If you’re a Meta advertiser, you’ve experienced this. You face the task of running ads that will drive more purchases or sign-ups, but they are utterly failing. Your ads aren’t converting at all, or the number of conversions is startlingly low.

It’s easy to blame Meta for your bad performance, but you know that’s a bad approach. Instead, you should troubleshoot to isolate the specific factors that are leading to these bad results so that you can address them.

Stop throwing money away. Your lack of conversions is likely due to at least one of these things…

1. Pixel, API, or Event Problems

If you get this wrong, you have no chance. Events are how important conversions are defined. This makes attribution (credit given to your ad for conversions) possible. And the algorithm learns from those attributed conversions to make adjustments to delivery.

You haven’t set up the pixel or Conversions API.

If you don’t have either set up, what are we even doing? I assume you’ve got the pixel set up — that’s the bare minimum now. But, attribution is bound to be incomplete if you haven’t also set up the Conversions API — either web or CRM version.

You’ve set up events incorrectly.

It’s one thing to have the foundation (pixel and Conversions API) set up properly. That’s worthless window dressing without events.

In some cases, event setup is straightforward. In others, it can be complex. The result could be undercounting, overcounting, or events that haven’t been deduplicated.

This confuses Meta, which will impact your results.

You’re optimizing for the wrong event.

You could have everything set up properly, but the problem could be that you’re optimizing for an event that isn’t your ultimate goal.

Advertisers often do this because they are unable to exit the learning phase by optimizing for their conversion event of choice (like a purchase), so they may optimize instead for something further up the funnel that will generate more volume.

It’s not that this is necessarily something you shouldn’t try. But it’s always a gamble to optimize for an event that isn’t what you ultimately want. More often than not, this results in not getting the thing that will make the campaign successful.

2. Your Performance Goal

A surefire way to get disappointing conversion results is to set a performance goal for something other than a conversion.

The performance goal may be the most important step you take when creating a campaign. It defines what you want to accomplish. This also impacts who sees your ads. The algorithm will dynamically update delivery in an effort to get you more of that action.

If you set a performance goal for link clicks, landing page views, ThruPlay, post engagement, or some other top-of-the-funnel action, don’t be surprised if you struggle to get any conversions.

Why? Meta’s delivery algorithm doesn’t care if you get conversions in that case. The only focus is on getting you those clicks or other actions because that’s what you defined as your performance goal.

If you want conversions, set a performance goal that reflects that.

3. Your Ad Copy or Creative

You could summarize this section by simply saying that if you create a bad ad, you should not expect to get conversions. But, let’s dig a bit deeper.

Understand that people aren’t robots. You can’t just create an ad and expect people to perform the action that you want. You have a role to play.

In fact, ad copy and creative may be more important now than ever before. Since your targeting inputs mean less than they once did, much of the targeting is determined by your ad. You attract your ideal audience.

Here are some examples of how your ad can go wrong…

Your copy doesn’t inspire an action.

This is the most important quality of good copy. It needs to inspire the action that you want. A prospective customer should read your ad and know what they are supposed to do and why.

Your ad doesn’t clearly articulate the value of your product.

What makes your product special? What is the customer’s pain point that your product solves? It’s not always easy to articulate these things in an ad, but that’s your job.

Your copy is unprofessional or is filled with typos.

The audience matters, but there’s often no better way to repel potential customers than an ad that’s littered with typos and grammatical errors. You don’t need to be buttoned up and professional for all audiences, but you still need to convey a trustworthy brand message.

Your creative is fuzzy, out of focus, or poorly done.

Unprofessional execution can be found in the creative, too. You don’t need professionally staged images. Those can be ineffective, too. And while there are arguments for the effectiveness of intentionally ugly ads, the audience matters.

Your creative isn’t optimized by placement.

Your ads will be shown in many different placements with various aspect ratios and design specs. Some of it will be taken care of automatically for you. But, your creative can also be cropped in ways that impact your brand. The copy may also be limited by character counts, thereby impacting your message.

Your ad is bombarded by negative comments that you don’t address.

Do you publish ads and walk away? If you get bombarded with negative comments, you can’t just ignore them. They need to be addressed in some way, or they may be the reason why no one is converting.

4. Ineffective Offer

This is loosely connected to your copy itself, but there is a difference.

You could actually do everything right with your ad, but your offer itself isn’t desirable. Great copy can’t fix a bad offer.

Is the price too high? Is the discount a weak 10% off or free shipping? Did you fail to make your offer irresistible?

You could potentially create an ad with no copy at all. If the image features an amazing offer, it will generate conversions.

Your offer is that important. Take your goggles off. Would you act on your offer? If not, come up with something better.

5. Landing Page Issues

You’re doing everything right. You’ve set up the pixel, Conversions API, and events properly. You created an amazing ad with an inspiring call-to-action and an offer that can’t be refused. But, you still aren’t getting conversions.

It’s probably because of your landing page. And that’s part of the problem for advertisers. You are judged on the performance of your ads, but you may have no control over the landing page experience.

Consider these problems…

Loading and connection issues.

Your ad inspired a potential customer to click. They’re excited. The page loads and loads or eventually crashes. Do not overestimate the potential customer’s patience. They will move on and never come back.

Poorly designed page.

I’ve seen some amazing ads that lead to the cheapest, lowest-quality landing pages. While ugly ads might work sometimes, don’t expect that to be the case for your landing page. You will lose trust.

Confusing or broken purchase flow.

You require multiple steps to complete the purchase, and those steps are unclear. Maybe the customer is unable to easily able to update their cart or apply a promo code. If you make it too complicated, they will leave.

Branding and messaging are inconsistent with your ad.

Do not underestimate the importance of consistency. Colors, branding, and messaging should be consistent from ad to landing page. Was the product or offer that you promised in the ad found on the landing page, or does it look different?

The landing page violates rules related to post-click experiences.

Low-quality post-click experiences like pop-ups, lots of ads, and more can increase your costs, if not get your ads rejected.

If any of these are problems, consider experiences that eliminate, or at least minimize, the landing page. If you need leads, use instant forms. For sales, consider Shops.

6. Product Problems

If you can confidently check off every item we’ve listed so far, you are running out of excuses. The problem might be obvious.

If no one will buy your product, maybe it’s because no one wants to buy your product.

Or maybe the competition in this space is so great that you are unable to stand out. If someone can buy a similar product from a well-known and trusted brand, what makes your product special?

It’s possible the problems go even deeper. Your product has a bad reputation. Bad reviews. Low quality or poor customer service.

These are all issues that are difficult to overcome.

7. CPM Related Issues

When we talk about CPM (Cost Per 1,000 Impressions) related issues in this context, we’re not talking about slight increases that drive up your costs. We’re talking about CPMs that are so high that they’re virtually impossible to overcome.

There are many factors that drive a high CPM:

• Competition for the audience
• Seasonal competition (Black Friday)
• Stale ads with high frequency
• Negative feedback on your ads (hide, report)
• Limiting your audience size unnecessarily
• A difficult or controversial industry

A high CPM gives you fewer impressions for your budget, which will likely mean fewer conversions and potential delivery issues.

8. Your Budget is Too Low

It’s simple. If you can’t spend enough to generate conversions, the delivery algorithm can’t properly learn from the results that it gets. More volume helps the algorithm properly optimize and make adjustments to get you the best results possible.

If you’re generating five conversions per week because you’re spending $20 per day, the algorithm is mostly going blind. It won’t exit the learning phase, and you’ll end up in learning limited.

That doesn’t mean it’s impossible to get results in that state, but performance won’t be stable or optimal.

I realize that not everyone can simply spend more money to get more conversions. But, in some cases, this is self inflicted. You have an excuse if you can only spend $20 per day and it’s all dedicated to one ad set. You don’t have an excuse if you can spend $100 per day, but only $20 is dedicated to the ad set for conversions.

You could combine campaign and ad sets and focus your budget, but you’ve chosen not to.

Your Turn

Are there any other issues I missed?

Let me know in the comments below!

The post 8 Reasons Your Ads Aren’t Converting appeared first on Jon Loomer Digital.

Attribution may be the single most important element of advertising. It not only helps advertisers see what works and what doesn’t by assigning conversion credit to ads, but it impacts optimization and targeting. Get this wrong, and your mistakes spill down through every step of your advertising.

Last week, we covered the most common optimization mistakes that advertisers make. This week, let’s focus on attribution mistakes.

Maybe you are making some of these mistakes. It’s not too late. Make the necessary corrections.

Let’s get to the most common attribution mistakes…

What is Attribution?

First, let’s be clear about what we’re talking about.

Attribution is the ability to give credit to an ad for a conversion. While a simple concept, there are several layers to proper attribution that can impact advertising performance.

When something goes wrong with attribution, it’s due to a failure in one of these areas…

1. Setup. You’ve done everything on the back end to make sure that results are reported accurately and completely.
2. Application. You know how to apply your knowledge of attribution to different optimization strategies.
3. Interpretation. You are able to make meaning of your results.
4. Understanding. You understand how attribution works, it’s strengths, and weaknesses and how that impacts your approach.

Now let’s break down the most common mistakes.

1. Improper or Incomplete Setup of Pixel or Conversions API

Conversion attribution is impossible without first setting up a way for Meta to know how people are engaging with your business away from the Meta family of apps.

This starts with the Meta pixel. It needs to be on every page of your websites. When possible, it needs to be on other websites you don’t own where you sell products.

At one time, setting up the pixel (and events, which we’ll get to in a moment) was enough. But mostly due to privacy laws and weaker tracking, passing first-party data is critical to complete attribution. If you haven’t set up the Conversions API, you are sending incomplete data to Meta.

That could come in two forms:

1. Web API. This is the most common form of the Conversions API. By sending conversion information from the web API in addition to the pixel, you can help fill in blanks where the pixel can fail. There are multiple methods to accomplish this, but I use Stape to set up the API Gateway.

2. Offline or CRM API. If all business is done on your website, the web API may be sufficient. Otherwise, offline leads and purchases need to be passed to Meta via an offline or CRM API. This allows the possibility that you can see when your ads lead to conversions that happen away from your website. Meta can also optimize for these conversions.

2. Failure of Standard Events, Custom Events, and Custom Conversions

Of course, setting up the pixel and Conversions API is half the battle. Make sure you do that. But it’s the events themselves that define when someone performed an important action.

Events help define whether someone performed a purchase, registration, search, or other important action on your website. Custom conversions help provide granularity to your reporting, like the specific product that was purchased.

Failure in this area comes down to three primary things…

1. Misunderstanding their roles and unique purpose. Do you know the differences between standard events, custom events, and custom conversions? Most advertisers don’t, confusing custom events for custom conversions. Advertisers will attempt to use one in place of another. The reality is that you need to use all three.

2. Improper or incomplete setup. Set up standard events for all important actions when possible. Set up custom events for those unique actions that aren’t predefined. Pass the necessary details of these actions via parameters. Create custom conversions to add granularity to your reporting.

3. Over or under reporting. When results are clearly wrong, advertisers are often quick to blame Meta. But start with yourself. The pixel, Conversions API, and events all need to be set up properly to fire on the right page and at the right time. Do this incorrectly, and you may send too many or too few events, which will impact your reporting.

3. Inability to Understand Meaning of Conversion Results

One of the most fundamental failures is misunderstanding your results, how they are calculated, and the context behind different types of attribution.

By default, conversions are counted when someone clicks your ad and converts within seven days or views your ad and converts within a day (without clicking). Far too many advertisers have no idea this is the case. They assume that all reported conversions in the Results column are due to someone clicking their ad and immediately converting.

That conversion may not be immediate. It may happen later that day. It may happen seven days later. Or your customer may not have clicked at all, but they were shown your ad.

Attribution mistakes often come down to misunderstanding that either all conversions are equal or that all conversions of a type (1-day click or 1-day view) are always good or always bad.

Context matters.

If you are an experienced advertiser who appreciates the nuance of the various types of attribution, you regularly use the Compare Attribution Settings feature to see how your results break down. You’ll even add a column for 28-day click, which is otherwise buried.

How many of your conversions are view-through? Depending on what you’re promoting, a high percentage is a red flag. You may want to discount them. Or simply acknowledge that they aren’t as meaningful as the the click-through conversions.

Of course, if you’re selling a product and a high percentage of those view-through conversions are engaged-view (and your ad uses video), you may have more confidence in those numbers.

