you understand that reason, your data will make a lot more sense.

Let’s clear this up…

The Conversion Data

First, let’s establish the various pools of conversion data that we’re concerned about here.

1. Standard and custom event data within the Data Sources section of Events Manager
2. Custom conversion mapped to that standard or custom event
3. Ads Manager conversion reporting

These three will almost never match up. For the most astute, it may be obvious why #3 doesn’t match up with #1 or #2.

But, do you understand why the first two won’t match up? The assumption tends to be that Events Manager is over-counting or the custom conversion is restricted by a rule.

That’s not the case…

About Event Deduplication

The primary reason for discrepancies between these three groups is right here: Event deduplication. But it’s not what most people think.

There are actually two different types of deduplication.

1. Browser vs. API Event Deduplication.

In this case, you pass events to Meta from both your browser (using the Meta pixel) and Conversions API. But when you do this, the same event will often get passed from both sources. Instead of counting that event twice, Meta will need to match them up to the same user and deduplicate the events.

This is what most advertisers think of when they hear about event deduplication. But there’s another…

2. Multiple Times From the Same Person.

Meta will also deduplicate events in another scenario.

The above passage comes from Meta’s documentation.

Let’s assume your pixel has sent multiple purchase events from the same person during a short period of time. This might happen if a user refreshes a confirmation page. Or it could happen if you use engagement-based events that can happen multiple times.

In some places, you will see raw event totals prior to deduplication. In others, the data will be cleaned up.

Now, let’s get to what you should expect to see in each of the three locations…

Events Manager Data

The events data that you see in Events Manager is before processing and deduplication of events. It’s the raw total.

In the example above, the event is passed using both the pixel and API. The 80.2k number is likely closer to 40k after deduplicating the browser vs. API events. But it could be even lower than that (it will be) after removing the second form of deduplicated events.

Custom Conversion Mapped to an Event

I created a custom conversion mapped to that same event shown in Events Manager.

Remember that the original number prior to deduplication of any kind was 80.2k. Here, the total number of events is only 18.8k. Why?

You may guess that it’s due to the rule you need to create with custom conversions. It’s not. The rule used will pick up every event fired on the website.

It’s entirely due to deduplication. We can make a couple of logical assumptions…

1. After deduplicating browser and API events, the event total dropped from 80.2k to 40.1k (or so).
2. After deduplicating multiple events from the same user during a short period of time, the event total dropped from 40.1k to 18.8k.

You’re not going to typically see this rate of drop-off due to a user repeatedly performing the same event during a short period of time. But this event is unique in that it can happen many times (and often will).

Ads Manager Reporting

Finally, we have Ads Manager reporting. When you add a column to your report for a specific event, it is very unlikely to match up to Events Manager data or custom conversion data.

The primary reason that it won’t match up with either is that Ads Manager reporting is only for those events that can be attributed to your ads. That’s most obvious.

But even if you are positive that your ads drove 100% of your conversions and they all happened within the Attribution Setting, Ads Manager reporting will be less than Events Manager because it’s after deduplication.

Ads Manager reporting and custom conversion reporting could conceivably be the same if all conversions came from your ads within the Attribution window since both numbers will be after deduplication.

Watch Video

I recorded a video about this, too…

Your Turn

What inconsistencies do you see with your data?

Let me know in the comments below!

The post Meta Conversion Events, Deduplication, and Conflicting Reporting appeared first on Jon Loomer Digital.