There’s also the matter of visitors performing a conversion event multiple times, which can lead to the perception of inflated results. This can be addressed with First Conversion reporting.

4. Expecting Google Analytics and Ads Manager to Report the Same

One of the advertiser’s biggest annoyances is a client who insists that Ads Manager reporting is wrong because it doesn’t match up with Google Analytics.

How do you respond?

Meta and GA4 will measure your conversions differently. And frankly, Google has less data than Meta does.

Only Meta has the knowledge that someone saw your ad without clicking prior to converting. And Meta may be better equipped to attribute a conversion to an ad when a customer switches devices or comes back days later to complete a purchase.

It doesn’t matter that you use UTM parameters. This still doesn’t solve for view-through conversions. And it’s unlikely to be enough to help GA4 properly attribute a conversion from Facebook if it happens days after the initial click.

It’s important to use both. Use GA4 with UTM parameters as a second source of information. This can also help you spot problems if you are unable to explain the disparity.

But one isn’t “right.” Neither is perfect. Embrace this.

5. Always Leaving the Attribution Setting at the Default

A big mistake is misunderstanding how the attribution setting applies both to default reporting and optimization for ad delivery.

Once again, the default attribution setting is 7-day click and 1-day view. Not only does that mean that conversions will be reported that happen within that window, but Meta will optimize to show ads to people who are likely to convert within that window as well.

This is important. If you’re optimizing for purchase, a 7-day click and 1-day view attribution setting makes sense. But it may not for any other type of conversion.

You can make the case that a view-through conversion is relevant for purchases. Someone saw your ad. They were interested. But it is a big commitment. They need to discuss with their spouse, business partner, or higher ups. They either go directly to your website or Google your product later that day and convert.

But this explanation for view-through conversions falls flat when discussing the typical lead. If something is free and easy to acquire, it makes very little sense that someone wouldn’t simply act on that ad when they see it.

This also applies to when optimizing for custom events based on engagement actions. These events can happen repeatedly. The result is that Meta can inflate your results by simply displaying ads to people who visit your website regularly. Even if they don’t click.

There is a solution. Edit the attribution setting in these cases to be 1-day click only. Since view-throughs won’t be counted as conversions by default, the algorithm won’t optimize for that type of conversion.

You can still see 1-day view conversions, though. They just aren’t included in the default reporting. Use the compare attribution settings feature to see them. Expect that you’ll get fewer of them when they aren’t included in the ad set attribution setting.

Watch Video

I recorded a video about this, too. Watch it below…

Your Turn

What areas of attribution do you struggle with?

Let me know in the comments below!

The post 5 Most Common Attribution Mistakes Advertisers Make appeared first on Jon Loomer Digital.

On January 4, Google began its test to phase out third-party cookies, with the completion expected in the second half of 2024. What does this development mean for Meta advertisers?

I am not a cookie expert. I wish I were. But I decided to immerse myself in as much of this cookie news as possible to help understand — both for my advertising efforts and yours — whether this is something to worry about. And if there is, what we should do about it.

There’s a lot happening here. It also appears that there is a reasonable level of unknown as well. I’ll do my best to highlight what is known while also being clear when I’m just not sure — and maybe no one’s sure — about how this will roll out or impact Meta advertisers.

In this post, we’ll cover the following:

1. What are cookies?
2. Google’s Tracking Protection and third-party cookie phaseout
3. Google’s replacement
4. What Apple and Safari have already done
5. How this impacts Meta advertisers
6. What you should do
7. Remaining questions
8. Resources

What Are Cookies?

Cookies are small pieces of data or text that are used to store information on web browsers. Their purpose ranges from helpful (keeping you logged in or personalizing your experience on a website) to sinister (digital fingerprinting). And of course, plenty of gray in between.

Also understand that there are first-party and third-party cookies. First-party cookies are stored by the website itself. Third-party cookies are stored by a separate service that tracks users across multiple websites or devices.

The focus here is on third-party cookies. First-party cookies are not currently at risk.

Google’s Tracking Protection

Google’s Tracking Protection initiative is part of their Privacy Sandbox for the Web. The long-term goal is to eliminate all third-party cookies from Chrome browsers by the end of 2024.

On January 4, 2024, Tracking Protection rolled out globally to 1% of Chrome users via desktop and Android as an initial test. While 1% may not sound like much, Gizmodo estimates this is about 30 Million people, with 60% of all internet users on Chrome.

If you are part of this test, you will see the following notification in your browser…

Tracking Protection restricts website access to third-party cookies by default, though with caveats. If Chrome detects that a website requires third-party cookies to function (difficulties loading and displaying content), you may be prompted to temporarily re-enable them.

According to Google’s public timeline, this initial 1% test will run through the first half of the year, with the complete elimination of third-party cookies happening by the end of 2024.

Google’s Replacement

Of course, Google’s not planning to completely eliminate third-party cookies without some sort of replacement. These cookies are important for advertisers and publishers, after all.

Privacy Sandbox for the Web will phase out third-party cookies by using the following (from Google):

Differential Privacy: A system for sharing information about a dataset to reveal patterns of behavior, without revealing private information about individuals or whether they belong to the dataset.

K-Anonymity: A measure of anonymity within a dataset. If you have k=1000 anonymity, you can’t be distinguished from 999 other individuals in the dataset.

On-Device Processing: Computation is performed “locally” on a device (e.g., your phone or computer) without communicating with external servers.

Essentially, the Chrome browser itself will continue to track your online behavior, but the information that it sends to Google or other parties will be anonymized and categorized, rather than hyper specific (for example, you’re interested in baseball, rather than you visited a specific website related to the 1982 Milwaukee Brewers). These cohorts can still be used for targeting (and which targeting we’re actually talking about here, Google or Meta or all targeting, is something I’m not clear about).

What Apple and Safari Have Already Done

If Google’s elimination of third-party cookies sounds a bit like deja vu for Apple users, you’d be forgiven. This is something that Apple has been doing, in one form or another, since at least 2017.

Intelligent Tracking Prevention (ITP) blocks third-party cookies by default from Safari browsers. Of course, Safari makes up about 14% of all browsers. The inclusion of Chrome in this effort would likely be the final step to killing third-party cookies completely.

How This Impacts Meta Advertisers

The answer to this question is why you’re here, and I’d love to say I have a crystal clear directive. That may be partially because I’m not an expert on this topic, but there also seems to be quite a bit that we simply don’t know right now. This clarification is bound to come as data emerges from the initial 1% test.

What’s interesting is that almost all of the response I’ve read regarding the anticipated impact of this change was focused on targeting. I’m not sure if that’s a coincidence or if there will be less impact on attribution and optimization. Because I would assume that if third-party cookies were critical to attribution, that would be the bigger issue here.

Regardless, it would seem that the greatest risk is to anything that relies on third-party cookies. While the Meta pixel does use third-party cookies, it also uses first-party cookies by default (you can turn this off).

Whether first and third-party cookies provide something unique that the other can’t offer to the pixel is unclear. That would certainly add clarity to the impact of this roll-out.

The value of first-party data of all kinds going forward goes up. Which brings us here…

What You Should Do

As I said above, it’s not entirely clear how Chrome’s elimination of third-party cookies will impact Meta advertisers. But there are a couple of things that you should do, if you haven’t already.

1. Enable First-Party Cookies with the Meta Pixel.

Within Events Manager, go to Data Sources and then the Settings tab. There is a section for Cookie Usage.

From that screenshot above:

When first-party cookies are turned on, this provides additional data that helps Facebook deliver relevant ads to people who may be interested in your products or services.

First-party cookies should be on by default. If not, you can edit these settings to turn them on.

NOTE: There may be privacy considerations before turning on first-party cookies. Make sure to read Meta’s guidance on cookie usage here and here.

2. Connect the Conversions API.

We’ve been talking about connecting the Conversions API ever since about 2021 with Apple’s ATT tracking opt-out. It’s becoming more and more critical that you pass first-party data to Meta to be used for ads attribution and targeting. Otherwise, the accuracy gap will widen as third-party data is blocked.

You can pass server-side, first-party conversions data via the API using two different methods.

Conversions API for Web: Pass the same events that are sent from your pixel, but from a dedicated server. One popular solution is the API Gateway. I’ve set up the Gateway using Stape.

Conversions API for CRM: If conversions don’t happen online, another solution for providing a complete picture for attribution is sending the events from your CRM. A common scenario is when you have salespeople who call and close sales, which are marked via CRM tags.

It’s not clear whether these two steps are required to overcome the blockage of third-party cookies, whether they’re necessary, or whether they’ll even help. But until we know more, implementing both first-party cookies for your pixel and the Conversions API are good starts.

I don’t want to minimize the impact of the elimination of third-party cookies on Meta advertisers. At the same time, I’ve yet to see anything definitive that has me particularly concerned.

We’ve already seen the elimination of third-party cookies with Safari. You can turn on first-party cookies with the pixel and pass first-party data with the Conversions API.

Maybe changes will need to be made to the Conversions API and the data passed with the Meta pixel. Maybe publishers will be required to make adjustments to their websites. We’ll undoubtedly know more in the coming months.

But for now, those truly at risk are those who haven’t implemented first-party cookies with the pixel or the Conversions API.

Remaining Questions

As I’ve mentioned a few times, it’s still not clear to me how much these changes will impact Meta advertisers. It’s possible, if not likely, that there is an impact.

Here are some of the questions I’m left with, some which were mentioned throughout the post above…

1. What is the direct impact of eliminating third-party cookies to Meta advertising? The answer is surely found with clarity regarding how Meta is using third-party cookies now.

2. Does turning on first-party cookies for the Meta pixel solve for data that is otherwise lost from third-party cookies? Meta isn’t clear regarding how first vs. third-party cookies are used related to the pixel.

3. Does implementing the Conversions API solve for data that is otherwise lost due to browser cookies being blocked?

4. Will Meta need to make changes to the pixel and/or API related to these updates? Google has their own Attribution Reporting API. There’s also the matter of cohorts and topics for defining online behavior. Will these be used for Meta advertising, too?

5. Will the elimination of third-party cookies impact targeting, optimization, and attribution? Almost everything I’ve read has been focused on targeting. But maybe the reporters assumed that targeting is what matters most.

Resources

I dug through a long list of articles to assemble this blog post. Here’s a collection of resources that you could read to provide additional background.

• The next step toward phasing out third-party cookies in Chrome
• Privacy Sandbox: Protecting Your Privacy Online
• Privacy Sandbox for the Web
• Google Attribution Reporting API
• Google Reveals Next Step Toward Removal of Tracking Cookies
• Google Implements First Stage in the Removal of Tracking Cookies
• Google Just Disabled Cookies for 30 Million Chrome Users. Here’s How to Tell If You’re One of Them.
• Google Will Turn Off Cookies for 30 Million People on January 4
• Google has started phasing out third-party cookies
• Google Chrome’s Cookie Phase-Out: What You Need to Know
• About cookie settings for the Meta Pixel
• Meta’s Cookie Policy
• FAQs About Safari’s Intelligent Tracking Prevention (ITP)

Watch Video

I also recorded a video to walk through this. Watch it below…

Your Turn

If you’ve read any definitive details (from respected and dependable experts) that help clarify areas where I’m unsure, please provide a link to that information.

How are you preparing for the elimination of third-party cookies?

Let me know in the comments below!

The post What Chrome’s Elimination of Third-Party Cookies Means for Meta Advertisers appeared first on Jon Loomer Digital.

If you pass purchase events to Meta via the pixel and API, you may be aware of a challenge: What do you do when the value of the purchase is variable?

Here’s an example of the purchase event code and parameters that you’d use when you know that the price of a product is $147…

fbq('track', 'Purchase', {
value: 147.00,
currency: 'USD'
});

This is great when the loading of a specific page (like a confirmation page) means that someone purchased a product for $147. It’s no longer useful when that total is variable.

What do you do if you don’t know the total amount spent? What if the customer can add multiple items to their cart prior to completing a purchase? What if the customer can apply promo codes that impact the total order value?

This is where it gets tricky. Let’s discuss the factors that would help you solve this problem…

Dynamic Variable

In simple terms, you need to replace “147.00” above with a dynamic value that represents the total order value.

It might look like this…

fbq('track', 'Purchase', {
value: order_total,
currency: 'USD'
});

In this example, we replace the dollar amount with a variable that reflects that total. That total will then be injected dynamically.

Of course, I’d love to tell you that your platform utilizes a variable called “order_total.” Unfortunately, it is not universal and what you use is going to be different depending on your platform.

Meta provides the following well-known examples:

Shopify:
'{{ total_price | money_without_currency }}','currency':'USD'

Magento:
$amount

WooCommerce:
$order->get_order_total()

Squarespace:
{orderGrandTotal}

BigCommerce:
%%ORDER_SUBTOTAL%%;

The good news is that if you use any of these solutions, the dynamic value may be passed via the pixel already. Confirm that, but it’s likely the case. So, again, we haven’t solved a problem yet.

The issue comes into play when we have to pass events manually by adding our own event code.

General Solution

Let me start this section by being clear that I am not a web developer. Based on Meta’s documentation and my own research (always dangerous), this is my interpretation of what you need to do.

There do appear to be multiple approaches, but the most common is related to pulling the order total from the confirmation page. This may be your first obstacle.

I use Infusionsoft (Keap). Purchases are made using an Infusionsoft order form. Customers are then redirected to a confirmation page on my website.

We need the Infusionsoft form to pass the order total to the confirmation page and display it. There is actually an Infusionsoft setting when creating order forms to “Pass contact’s information to the Thank You Page.”

This information should then be passed using URL parameters (characters that are appended to the end of the confirmation page URL).

From what I can tell, when using Infusionsoft, the product price is passed using an ID of “price,” though there may be a different ID for the total if you have multiple items in your cart. You can use that information to display the total on the confirmation page.

Of course, you won’t be able to display that information on the confirmation page without some programming effort.

Consult a Web Developer

I know. I’d love to be able to give you the specific step-by-step instructions to solve this problem, but I can’t. Not only am I not a web developer and I already worry I’ve overstepped my expertise, how exactly this is solved will depend on your platform.

But, pass this post (and Meta’s documentation) on to a developer.

The main steps:

1. What platform is used for purchases?
2. What ID is used to define the purchase total?
3. Pass that total to the confirmation page
4. Display that total on the confirmation page as a variable (it could probably be hidden)
5. Pull that variable into the purchase event code that fires on that page

Hope that helps!

Your Turn

Is this a problem that you’ve solved? What did you do?

Let me know in the comments below!

The post Pass Dynamic Purchase Value With Meta Events appeared first on Jon Loomer Digital.

Meta made a change recently that is leaving advertisers confused. Meta pixels are disappearing from Business Settings, which will freak you out the first time you see it.

There’s a simple solution and an explanation. Let’s get straight to it…

“Doesn’t Have Any Pixels Yet”

Advertisers manage access to their Meta pixels within Business Settings under Data Sources.

When you go there, you’ll probably see this…

I admit, I about lost it temporarily when I saw the “Jon Loomer Digital doesn’t have any pixels yet” message for the first time. But I knew that I had pixels, so where were they?

The Fine Print

If you were like me, you ignored the fine(r) print. It’s possible I need to up the prescription for my glasses.

Here it is…

You’d be forgiven if you missed this like I did.

Your asset has a new location

“We’ve made some changes to our platform. You can now find this asset in the Data Sources menu under Datasets.”

That’s some pretty bad messaging. Why say I don’t have any pixels yet and then say my “asset” has been moved to a new location?

A couple of lines under Pixels in the menu on the left, you’ll see Datasets.

Once you go there, you should breathe a sigh of relief. Your pixels will be there.

What Are Datasets?

Your pixels aren’t going away.

From Meta’s documentation on datasets, website, app, and offline events are being merged together within a single view called a dataset.

I know this is confusing. First, your pixel IDs will be converted to Dataset IDs. This won’t change anything related to optimization of ad sets using your pixel.

The main thing is that you’ll be able to connect multiple assets under the same dataset. Integrations include:

• Meta Pixel (website events)
• Conversions API (website, app and offline events)
• Facebook SDK for iOS or Android (app events)
• Mobile Measurement Partners (app events)
• App Events API (app events)
• CSV file upload (offline events)

An example might be that you have a single dataset that combines events coming from the Meta Pixel, Conversions API, and CSV file upload so that they can all be displayed in one view. Note: You’re probably already seeing this for your pixel and Conversions API.

Once you create a dataset, you can then set up the various assets in Events Manager.

This is a much deeper discussion that will need to be covered separately. But, chances are good that there’s nothing you need to do related to datasets. Meta created a grid to help understand the dataset creation method that may be best for you, if necessary.

Watch Video

I recorded a video about this, too…

Your Turn

Have you noticed this change? What do you think?

Let me know in the comments below!

The post Where Are My Meta Pixels? appeared first on Jon Loomer Digital.

I often hear from Meta advertisers who think their conversion events are overcounting. It typically starts with a distrust of Meta. But if conversion events actually are getting overcounted, there’s almost always a reasonable explanation.

Let’s go through the steps to help you troubleshoot and correct this so that your events will fire correctly.

Ads Manager vs. Events Manager Reporting

Before even having this conversation, there’s often a core misunderstanding regarding reporting. Where do you think events are overcounting? Within Ads Manager or Events Manager?

Ads Manager only reports on conversions from your ads. If you think Ads Manager overcounts because it doesn’t match up with Google Analytics or another tool, know that it’s never going to match up. They report on conversions differently. You will see variations. That’s a whole different discussion about attribution that we’re not going to tackle here.

A true overcounting would be spotted in Events Manager. Events Manager reports on all conversions, regardless of the source. If you think Events Manager is showing lots of conversions that aren’t actually happening because you don’t see them on the back end, that’s a reason to suspect overcounting.

If that’s the case, go through these questions…

1. Are Browser and Server Events Deduplicated?

Are you sending events both from the browser (pixel) and server (conversions API)?

If so, Meta needs to know that an event coming from both places is the same event. Otherwise, that event will be counted twice. Your events need to be deduplicated.

Even if your events are deduplicated, you will see an initial double counting in Events Manager. Here’s an example of the counting of an event.

The total amount displayed in Events Manager will be prior to deduplication. It will appear to be doubled. If there are problems with deduplication, you will get a message from Meta telling you that.

2. What URLs is the Event Firing On?

If you’re convinced that conversion events are reported that shouldn’t be, a good first step to isolate the problem is uncovering which URLs the event is firing on.

You can find this by expanding your event in Events Manager and clicking View Details.

Then select “URLs” in Event Breakdown.

Are there any URLs listed where this event shouldn’t occur? Do any of these URLs appear to be the source of this overcounting?

The classic example of overcounting occurs when events fire on a URL where they shouldn’t occur. Often this is because the event was added to the wrong step of the funnel. For example, a Purchase event is added to the landing page rather than the confirmation page. If this is the case, you’ll need to remove that event.

But if you’ve isolated a page where the event should occur but appears to be overcounting, move on to the next step.

3. What About That URL Leads to Overcounting?

Ah hah! You’ve found a URL that is clearly overcounting. You are not receiving nearly as many conversions on this page as Events Manager is reporting.

Let’s think about that. What would explain this overcounting?

Is it a URL people can return to frequently? It should be a confirmation page that users only see once. Make sure this page is hidden from search engines and that your email campaigns never send people back to these confirmation pages. Otherwise, a conversion could be reported every time that page loads.

Has a team member been testing this URL recently? This is a frequent explanation. The team member is making changes to the page or testing it and repeatedly refreshing the page. That loads the pixel and fires any events on the page. Is the overcounting focused on times when this was going on?

4. How Was the Event Set Up?

To pinpoint and fix the problem, make sure you know how you set that event up in the first place.

Did you use the Event Setup Tool? If so, open that page up with the Event Setup Tool to see how the event was created.

Click the Add Events dropdown in Events Manager. Then select “From the Pixel.”

Click to open Event Setup Tool.

Then enter the URL that is the problem.

The page will be loaded with the Event Setup Tool and you’ll be able to edit and remove events from there.

Did you use a third-party tool that manages your pixel? Verify how you set up that event. Did you set it up twice?

Is this a custom conversion? Verify that this was set up properly. If you created a URL rule with “URL contains,” make sure that what you pasted in will only include a single URL.

The example above could fire on any page that includes “thank-you” in the URL.

5. Go Through the Conversion Process

Finally, go through the process of a conversion as a website visitor would.

Don’t just refresh the page. This is a classic mistake. That’s not normal user behavior. The overcounting is due to normal user behavior, and you need to mimic that.

Walk through the steps that a user would go through. Does the event fire properly?

Maybe everything fired properly when you went through the process. Is there anything that might cause the event to fire again? Evaluate the page and decide if there’s something about how it is set up that may lead to this problem.

Watch Video

I recorded a video about this, too. Check it out below…

Your Turn

Have you experienced overcounting of events? How have you pinpointed the problem?

Let me know in the comments below!

The post Are Meta Conversion Events Overcounting? appeared first on Jon Loomer Digital.

Quality traffic with Facebook ads is the Holy Grail. I’m not going to go into it here, but Meta’s ignorance of quality traffic activity is maddening. But I have a solution for you: A custom event that combines time spent and scroll depth.

I actually wrote about this three years ago, but hoo boy. I seriously overcomplicated that tutorial. We can do this in far fewer steps.

While there are likely manual solutions and other tools that help you accomplish something similar, I’m using Google Tag Manager to manage my pixel. This post assumes that you are doing the same.

After this tutorial, we’ll talk about what you can actually do with this once you have it set up.

Let’s go…

First, Do This…

As mentioned, this post assumes you are using Google Tag Manager to manage your pixel. I assume that you already have a tag created for the base pixel code. I also assume that you’ve already created tags for both the 60-second view and 70% scroll events.

If you haven’t done these things yet, you’re in luck. I have some rather simple instructions below. Read them first.

1. Create a Meta Pixel Event that Fires After Viewing a Page for 60 Seconds
2. Create a Meta Pixel Event that Fires After Scrolling 70% Down a Page

Create a Quality Visitor Event

If you’ve already completed the steps above, the most difficult tasks are finished. The rest is easy.

Create a tag in Google Tag Manager. Once again, we’ll use the Custom HTML tag type.

Add the following code:

<script> 
fbq('track','Quality Traffic');
</script>

We could add parameters, but we’re not going to bother. We’re keeping it simple.

Make sure to turn on Tag Sequencing so that the base pixel code tag fires first.

Now click to configure your trigger and create a new trigger. We’re going to use the Trigger Group trigger type.

You’ll want to configure your trigger so that requires both the 60-second event and the 70% scroll event to fire prior to this event firing.

The final product looks like this…

You may want to test it using the Preview tool in Google Tag Manager. Otherwise, publish it and you’re ready to go.

Create a Custom Conversion

We’ve discussed this in the other two blog posts, but there’s a bug that doesn’t allow you to add columns to your Ads Manager for all custom events. The easy solution is to create a custom conversion that maps to that custom event.

The way I do it so that it includes all pages where this event is fired looks like this…

If you can, add it as one of your eight ranked events in Aggregated Event Measurement.

I consider this event pretty important, so I rank it after Complete Registration.

Use for Reporting

I add the Quality Visitor event along with the Scroll and Time on Page events as columns to my Ads Manager. This is a really good way to measure the quality of your traffic.

Compare these numbers to your link clicks, outbound clicks, and landing page views.

Also note that I compared attribution to isolate 1-day click. Otherwise, these numbers include events fired for up to seven days after clicking or one day after viewing.

In the example above, we have 182 1-day click Quality Visitors compared to 801 landing page views (23%). Considering my Quality Visitor requires a 2-minute visit, that feels pretty solid.

This would be something to look at very closely if you ever optimize for link clicks or landing page views because the quality is often low.

Optimization

If you ever run ads to promote blog posts, you should optimize for this event. While it would be nice if Facebook had a “Quality Traffic” optimization option built-in, this still can’t be worse than optimizing for link clicks or landing page views.

To do that, create an Engagement campaign.

Select “Website” as your conversion location within the ad set.

And then select “Maximum number of conversions” as your Performance Goal and then your pixel and the Quality Visitor conversion event.

I’m actually running a split test right now to compare the results between optimizing for Quality Visitor or landing page views. I admit I don’t understand why I hadn’t done that before.

Targeting

If you run any remarketing ads, one group of people to consider targeting would be those who are most engaged. Those who trigger the Quality Visitor event would be a solid differentiator within your total website visitors pool.

Your audience would look like this…

Whether you refine the audience by page or alter the time window is up to you.

Watch Video

I recorded a quick video on this, too. Check it out…

Your Turn

Do you use custom events in this way? Are there any others that you create?

Let me know in the comments below!

The post Create a Meta Custom Event That Combines Time Spent and Scroll Depth appeared first on Jon Loomer Digital.

Ever since ChatGPT made it into the mainstream, marketers have been scrambling to find creative ways to use it. Here’s a good one: Use ChatGPT to generate purchase event code for your Facebook pixel.

This is especially useful if you aren’t super technical (which includes me). Here’s what you can do…

Collect Basic Info First

Before you do this, you’ll need some basic information related to the purchase. When creating a purchase event, you’ll need at least the following information:

• Product Name
• Value (purchase price)
• Currency

These are necessary for the parameters, which are details related to the purchase. You can use others as well (content ID, content type, number of items), but start here.

You may not need to worry about currency if you’re in the US since ChatGPT seems to generate code using USD currency automatically for me.

The ChatGPT Prompt

Now, go to ChatGPT and enter the following prompt:

Generate Facebook pixel event code for a purchase based on the following information:

– PRODUCT: [Your Product Name]
– VALUE: [Your Value]
– CURRENCY: [Your Currency]

You’ll replace everything in brackets with details related to your product. Here’s an example:

– PRODUCT: Power Hitters Club – Elite
– VALUE: $147
– CURRENCY: USD

Here’s what I get…

You then copy that code and place it (with opening and closing SCRIPT code) within the header of the purchase confirmation page. For more resources on pixel events, go here.

Lots of Potential

This approach should work for any of the standard events. The information is pretty straightforward, so you shouldn’t have any issue getting accurate code. But as your request gets more complicated, the code ChatGPT provides may be less dependable.

For example, I’ve asked ChatGPT to generate code for an Initiate Checkout event based on button click. The answer it gave me was technically correct, but I wouldn’t have been able to simply copy and paste the code it gave me without some tweaks.

I’ve had some success with custom events, too, but that entire process is a bit messier and has more variables involved. But I’m trying to find the best way to finesse my ChatGPT prompts to produce helpful results.

Watch Video

I also put together a quick video of this process…

Your Turn

Have you experimented much with ChatGPT yet? What creative solutions have you found?

Let me know in the comments below!

The post Use ChatGPT to Generate Facebook Pixel Purchase Event Code appeared first on Jon Loomer Digital.

The easiest way to set up Conversions API is with the Facebook for WordPress plugin. And it also just happens to be free.

(If you need background on the Conversions API and why you need to set it up, make sure to check out this explainer.)

These are two major barriers for any publisher wanting to set up the Conversions API. Many of the options come with a monthly cost (like the API Gateway). Setting it up manually or with Google Tag Manager is also technical and complicated (at least if you’re not super technical yourself).

The truth is that I attempted to use the Facebook for WordPress plugin originally, and let’s get this out of the way first. It’s not a very good plugin. It’s clunky. It has very little value, and you are unlikely to use it for what Facebook seems to want you to use it for (apparently monitoring and setting up Facebook ad campaigns from your website??).

And actually, one reason that I originally abandoned the plugin is that I didn’t even realize it was connecting the API when it was. It’s just not the cleanest piece of design, but that doesn’t really matter.

If all you want is a simple solution that doesn’t cost anything, you are in luck.

Set Up the Plugin

First, go to your Events Manager. After selecting your pixel as the data source, go to the Settings.

Select the option to Choose a Partner.

Select WordPress. You will then be taken through the steps of the install.

Go to the Plugins menu of your WordPress website and click to “Add New.” Search “Facebook for WordPress” (you can also download it here). Then install and activate the plugin.

After activated, head over to the plugin’s settings and click “Get Started.”

You’ll need to log into your Facebook account.

You’ll then need to select your Business Manager, Facebook Page, Instagram Profile, Ad Account, and pixel.

I keep “Manager Your Business” on, but I’m not sure whether turning it off would impact access to connecting the API.

Here’s the important part. You may need to refresh your WordPress page to see this…

The token is what’s used for the API. You’ll want to check this box.

After you confirm, go ahead and refresh the page again (yeah, not particularly dynamic). You should then see a box checked that you’re sending web events using the Conversions API.

You’re done!

What Will Happen Now?

Yes, that’s it. You don’t need to set up new events. Facebook will merely use your current pixel and any events you’ve set up and also send events via a server.

In other words, I hope you’ve already set up standard and custom events to track important actions on your website. Connecting the API will then piggyback off of those events.

Facebook will then receive two sets of events from you: 1) from your browser and 2) from your server. Facebook will then deduplicate those events so that nothing is counted twice.

Confirm It’s Working

You’ll need to resist the urge to immediately check on whether events are sent using the API. It may not show up for a few hours. I’d wait a day. And, of course, what you see may depend upon the amount of traffic you get and the events you’ve set up.

Then go to your Events Manager again and select the pixel as your event source. The column for Connection Method should include both Browser and Server.

If you only see Browser, it could be because that event has not happened yet since you connected the API.

Once you see the Server is sending events, that’s it! There’s really nothing left for you to do.

Your Turn

There may be some advantages for using the more technically sophisticated (and expensive) options, but this is a simple and free approach that will get you off the ground.

Have any questions? Let me know in the comments below!

The post How to Set Up Conversions API with Facebook for WordPress Plugin appeared first on Jon Loomer Digital.

Some of the most helpful tools are super simple. The Facebook Pixel Helper (is it the Meta Pixel Helper now?) is such a tool.

The Facebook Pixel Helper is a Chrome browser extension. It’s not new. But, it’s extremely valuable for Facebook advertisers, and it’s free.

What is it?

First, you need to use the Chrome browser. If you do, you can add the Facebook Pixel Helper browser extension.

It’s a troubleshooting tool that detects the presence of a pixel on the current URL you’re viewing. It also detects the standard events, custom events, and custom conversions that are firing.

Let me provide a couple of examples of how it can be used…

Managing Clients

Maybe you’re managing a client or are considering a potential client. You don’t have access to their Ads Manager, but you want to get a better sense of what they’re doing.

An example: I host one-on-one sessions. I’m not a hands-on contractor, but more of a short-term (45 minutes) consultant. I don’t have or desire access to your Ads Manager, Events Manager, or Business Manager.

Prior to our session, I have the client complete a questionnaire to tell me more about what they’re doing and what they hope to accomplish. They also provide a list of domains related to their business.

This allows me to poke around a little bit without any direct access. Do they have the pixel installed? What kinds of events are firing? It doesn’t give me a thorough review, but it provides some surface-level context.

Testing Tool

Yes, Facebook has its own testing tools within Events Manager. You can use them, too. And while they may be best for viewing how the pixel is firing across your website, I prefer the Facebook Pixel Helper for testing individual pages.

The extension makes it super easy to immediately see if the pixel fires when the page loads. It also allows me to test whether certain events fire when they’re supposed to, in real-time.

Learning Tool

It’s a great learning tool! When I write about the custom events running on my website, you can actually test them out for yourself.

You’ve already been on this page for a while. You’ve scrolled. You should also click the audio player at the top. Then click the helper to see the exact events that are firing.

Try it!

You can even expand each event to learn more about the parameters used.

Your Turn

Do you use the Facebook Pixel Helper, or do you prefer other testing tools?

Let me know in the comments below!

The post Why You Should Use the Facebook Pixel Helper Chrome Extension appeared first on Jon Loomer Digital.

The process of adding standard events can be confusing and overwhelming for some publishers. Automatic Events can help.

Let’s explain what Automatic Events are and how you can turn them on.

What Are Automatic Events?

Assuming that you already have the Meta pixel on every page of your website, Automatic Events can be generated without adding code — or any effort at all.

Facebook detects these events through contextual activity happening on your website. Facebook doesn’t provide clear examples, but we can make some assumptions about how this might work. Button clicks, submitting forms, and submitting payment info are examples of context the pixel could detect to set up an event automatically.

How to Turn Automatic Events On

To turn this feature on, go to Events Manager and select your pixel from among the data sources on the left. Then go to Settings.

Find “Track Events Automatically Without Code” under Event Setup and toggle it “on,” assuming it wasn’t on already.

What Happens?

Assuming you hadn’t previously created events and you toggle this on, you should start to see events generated — assuming, of course, you have traffic and events that Facebook can detect.

Once those events start happening, you’ll be able to get reporting for those actions, optimize for those events, and create website custom audiences to target people who performed those events.

Know that this shouldn’t necessarily be seen as a replacement for creating events manually. And if you create events manually, it doesn’t mean that you should toggle Automatic Events off (Facebook recommends you do both).

If duplicate events are ever created, Facebook will deduplicate them. You won’t multiply your reporting because you use both automatic and manual events.

Don’t expect any noticeable changes, necessarily, but using Automatic Events is just good practice.

Your Turn

Do you have Automatic Events turned on?

Let me know in the comments below!

The post How to Set Up Automatic Events for Your Meta Pixel appeared first on Jon Loomer Digital.

If you’ve ever spent much time in Facebook Events Manager, you’ve surely received notifications of an unrecognized domain sending events from your pixel.

I can’t really speak to the motivation behind why this might happen, but it absolutely does. In some cases, there may be reasonable explanations related to selling your products on third-party websites and your pixel ends up there.

But, in theory, activity from domains you don’t own on your pixel could water down your data — if enough of it comes through. And since your pixel is often easily found within your website code, it wouldn’t be all that difficult for anyone to add your pixel to their website — whatever the motivations.

So, what do you do?

Traffic Permissions

You can actually control which websites have access to your pixel using traffic permissions. Go to your Events Manager Settings and scroll to the bottom.

There, you’ll see “Traffic Permissions.”

You’ll be able to do one of two things:

• Create a Block List
• Create an Allow List

Create a Block List

Originally, your only option was to create a block list. You are given a list of all of the domains that send data from your pixel, and you have the ability to block any of them.

Of course, this could end up being a game of whack-a-mole if you get significant traffic. I even seem to get a new domain attempting to send data from my pixel every week or so.

Create an Allow List

Luckily, you can also create an allow list. In this case, only the domains you list (including their subdomains) will be allowed to send data from your pixel. Any domains you don’t add will automatically be blocked.

This, of course, is much easier.

What if You Previously Created a Block List?

This happened to me when allow lists were created, and I assume it remains the same process. I had created a block list first because it was available first. It was not immediately clear how to create an allow list when you already had a block list. You will first need to remove all domains on your block list to create an allow list.

Similarly, let’s assume you want to switch from an allow list to a block list (not sure why, but okay!). You’ll get an error when attempting to create a block list.

Your Turn

Do you use allow lists or block lists?

Let me know in the comments below!

The post Pixel Traffic Permissions: Block and Allow Lists appeared first on Jon Loomer Digital.

You may want to target your most valuable website visitors with Facebook ads. One way to do this is by creating an audience based on event frequency.

While targeting the broadest audience possible is popular these days, there are absolutely times to consider targeting a smaller, more valuable audience, too. When you do, this is the type of targeting that you should use.

In this post, we’ll walk through how to isolate your audience based on the frequency of events executed. But, I’ll also give you the tools to dig deeper and create audiences based on event parameters.

Create a Website Custom Audience

To isolate those most valuable website visitors, of course, you’ll need to create a Website Custom Audience.

For the source, select your pixel…

While the pixel has become less reliable over the years due to iOS 14+ and browser restrictions, this should also capture web events fired from the API. Facebook isn’t perfectly clear on this point, but it would be consistent. When you set up the API for web events, you need to first select the pixel that those events are based on. And there’s no way — that I’m aware of, at least — to create an audience based only on API web events.

Select an Event

Next, select an event under “From your Events.”

If you want to create an audience of frequent website visitors, you can select the PageView event.

Other events advertisers are most likely to use would be the Purchase or CompleteRegistration events. What you use here depends on what type of audience you’re trying to create.

We’ll walk through a few examples during this post.

Set a Frequency for PageView Event

Before we get to this, you would set a retention. I’d recommend using the largest retention possible for most advertisers since this is going to shrink your audience. In that case, use 180 days (but feel free to use whatever works for you).

After setting the retention, click the “Refine by” drop-down menu. If you’re creating an audience based on the PageView event, select “Frequency” (options will look different for other events and we’ll get to that next).

The default set-up here is a frequency greater than or equal to 2.

This is a really good place to start as it will eliminate people who viewed only one page of your website. Feel free to increase the number, but know that the audience size will shrink with each increase.

A key point to understand is that this measures the number of times the PageView event fired. So, technically, it could be the same page multiple times or several unique pages.

Set a Frequency for Other Events

You could also create an audience based on the frequency of purchases, searches, registrations, or other events. When creating an audience based on one of these events, you’ll see options for “URL/Parameter” and “Aggregated Value.”

Select the “Aggregated Value” option and the default option will be “Frequency.”

Parameters and Other Examples

You can also get way into the weeds on various audiences you can create based on some of your events using parameters, whether it’s for standard or custom events.

I go into additional detail in a recent blog post covering the 10 website custom audience strategies that I use. Take a look!

Your Turn

Do you have other examples of ways that you’ve used this type of targeting?

Let me know in the comments below!

The post Create a Facebook Ads Audience Based on Event Frequency appeared first on Jon Loomer Digital.

While cold, broad targeting is popular, I still find warm targeting extremely valuable. I believe this is especially the case for content creators like me. Website custom audiences can be a great tool, and you can use them in many different ways.

I attract you to my website with free content, driven here by email, organic search, social media posts, and ads. It’s then important that I can isolate those who were most engaged to move them to the next step.

Because of the importance of warm audiences for me, I have a rather sophisticated approach to website remarketing. It’s more than just targeting all of my visitors or retargeting an abandoned cart.

While I use many of the “base” audiences that anyone can create, I also create audiences based on standard and custom events that help me isolate those who show they really dug into my content.

Let’s walk through the ways that I’m using website custom audiences right now…

Group 1: Base

First, let’s go through the easy audiences, the ones I call the “Base” audiences. These can be created by anyone and only require that you have the Meta pixel on your website.

1. All website visitors.

This is the broadest audience you can create of your website visitors. If you lack traffic, this is where you’ll start.

Visiting your website should be a good signal. It suggests at least the smallest amount of interest in your business or content. Of course, such an audience includes everyone: Those who spend three minutes and those who spend hours; those who view one page and those who view 100; those who buy from you and those who never would.

While you can use this for multiple purposes (driving traffic back to your website, building your email list, or selling a product), the variation of engagement may make it the best fit for driving traffic or free opt-ins.

2. People who visit specific web pages.

I use these for several very different situations.

First, like in the image above, I’ll use it to isolate traffic to a specific section of my website. Not everyone listens to podcasts, so I can promote podcast episodes to people who have visited “Pubcast” pages of my website.

When I use an ad set to promote a single blog post, I’ll also make sure to exclude those who already read the blog post. I do that by creating an audience of people who visited that URL and exclude it in my ad set.

Another way I use these audiences for exclusion purposes is by excluding those who already bought a product or opted-in to a free thing. Instead of using the website custom audience for standard events (we’ll get to those), I choose to instead create audiences of those who visited the thank-you page for the product I’m promoting and exclude the people who have been there.

Finally, I run remarketing campaigns to people who visited a product landing page but didn’t convert. I do this by targeting the people who visited the landing page and then excluding those who visited the thank-you page. While you could do this in a single audience, I choose to create two (target one, exclude the other).

3. Visitors by time spent.

This audience has been around for years, but I still find it very valuable for isolating my most engaged audience. In this case, it truly can be used for promoting just about anything (on my website, at least), whether it be content, an opt-in, or a product.

The key to remember is that it will, obviously, shrink your overall audience quite a bit. If you target your top 5%, that will be extremely relevant, but it is also going to be a fraction of the total website visitors. Size can lead to deliverability issues.

Group 2: Standard Events

One of the many reasons that you should create web events is that you can target people who perform them. I use these at a very basic level. For example, I will target all people who have purchased a product from me during the past 180 days.

I do the same for CompleteRegistration and Search. I target each group as engaged users likely to want to read a blog post or buy a product from me. While I could refine by parameters to isolate those who bought a particular product or spend the most money, I don’t tend to do that.

Keep in mind that I’ll create audiences by URL (using the confirmation page) to target or exclude those who have bought or registered for something.

One event that I will utilize parameters for, though, is PageView. I’ve used this during a recent experiment to find my most engaged website visitors by the number of pages viewed.

Group 3: Custom Events

I’ve written before about how I use Custom Events to isolate quality engagement on my website that I can’t get from Standard Events alone. While one valuable use of these events is for adding more context to reporting, I also use it to target these actions.

I created these events in the first place because they represent important engagement on my website. So, it would only be logical to target the people who perform these important events.

Once you create these custom events, you can create the audiences based on the events. Here are examples of what I do…

1. User Views 2+ Pages in a Session

2. User Scrolls at Least 70% on a Page

Note that I don’t technically refine by scroll depth here because the event only fires once you’ve scrolled 70%. I used it as an example here so that you can see how you might choose the scroll depth for this audience. (Read more about this event here.)

3. User Spends at Least 2 Minutes on a Page

I’ve set up the event itself in different ways. It originally fired in 30-second intervals. Then I set it up to only fire at 1 minute. Now I have two separate events, one at 1 minute and one at 2 minutes. As a result, I don’t need to refine further to create this audience.

4. User Performs “Quality Visitor” Event (2+ Minutes AND 70% Scroll)

Just for fun, I’m showing how to create an audience of people who perform this event at least three times.

5. Embedded YouTube Video Watched

I typically use these to include all YouTube video views on my website, but here’s an example of how I could include only views of a particular video and for a certain amount of view time.

6. Audio Player Started on My Website

Your Turn

Are there any other audiences you use that I haven’t mentioned here?

Let me know in the comments below!

The post 10 Facebook Website Custom Audience Strategies appeared first on Jon Loomer Digital.

The Facebook Conversions API has been a popular topic for the past year or so. While most marketers understand that they need it, most misunderstand the reason why.

Let’s clear up the following:

• What the Facebook Conversions API is
• Why it’s important
• Whether it’s helpful for iOS 14 data loss
• How to get it set up

Let’s go…

What is the Facebook Conversions API?

Look, as much as I’d like to be, I’m not a super nerdy, techy, programmer guy. I’m going to explain this in only the most basic terms — mainly because I understand it in the most basic terms.

The Conversions API creates a direct connection between your data and Facebook. This helps provide a conversions source in addition to the pixel and offline methods.

Consider the API something of a backup plan for sending web events. Those web events can be used for conversion attribution and reporting, optimization, and targeting.

Why the API is Important

The Facebook pixel was one of the most impactful developments of the past decade for advertisers. It’s certainly been huge for my advertising.

The problem is that the pixel is getting less and less reliable. Its ability to send event data to Facebook is interrupted by cookie blockers, loading errors, and connection problems.

It doesn’t mean that you should use the Conversions API instead of the Facebook pixel. If you use them both, you’re more likely to send Facebook a complete set of data. If Facebook doesn’t have the complete picture, it will negatively impact the platform’s impression of performance.

Consider this: If Facebook doesn’t have all of the event data, it may make it more difficult for your ad set to exit the learning phase. It may lead Facebook to incorrectly favor one ad set over another or one ad over another. Accurate attribution is important.

Adding the API leads to improved reporting, more complete custom audiences, and better optimization. And given the trend of ad blocking and browser privacy changes, we can expect the pixel to get less useful in the future — making the API even more important.

The API, iOS 14 and Data Loss

The Facebook Conversions API started getting more popular once changes related to iOS 14 were first announced. And Facebook confused matters more by recommending the API during this time.

The problem is, though, that the Facebook Conversions API has to follow the same rules for web events that the pixel does for sending data. If someone opts out of tracking, the API will be impacted in the same ways the pixel is.

Again, though, that doesn’t mean the API isn’t important. If you’re getting fewer conversions reported due to iOS 14, that just makes it more important that Facebook gets as many of the events that it can to report on what it can.

It won’t solve problems related to iOS 14, but the Facebook Conversions API will help improve your reporting that is unaffected by iOS 14.

How to Set it Up

Of course, there isn’t a single method for setting up the Facebook Conversions API. And in most cases, it’s not a simple task (there are exceptions!). It depends largely upon how you’re managing your pixel right now.

Within the Events Manager for your pixel, scroll down to Conversions API.

Click to choose a partner. There are several potential integration partners that you can pick from.

Depending on the partner, the instructions for setting up the API will be different. In some cases, it may be just a matter of a few clicks (the rumor is that Shopify and WooCommerce are very easy). In others, it may require some technical assistance.

I used the Conversions API Gateway to set it up. I wouldn’t say it was easy, but it was finally a solution that allowed me to get the process completed. For the longest time, I ran into hurdles.

Read my tutorial on how I set up the Conversions API Gateway.

Other Uses of the API

Beyond sending web events, you can also send offline events or integrate your CRM. The CRM integration, at least for now, is being used by Facebook for Conversion Lead optimization when running Facebook lead ads. I’ll cover that in more detail later.

Watch Video

Your Turn

Do you have the Conversions API set up? What method did you use? Are you seeing an improvement in performance as a result?

Let me know in the comments below!

The post Importance of the Facebook Conversions API appeared first on Jon Loomer Digital.

For the past couple of years now, I’ve used Google Tag Manager to manage the Facebook pixel and events (both standard and custom events). In this post, I’m going to walk through exactly how I do that.

I wish I would have started using GTM to manage my Facebook pixel and events sooner. It provides a ton of flexibility and ability to get creative in ways that you can’t while sticking with standard events only.

Install the Base Pixel Code

In order to take advantage of Google Tag Manager for standard and custom pixel events, you’ll first need to add the base Facebook pixel code.

Within the Google Tag Manager workspace for your domain, go to Tags.

Click to create a “New” tag.

Click “Tag Configuration.”

Select “Custom HTML.”

This is where you’ll need to paste your base Facebook pixel code. Go into Facebook Events Manager and select your pixel as the data source.

Then click the “Add Events” drop-down and select “From a New Website.”

Choose to “Install Code Manually.”

Click the green “Copy Code” button.

Then paste that code back into the HTML field of the tag you were creating in GTM.

Under “Advanced Settings,” choose “Once per page.”

At the bottom, click into “Triggering.”

Select the “All Pages” page view trigger.

Name your tag (something like “Facebook – Base Pixel”) and save it.

Then click to submit your changes.

Create Standard Events

First, you can technically use the Facebook Pixel Setup Tool to create standard pixel events without code. I’ve personally not had a lot of luck with that tool and choose to do it manually in Google Tag Manager.

We created a Facebook Pixel Event Generator tool to help with this process. Let’s assume that I want to create a ViewContent event for the view of my training landing page.

I select “ViewContent.”

Everything else is optional, but I’ll also provide the name of the landing page for “content_name.”

The code I need is now at the bottom of the page. Copy that.

Here’s a video of how to use that tool if you need it…

Now, create a new tag in Google Tag Manager. Once again, it should utilize custom HTML. Paste the code we just copied from the Event Generator.

Let’s name the tag before we go further. This is for you, so name it whatever you want. Make sure it’s descriptive so you know what it is.

Under Advanced Settings, expand Tag Sequencing and check the box for “Fire a tag before [your tag] fires.”

We want the base Facebook pixel code to fire first or the events won’t work. Click to select a tag and then choose the base pixel tag that we created earlier.

Click into Triggering and then click the “+” to add a new trigger. This trigger will be the view of the specific page that will result in the ViewContent event firing.

First name it. Then click Trigger Configuration. Select “Page View” as your trigger type.

Select “Some Page Views” and then “Page URL” from the drop-down. You’ll use Page URL “contains” and then paste in everything from your landing page URL after the domain name (including “/ and /”).

When you’re done, save and submit your changes.

You can do this with any standard event. I also create events for CompleteRegistration and Purchase using the page view of the thank-you pages as the trigger events.

Create Custom Events

One of the really cool benefits of Google Tag Manager for managing your Facebook pixel is the custom events that you can create. I’m not going to use this space to detail how I created all of my custom events because I’ve already written individual blog posts on each one.

I’ve created a custom event to trigger when someone views a page of my website for at least 60 seconds. It uses a special Google Tag Manager timer trigger.

I’ve also created a custom event to trigger when someone scrolls at least 70% deep into a page. This event utilizes the Scroll Depth trigger.

And finally, I created an event that triggers when someone watches YouTube videos embedded on my website. These events use a YouTube Video trigger.

I’m sure there’s still way more that I can do with custom pixel events using Google Tag Manager, but these are really nice tools to help me track, optimize, and target quality actions on my website.

Test Them

You can test whether the pixel and events are working using the “Test Events” tab in your Events Manager. But I find it’s easier to simply use the Facebook Pixel Helper Chrome plugin.

If you use the plugin, simply navigate to the page that should fire the event you’ve added.

If everything is working properly, all expected events will fire and display with a green checkmark.

GTM + Conversions API Gateway

While the Conversions API Gateway isn’t part of Google Tag Manager, I wanted to note that the two play nicely. Once I set up the Conversions API using the API Gateway, it automatically detects all of the standard and custom events that pass through the pixel.

Watch Video

Your Turn

I’m a big fan of using Google Tag Manager to manage my Facebook pixel and events. Have you used it to create other powerful custom events that I haven’t?

Let me know in the comments below!

The post How to Use Google Tag Manager to Manage the Facebook Pixel and Events appeared first on Jon Loomer Digital.

Thanks to a recent update, advertisers can now optimize for and track Facebook custom events — without needing to first create a custom conversion.

If this doesn’t make sense to you, allow me to explain…

What are Custom Events?

First, when we speak of “events” in this context, I’m referring to pixel events. Publishers who install the Facebook pixel (a unique snippet of code) to their website can track and optimize for specific events that occur on their website using Facebook ads.

There are two kinds of events:

1. Standard: Facebook has predefined events that they can easily recognize for tracking and optimization purposes. Examples include Purchase, CompleteRegistration, VieContent, and Search (among many others).

2. Custom: Maybe you have events that can’t be defined within “standard” constraints. You can use custom code to define “custom” events so that Facebook can track these as well. An example of a custom event on my website is the “Time on Page” event.

This allows me to send an event when someone has spent 60 seconds or more on a page. (You can read more about how I created this custom event here.)

The Problem (Before)

Once you create a custom event, you can create an audience of people who have performed it for targeting purposes. Here’s an example using the custom event I created for Time on Page.

After that, however, custom events had some weaknesses. You could optimize for standard events when creating a conversions campaign. You could also track standard event conversions by adding a column (if you didn’t define it as the conversion event in the ad set). But custom events needed another step.

In order to optimize for or track a custom event, you needed to first map that event to a custom conversion (since you could optimize for and track custom conversions, but not custom events).

What This Update Means

Mapping a custom event to a custom conversion in order to optimize for or track it seemed like a completely unnecessary step. And it was.

With this update, you will now be able to select a custom event when choosing your conversion event within the ad set.

Facebook doesn’t do a very good job of differentiating between what’s a standard event, custom event, or custom conversion during this process, but there’s one indicator. Standard and custom events don’t have rules, whereas custom conversions do. You should recognize all standard events. If you are uncertain whether an event is a custom event or custom conversion, hover over it to see if rules were set up for it.

Here’s a custom conversion where rules were set up…

And here’s a custom event, showing no rules…

If you select a custom event as a conversion event, it will be tracked in the “Results” column. But, you can also now add a column for a custom event now.

Click to customize columns…

On the left, you’ll see a “Conversions” section that includes standard events, custom conversions, and custom events.

You can then add a column for that custom event, regardless of whether you define it as your conversion event.

iOS 14 Considerations

Something to consider here is that you currently cannot configure your eight ranked events to include custom events, only standard events and custom conversions. Ranked events will result in more complete reporting, assuming you have a substantial audience using iOS devices.

My assumption is that Facebook will eventually allow us to add custom events as our ranked events, but until then this is something to keep in mind.

Your Turn

Have you started optimizing for and tracking custom events?

Let me know in the comments below!

The post How to Optimize For and Track Facebook Custom Events appeared first on Jon Loomer Digital.

We’re entering a time when tracking users from app to app and website to website is becoming increasingly difficult. Browser settings and Apple’s iOS 14.5 update are making the Facebook pixel less dependable for the purposes of tracking conversions and creating audiences for ad targeting.

That’s rough for advertisers. It creates a need for more granular targeting that isn’t impacted by these privacy developments. Activity that occurs entirely within the Facebook app, for example, can still be tracked and turned into audiences used for targeting.

Facebook offers some options. They just aren’t as robust as they could or should be. I’ve long wondered why many of the requests I make in this post aren’t already available. Until now, it was more of a luxury need. Now, though, they’re the type of options advertisers will need to replace or supplement some of their favorite options that are becoming less useful.

Facebook, if you’re reading this, it’s long past the time to offer these options for advertisers. You have the ability. Doing so will provide a little bit of sunshine during an otherwise tumultuous period.

Let’s go…

Clarification: What Is and Is Not Impacted

These additional audience targeting options are necessary because iOS 14 and other tracking restrictions are impacting the ability to target people based on their activity. Understand that iOS 14, specifically, applies to tracking across apps and websites.

This applies to the creation of website custom audiences and app activity custom audiences. If someone opts out of tracking, they will be removed from these audiences related to their activity while using an iOS device.

That said, this does not impact tracking that Facebook does and can do within their own app. As a result, this does not impact the following audience types:

• Video
• Lead Form
• Instant Experience
• Shopping
• Instagram Account
• Page Events
• Facebook Page
• On-Facebook Listings

It also doesn’t impact things like customer list audiences, interests, or lookalike audiences (though the source audiences may be impacted).

In this post, we’ll explore ways that Facebook can expand on those audiences that aren’t impacted.

Expansion of Engagement Types

The Facebook Page Engagement audience allows for several ways to target an audience that engages with your page…

Advertisers also have a similar method for building audiences of people who have engaged with their Instagram business account.

This is great and all, but the types of engagement are extremely general. The nice thing about website custom audiences is that I can isolate very specific types of events for targeting. That granularity does not exist here.

Here are a few engagement types that Facebook could turn into targeting audiences…

1. Post Shares
2. Post Comments
3. Post Reactions (or segmented by specific reaction type)
4. Image Click

You probably don’t realize this, but most of these actions (except for image click) were previously possible. Creation wasn’t part of Facebook’s main audience interface, though. It was done within Facebook Analytics.

In the example above, you’d first create a filter, save it, and then create a custom audience from it. Perfect, right? The problem is, of course, that Facebook Analytics went away on June 30, 2021.

We know that Facebook has the information to create these audiences. We could create them before. Facebook needs to make this part of the main audience interface.

Engagement on Specific Posts

Maybe you want to reach those who shared or commented but limit retargeting to that activity related to a specific post. In the example above, creating audiences for all comments, shares, or reactions would be good for building general targeting audiences. But there’s often a more specific need.

If you liked, shared, or commented on a specific post, I could then show you an ad related to that topic. Relevance, as always, is key.

Look, I understand that Facebook’s argument may be that this type of granularity wouldn’t be useful for those with small budgets or low levels of activity on their posts. The audience sizes will be small.

Fine. But it could be enormously valuable for those with higher budgets and those with more activity. Just make it available and let us sort out whether we have the volume to make it useful.

More Granular Instant Experience Actions

The Instant Experience ad format is likely to become more popular among Facebook advertisers since it doesn’t rely on the uncertainty of the pixel for audience creation. It keeps users entirely inside an “instant” experience that can consist of various “components,” or blocks of text, images, videos, products, or more.

You can create audiences of people who engage with these experiences. Audience creation options include anyone who opened the Instant Experience or anyone who opened and then clicked a link within it.

That’s a pretty soft offering of options. In addition to adding the components that were engaged with, what about adding specificity to the link clicked within the Instant Experience? You could include multiple links and buttons within the experience. Why not allow the ability to create an audience based on which one was clicked?

Impressions Shown

You may have been shown an ad or post, but you didn’t necessarily click on it. In fact, the odds are better that you didn’t. What if I could target or exclude people who were already shown a post or ad?

For example…

1. Show to followers who haven’t seen it.

Let’s say you published something organically to your followers. As we know, a small percentage of those followers will likely see it. What if we could create an ad that reaches only those who weren’t shown it so far? We could do that, but only if we could create an audience of those who were shown an impression and exclude that group.

2. Control frequency.

One of the biggest complaints among advertisers is that Facebook doesn’t give us enough ways to control frequency. We waste money showing ads to people who see them over and over again.

Currently, the best way to do that would be to use Frequency Capping when optimizing for Reach or using Reach and Frequency buying.

But, how would you control reach when simply optimizing for Conversions or something else with a modest budget? We could do that by creating an audience of people who already saw our post or ad during a set window of time (let’s say 14 days) and exclude that group.

3. Show a variety of content.

Or maybe we want to reach people who saw a post or ad (but didn’t necessarily engage with it) and show them something else. We could do that if we could target those who were shown that post or ad.

Frequency of Engagement or Impressions

One of the really cool and underutilized features related to website custom audiences is buried within pixel event audiences. You can create audiences based on parameters, values, and frequency of actions.

This is great! But we’ve already discussed how the pixel is becoming less dependable in the age of iOS 14 and less tracking. Anyone who opts out of tracking will be removed from these types of audiences.

What if we could apply this type of granularity to engagement with other types of Facebook content?

1. Frequency of engagement.

We mentioned creating an audience of people who engaged with a specific post or ad. But what about people who have engaged multiple times across your content? People who routinely like or love your posts, for example, may be valuable. Or people who message frequently, click links, comment, or provide numerous other types of engagement. It would be great to be able to isolate these people!

You can currently create an audience of people who engaged with any post or ad, but there’s no frequency element. That would decrease the audience size but increase the relevance.

2. Frequency of impressions.

Once again, a way to control frequency. Previously, we discussed creating an audience of people who were shown a specific post or ad during a specified window of time so that we could exclude them. Instead, what if we could exclude only those who saw that post or ad three times during the past seven days?

Watch Video

Your Turn

Facebook has the ability to provide these targeting options to advertisers. It would only enhance the performance of ads and the creativity of advertisers. Why not provide them?

Any other targeting options you want to see? Let me know in the comments below!

The post Audience Targeting Options Facebook Needs in the Age of Less Tracking appeared first on Jon Loomer Digital.

As advertisers configure their Facebook web events in preparation for iOS 14, we’ve been hearing from many experiencing hidden Facebook events. These can’t be seen (obviously), configured, or optimized for.

As you can see in the example above, hidden events are grayed out and won’t allow you to see or configure them.

This typically happens for agencies who are managing ads for a client. The explanation is often quite simple: You don’t have access to all of the events.

Let me explain…

Why this Happens

The “Hidden” message will occur because you do not have access to all of the eight configured events for a given domain. This may be a surprise for an agency that has been given access to a client’s pixel via Business Manager. But, understand that pixel configurations are often complicated.

Maybe your client has only one pixel. Maybe your client only configured standard events with selecting the eight that can be used for optimization.

But, there are two very common reasons why it won’t be that simple, leading to “Hidden” events.

Multiple Pixels

Your client may have multiple pixels on their website. And they may have configured specific events for each pixel.

One point of annoyance with the 8-event limit is that you can’t simply configure eight standard events for a domain and say they apply to all pixels on the domain. This would be ideal for ecommerce sites with dozens, hundreds, or thousands of sellers and pixels on the website. But, that’s not possible.

When configuring events, you have to first select the pixel.

So, technically, you could have eight different purchase events for eight different pixels. You would then have no room to configure any other events.

This may happen for bigger companies that have multiple locations or distinct departments that use their own pixels. And because they all fall under the same domain, they need to be included within the same group of eight configured events.

If this is the case, your client needs to make sure that you have access to all pixels that have events configured for their domain. This is done within their Business Manager.

They need to go to “Pixels” under “Data Sources.”

After selecting a pixel that has been configured with events, click on Partners to see with whom that pixel has already been shared. If no partners are listed, you’ll need to share it!

After clicking “Assign Partners,” enter the partner’s (agency’s) Business ID and determine the level of access they require.

Once you have access to the pixel, you should see its events within Event Configuration. When that’s the case, you’ll also be able to optimize for those events.

Share Custom Conversions

This is a big one. Honestly, it’s somewhat annoying. Custom conversions are not automatically shared with the pixel. So, if custom conversions are used for event configuration, they will be “Hidden” if they haven’t been shared.

As an agency that has access to a client’s pixel, you can create your own custom conversions. But, you do not automatically get access to any custom conversions that the client created. And if there are some that are needed (especially for optimization), you’ll need access.

While you can certainly recreate a custom conversion for reporting purposes, it won’t help you for optimization. Your recreated custom conversion won’t be the original that was configured as one of the domain’s eight events that can be used for optimization.

Custom conversions can also be shared from Business Manager.

Custom conversions exist both on an ad account-level and business-level. If the custom conversions in question don’t appear in this list in Business Manager, they are only currently used at an ad account-level. They’ll need to first be added to Business Manager.

Click the drop-down and select to add a custom conversion.

You will need to enter the custom conversion ID. Then select the ad accounts connected to your Business Manager that need access to the custom conversion.

Finally, determine the level of access that is needed.

For more information on sharing custom conversions, read this post.

Your Turn

This should solve the majority of issues with “Hidden” events. Still having issues?

Let me know in the comments below!

The post Where Are My Client’s Hidden Facebook Events? appeared first on Jon Loomer Digital.

Now that we’re in the world of iOS 14, Aggregated Event Measurement, and the 8-event limit, one of the biggest issues I’ve heard from consultants and agencies is an inability to access and optimize for a client’s configured Facebook events.

It all comes down to access and how you are set up. Not every client-agency relationship is constructed the same way, but I want to cover a couple of the most common ways to make sure that you have access to events based on the following scenarios:

1. Agency is given access to a client’s ad account and connected pixel
2. Agency uses their own ad account and gets access to the client pixel

Let’s go…

Assumptions

Before we walk through these two scenarios, it’s important to lay out a couple of assumptions based on best practices.

First, the client has their own Business Manager and Facebook pixel. They may even have their own custom conversions. You should have your own Business Manager as well, but it’s important that this starts with the client having their own.

Second, the client has verified their domains within their own Business Manager. You could assist them, but this process should be attached to their own Business Manager — not yours. You don’t own the domain; they do.

If your client hasn’t yet verified their domain, read this post for instructions.

Once that’s taken care of, let’s make sure you get access to those events…

Client Shares Ad Account with Agency

The first scenario assumes that ads are billed to the client directly through their ad account. If this is your setup, the client shares their ad account with you (the agency managing the client’s ads). This assumes that the pixel on their website is also connected to that ad account.

If you aren’t yet set up this way and want to be, let’s go through how this is set up first.

This process can be initiated by either the client or the agency. Within Business Manager, go to “Ad Accounts” within the “Accounts” section.

If you are an agency looking to get access to the client’s ad account, click the “Add” drop-down. Then select “Request Access to an Ad Account.”

Enter the ad account ID you want to access and click “Confirm.”

If you are the client and want to grant access to your ad account to an agency, first select your ad account within Business Manager. Then click to “Assign Partners.” You will have the option of assigning by Business ID or getting a link to share.

Your Business ID is found within the Business Info section at the bottom left of Business Manager.

Once they enter your Business ID, they can select what level of access you can get to their ad account.

Once this is set up, you’ll need to be sure you have access to the client’s connected pixel as well. The client can check by going to the “Pixels” section under “Data Sources” and going to “Connected Assets” for the pixel in question.

If their ad account isn’t listed here, they’ll need to first click “Add Assets” to connect it.

Once completed, you will be able to create ad sets that optimize for the client’s configured pixel events.

If the client has custom conversions as some of their configured events, see the portion at the bottom or read this post about sharing custom conversions.

Client Shares Pixel with Agency

Maybe the agency pays for the ads and gets reimbursed later. Even if this is the case, the client should have their own Business Manager and you should use their pixel. You can add your pixel as well, but your client will need their pixel on their website long-term for when you are no longer the agency.

The process to get access to the pixel isn’t quite as straightforward as it should be. There are multiple steps.

The client should go to “Pixels” within the “Data Sources” section of Business Manager.

Select the pixel that you (or the client) want to share and click “Assign Partners.”

They should enter your Business ID (see instructions for finding that above) and determine your level of access to their pixel.

The pixel will then show up in your (the agency’s) Business Manager under “Data Sources.” However, you will not be able to optimize for any of that pixel’s events yet since it isn’t connected to an ad account. This is a step that can be easily missed, so don’t forget it!

Click on “Add Assets” when viewing the client’s pixel in Business Manager and select the ad account that you want to connect to the pixel. That ad account will then appear within the Connected Assets section for that pixel.

You will then be able to optimize for that pixel’s configured events.

How to Share Custom Conversions

It’s possible that the process highlighted above will give you access to all of the events you need. However, if your client’s configured events include custom conversions, they’ll need to share those, too.

For more on how to share custom conversions, read this post.

Hidden Events

After walking through these steps, you may notice that some events remain “Hidden” and can’t be seen, configured, or optimized for. There is a primary reason why this is the case: The events represent pixels or custom conversions that weren’t shared with you.

Read this post for more information.

Your Turn

If your client-agency is set up in these ways, you’re set up for success. Still having problems?

Let me know in the comments below!

The post How to Optimize for a Client’s Configured Facebook Events appeared first on Jon Loomer Digital.

NOTE: Since writing this post, I’ve written several more related to iOS 14 and the impact to Facebook advertisers:

• Facebook Ads and the Impact of iOS 14
• Facebook Advertising Audiences and iOS 14
• Facebook Ads Attribution and iOS 14
• ERROR: “This event hasn’t been set up on any of your domains”
• Problem: Unable to Verify Domain to Configure Web Events

You’ve undoubtedly heard that Apple is making big changes to data tracking permissions in iOS 14 that could significantly impact Facebook advertisers, publishers, and app developers. You’ve surely heard of this news in stark terms, that advertising will be less effective and businesses will suffer.

What’s true? Let’s be very clear: WE DON’T KNOW.

We know some things. I shared a video that detailed my initial impressions. But there’s a lot happening, and I want to make sure I fully understand how this might impact you.

The point of this post is to help walk you through all of what I know about this to help you prepare.

What concerns me is that Facebook is clearly concerned. Based on their response, I’d even call it panic. And why would they panic? If these changes do in fact make advertising less effective, advertisers will spend less. If advertisers spend less, Facebook takes a big hit to their revenue.

This certainly has my attention, and it should have yours. But the sky is not falling (yet, at least). Let’s make sure that we understand what’s happening and prepare ourselves the best we can.

Ready for this monster topic? Let’s do it…

The iOS 14 Update

Privacy and data usage take center stage in the latest updates to Apple operating systems (iOS 14, iPadOS 14, and tvOS 14). Within each app’s product page, users will be able to learn about how an app uses their data. Developers will also be required to provide details on their privacy policies, the data they collect, and how they intend to use it.

These updates seem harmless enough — if not necessary. But the iOS 14 change that is most likely to impact Facebook advertising is related to permissions. Going forward, apps will be required to get permission from users to track them or access their device’s advertising identifier.

Here’s where it gets interesting. Getting permission isn’t as simple as a buried paragraph on your privacy policy. Developers can’t flash an announcement with a big “OK” button and a small link to update your settings. Users will need to explicitly opt-IN (not opt-OUT) to provide these permissions.

When it comes to privacy and data collection, Facebook tends to work in an opt-OUT fashion. They may alert you to the data that is collected and how it is used, but you need to update your privacy settings to opt-out of these practices (almost no one does this).

The main exception to this is when you use an app that integrates with Facebook’s systems. In this case, you are normally prompted for more explicit permission opt-in.

The Apple prompt will function more like a Facebook app integration permission flow and will make it clear that the app wants permission to use your data with two simple buttons:

• Allow Tracking
• Ask App Not to Track

This prompt will appear when using all iOS apps. That includes:

• Apps within the Facebook family (Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, WhatsApp)
• Apps that monetize with Audience Network, a placement utilized by Facebook advertisers

Examples of data tracking that will require user approval include (from Apple’s announcement):

• Displaying targeted advertisements in your app based on user data collected from apps and websites owned by other companies.
• Sharing device location data or email lists with a data broker.
• Sharing a list of emails, advertising IDs, or other IDs with a third-party advertising network that uses that information to retarget those users in other developers’ apps or to find similar users.
• Placing a third-party SDK in your app that combines user data from your app with user data from other developers’ apps to target advertising or measure advertising efficiency, even if you don’t use the SDK for these purposes. For example, using an analytics SDK that repurposes the data it collects from your app to enable targeted advertising in other developers’ apps.

Facebook’s Reaction

If you are unsure whether the iOS 14 update has the potential to cause chaos, observe Facebook’s major PR reaction.

In a post called Speaking Up for Small Businesses, Dan Levy, the VP of Ads and Business Products, claims that the “new iOS 14 policy will have a harmful impact on many small businesses that are struggling to stay afloat.”

Levy believes the changes will impact businesses in these ways:

• Force businesses to turn to subscriptions and in-app payments
• Make advertising less efficient and effective
• Cause a loss of personalization that could result in 60% fewer website sales from ads
• That loss of personalization could lead to a drop in revenue by 50% resulting from Facebook app install ads
• Make it more difficult for small businesses to reach their ideal audience, limiting growth

Facebook created a page for small business owners to “add your voice” in opposition to the iOS 14 updates. Facebook even created a toolkit to help you share posts, videos, and stories to #SpeakUpForSmall businesses.

The emphasis, if you haven’t noticed, is on small businesses. Facebook claims that the greatest impact will be felt by the most vulnerable businesses, rather than the big brands with deep pockets.

Impact to Audience Network

Facebook Audience Network is a network of ads that appear mostly on mobile apps, outside of the Facebook family. There are two primary sides to Facebook Audience Network: Publishers, who place ads on their apps (and sometimes mobile websites) to monetize their product; and advertisers, who spend to reach their targeted audience while using these apps.

A post by AdScholars helps explain how this impacts Audience Network:

Apple assigns IDFA or Identifier for Advertisers to an iPhone across apps. This tracking mechanism is basically their cookie and advertising platforms rely on the data to target ads… This identifier was always present by default for iOS users but Apple’s new privacy change means that users cannot be tracked by default anymore. Many advertising industry insiders believe users will refuse… data tracking permissions if given a choice. This means no data for ad targeting which eventually will make ad placement a task. Fewer ads on Facebook’s Audience Network will lead to less revenue for publishers.

In Preparing Audience Network for iOS 14, Facebook says that they “will continue to serve ads, however our ability to deliver personalized ads on iOS 14 will be limited.” They tell publishers to expect ad revenue to decrease.

How bad will it be? Facebook says it “may render Audience Network so ineffective on iOS 14 that it may not make sense to offer it on iOS 14 in the future.” Wow.

That sounds bad for publishers who monetize their apps. What about advertisers who use Audience Network among their ad placements to reach their audience?

According to Facebook, the ability to deliver targeted ads via Audience Network will be impacted. Some users may not see ads while others may see less relevant ads. The result should be lower CPMs, which means less revenue for the publishers.

That may mean lower CPMs for the advertiser as well, but it certainly sounds like this placement will provide little bang for that minimal buck.

Now, this is a big deal if you monetize your app with Audience Network and rely on that revenue. But, advertisers have seen inconsistent results from this placement. I’ve found it’s prone to accidental clicks, bot clicks, and click fraud.

I’ve also seen that the percentage of ad distribution to Audience Network is mostly negligible — but that’s if I use the placement at all. I often deselect it, particularly if I optimize for traffic or reach.

So, from an advertising perspective, is this it? Unfortunately, the issues with Audience Network are only scratching the surface…

Preparing for iOS 14

In a blog post to advertisers, Facebook announced a series of their own upcoming changes to address the iOS 14 update. While it was looking as though the impetus of this update would fall on Audience Network and mobile apps, Facebook indicates that this change “will have hard hitting implications for businesses that advertise on mobile devices and across the web.” (emphasis mine)

The posts goes on to say that once Facebook and Instagram are forced to show Apple’s prompt to users of the Facebook family of apps, “those that optimize, target, and/or report on mobile web events from any of our business tools will be impacted.” So, the impact is likely to extend beyond Audience Network.

So, we are now talking about the impact to advertisers as a result of people not giving Facebook’s apps permission to track them. It will, as Facebook says, impact optimization, targeting, and tracking across the mobile web. Why?

Imagine a user opts not to allow the Facebook or Instagram app to track them. They click a link shared to their news feed. We then, I presume, end up with a black hole. Facebook can’t track that user’s activity on the websites clicked from Facebook so that activity can not be used for targeting and conversion tracking.

Remember that this is mobile only. If a user visits your website directly via desktop or clicks a link from desktop on Facebook that drives to your website, the Facebook pixel should be functional. That is, of course, if local laws and browser settings allow it. That’s a whole different issue.

Back to iOS 14. Facebook is making several changes to prepare for this update that will go into effect in early 2021. Let’s cover those now…

Event Management

First, Facebook is making a couple of changes related to events occurring on iOS devices once Apple begins showing the permissions prompt. “Events” refer to actions on your website or app, typically reported using the Facebook pixel (on your website) or Facebook SDK (on a mobile app). Examples of events include purchase, complete registration, lead, and many more.

Aggregated Event Management: It’s unclear what this actually is. Facebook says this will “help you measure campaign performance in a way that is consistent with consumers’ decisions about their data.” I’m assuming this has something to do with grouping all events (mobile or pixel) performed on devices running iOS 14 since that information is likely to be incomplete.

Event Limits: Advertisers will be limited to EIGHT conversion events per domain — including pixel events AND custom conversions. Currently, no such limit exists.

This is where it gets weird (if it wasn’t weird already)…

Facebook indicates that no changes will need to be made to your pixel or Conversions API implementation. Instead, all changes will occur within Ads Manager in early 2021. There, you’ll configure your eight priority events, ranking them in order.

What happens if you have ad sets optimizing for events that aren’t among those primary eight? Those ad sets get paused.

Additionally, consider a situation where a visitor comes to your website (page view), goes to the product landing page (view content), begins the purchase process (add to cart) and completes the purchase (purchase). Facebook will only report on the purchase — or the highest-ranking event.

Now, maybe reporting only the highest-ranking event in a series isn’t a huge deal. We can make some assumptions. If you purchased, you likely also added to cart and viewed content. But, there are undoubtedly some reporting and optimization issues here if you start digging. For example, it seems you won’t be able to identify if you have certain products that have a high purchase abandonment (e.g. adding to cart but not completing purchase).

I also have a really hard time understanding the 8-event limit. First, we know that you can still differentiate product details with parameters. Most businesses can get away with only eight pixel events. But that number includes custom conversions? That’s a big blow to product-specific optimization and tracking.

At the very least, it seems we might need to significantly restructure the way product-level optimization occurs. It’s unclear if Facebook will make any changes to their systems to help streamline such a restructure.

An important question: Does this only apply to iOS traffic? If so, maybe it’s not quite as impactful (though trying to manage this separately sounds like chaos). Still, I see no indication from Facebook documentation that these event changes only apply to iOS 14.

I can’t help but keep asking: What does this have to do with iOS 14? Why will we now be limited to eight conversion events? At this moment, it doesn’t feel connected or make a whole lot of sense.

Regardless, plan for eight events per domain. And to avoid any other issues with this rollout, make sure you get your domain verified (follow that link since I’ve covered this before).

Delivery and Optimization

First, the obvious and unspoken point: If Facebook is tracking fewer events, it will be more difficult to effectively optimize your ad sets. Advertisers optimize for an action so that Facebook shows their ads to people most likely to perform that action. But volume is necessary (or you’ll fail to exit the learning phase).

Outside of the likely impact to optimization due to an expected drop in event volume, Facebook is making changes to Value Optimization. VO allows you to bid for your highest value customers, rather than a specific action only.

If you haven’t used or heard of Value Optimization before, you aren’t alone. It’s used mostly by advertisers with the highest volume and budgets.

Why? To be eligible for Value Optimization, you must satisfy these requirements:

• Have an active pixel, SDK, or product catalog
• Send and optimize for Purchase events
• Generate 100+ optimized purchases over the last 7 days
• Have at least 10 distinct values over the last 7 days (cumulative purchase values)

You undoubtedly have a pixel and send/optimize for purchase events already. But the 100+ purchases and at least 10 distinct values over seven days is going to limit whom this applies to.

If you do use VO, a value set will need to be enabled in Events Manager. Turning this on immediately uses up four of your eight events used for optimization.

Why four? No idea. But using VO may help you optimize more efficiently for high-value customers (assuming you qualify).

Dynamic Ads

Facebook says that there aren’t any immediate changes you need to make if you utilize dynamic ads. That said, expect performance and audience sizes to suffer when running retargeting campaigns. You shouldn’t see much impact to broad targeting campaigns.

To prepare, Facebook suggests using only one pixel per catalog and to avoid links in your catalog that send users to another domain.

Measurement

First, we’ve known for a while now that Facebook is moving to a 7-day click and 1-day view attribution window. What this means is that Facebook reports on a conversion, by default, when a user sees your ad without clicking and converts within a day or clicks your ad and converts within 7 days. This is moving from a 28-day click and 1-day view window.

You should still have access to the 28-day window now. If you customize your columns in ads manager, you can add columns for multiple attribution windows, including 28 days.

Every business is different. Get a sense of how many of your conversions tend to be beyond a 7-day click because those are about to go away.

Once the iOS 14 updates go into place, Facebook is expecting a loss of conversion reporting. As a result, Facebook will utilize modeling to help fill in the blanks.

From Facebook (emphasis is mine):

• Statistical modeling will be used for certain attribution windows and/or metrics to account for less data availability from iOS 14 users. In-product annotation will communicate when a metric is modeled.
• Certain attribution windows will have partial reporting and metrics will not include all events from iOS 14 users. In-product annotation will communicate when a metric is partial. This will launch in early 2021.

It’s unclear how this will be displayed and how Facebook will handle this. Essentially, Facebook knows that your conversions are underreported, and modeling helps them understand by how much.

Advertising for Your App

Facebook also expects the iOS 14 update to impact the effectiveness of advertising that promotes app installs and engagement. If you run ads to drive conversions within your app, it is recommended that you update to Facebook’s SDK for iOS 14 version 8.1.

Updating to the latest version of the Facebook SDK for iOS will allow you to personalize ads delivered to people using iOS 14 devices and continue to measure and optimize for app install ads, among other things.

The biggest change is that Facebook will require advertisers to create separate app install campaigns for devices running on iOS 14. Additionally:

• Your app can be associated with only one ad account
• The same ad account can be associated wih multiple apps, if you own multiple
• Each app is limited to 9 iOS 14 campaigns at once
• Each campaign is limited to 5 ad sets of the same optimization type
• Auction is the only buying type available

To be clear: These limitations ONLY apply to app install ads on iOS 14. This does not impact other campaigns.

There’s actually quite a bit more documentation for app developers and advertisers on this topic here, and Facebook seems to be updating this information quickly.

My Concerns

Look, I’m not going to lie to you (do I ever?). I’m concerned.

I’m most concerned about negatively impacting or even losing some of the strategies that have made my advertising so successful. Most specifically: Targeting.

I thrive on microtargeting my most engaged audience. I create audiences based on pages visited and quality of visit, and I have a ton of success with this approach.

But, let’s say that suddenly my volume for these audiences is cut in half. Additionally, audiences for conversions become less reliable because they leave out the people who refused tracking. This would hurt.

All true. But, it would force me to reassess and maybe change my ways. It would force me to get outside my comfort zone and try something new.

What’s Going to Happen?

If after reading all of this, you still don’t know precisely how the iOS 14 update is going to impact you as an advertiser, GOOD. It shouldn’t be clear. It’s not clear. We really won’t know until all of this rolls out — and we’ll probably need a few months after that to get an accurate measure.

Facebook threw around some scary stats related to how this might impact small businesses, but we just don’t know. Don’t freak out yet.

My best summary is this:

Updates to iOS 14 will lead to less tracking of people on mobile devices. This will impact the pixel and everything associated with it (conversion tracking, optimization, targeting). It will impact mobile app ads. Audience Network publishers will take a hit, and the placement may be less effective. This may even spill over to location targeting and actions performed within the Facebook app.

All of these things may be true, but we just don’t know about the extent to which it is true. It could be a small blip or it could be catastrophic. And that may be the case for the entire industry, or it may differ from business to business.

Lots of things may impact the impact on you.

How many people in your audience use iOS devices? How many will opt not to be tracked?

How much targeting will we lose? Will this force us to make adjustments? How will our new efforts fare?

How much conversion reporting will we lose? If we’re still getting these conversions, but it’s not attributed directly to our ads, how much does it matter? It certainly matters some, but how much?

If the volume of events impacts optimization, how much will efficiency suffer? Will it suffer at all? If it does, how will we adjust?

How will you adjust to using eight conversion events? Can you get by, or will it negatively impact your results?

Bottom line: I see this as a dress rehearsal. Maybe the impact will be minimal for now. But, this train started moving with GDPR. More changes will be made. Emphasis on privacy and data tracking is not going away.

I have a hard time believing that the Facebook ads market is going to collapse. New tools will be created to solve problems. If advertisers initially drop out, that decreases competition and CPMs.

And maybe that takes us back to small businesses. Maybe they will suffer initially. More accurately, I’d suggest those who are less savvy, regardless of business size or budget, are most likely to struggle.

But, none of this is clear. We can only predict and prepare. I hope this post helps.

How Big Could the Impact Be?

While we don’t really know how much these changes will impact Facebook advertisers, we can evaluate the size of the Apple iOS mobile audience to determine the pool of users we’re dealing with. We can do this using Facebook’s Audience Data.

You can uncover the audience of Facebook users on iOS when building an audience in an ad set. Under Detailed Targeting, select the Browse option, then Behaviors → Mobile Device User → All Mobile Devices by Operating System.

This data indicates the primary mobile device used to access Facebook (there could be people using multiple device, but there is only a single primary device associated with a user).

We can use this data to evaluate differences between potential audience groups. As a very general example, we can see that the potential impact would likely be much more significant in the US than it would be elsewhere:

These differences can be assessed for your own advertising by selecting whatever applies for the normal audience you target. Of course, what we don’t know is how long it will take for the entire user base to be active on iOS 14 or higher, and of those users, how many we should expect to opt-in to tracking.

Links and Resources

This is A LOT! I summarized the best I can, but I’m pulling from the following articles. Feel free to click through for more details:

• Apple Developer: User Privacy and Data Use
• Apple Developer: App privacy details on the App Store
• Preparing our partners for iOS 14: Mobile Web Advertising
• Eligibility Requirements for Value Optimization
• How Apple’s iOS 14 Release May Affect Your Ads
• Facebook Domain Verification: Link Ownership Control
• Use the Facebook SDK for iOS, App Events API and Mobile Measurement Partners to Reach Devices on iOS 14
• Preparing our Partners for iOS 14: Impacts to App Advertisers and Developers
• Use Facebook Pixel to Reach Devices on iOS 14
• Preparing Audience Network for iOS 14
• Explained: Why Facebook thinks Apple’s iOS 14 privacy push will have a severe impact on business
• Speaking Up for Small Businesses
• Breaking Changes For SKAdNetwork Campaigns

Your Turn

What’s your interpretation of how this will impact Facebook advertising and your business?

Let me know in the comments below!

The post iOS 14 and Facebook Ads: What We Know appeared first on Jon Loomer Digital.

]]> https://www.jonloomer.com/ios-14-and-facebook-ads-what-we-know/feed/ 0 https://www.jonloomer.com/facebook-website-custom-audiences-guide/ https://www.jonloomer.com/facebook-website-custom-audiences-guide/#comments Wed, 16 Sep 2020 05:30:07 +0000 https://www.jonloomer.com/?p=22338

Those who have the most success with Facebook ads have mastered remarketing with Website Custom Audiences. Here's everything you need to know...

The post Facebook Website Custom Audiences: A Definitive Guide for Remarketing appeared first on Jon Loomer Digital.

[NOTE: This post has been updated and completely rewritten from an original publication.]

The power of Facebook ads is found within the targeting. And targeting those who are closest to your business using Facebook website custom audiences is one of the best and most effective ways to do it.

I don’t care how perfect the ad copy, imagery, bidding, and optimization are, it’s imperative that you target the people most likely to perform your desired action.

Who are those people? In many cases, they are those who have visited your website.

Those who have the most success with Facebook ads have mastered remarketing. The purpose of this post is to help you master it, too.

What is Website Retargeting on Facebook?

Website retargeting — also known as remarketing — is the process of running ads that target people who have previously visited your website. In this case, we’re speaking specifically about using Facebook ads.

You can only run ads targeting people who have visited a website you control. You’ll need to place a snippet of code (also called a “pixel”) on your website that essentially allows you to claim those pages.

Whenever that pixel is fired, Facebook is notified that a user has visited a page of that site. Facebook will then refer to rules an advertiser has created to determine whether that user should fall within a specific audience to be targeted with an ad.

Advertisers create rules that help bucket website visitors into specific audiences based on the specific actions they’ve performed and when those actions occurred. This then allows advertisers to create ads that are perfectly crafted based on a user’s activity on the advertiser’s website.

How to Install the Pixel

All of this is possible thanks to the Facebook pixel. The base pixel is unique to your ad account, and it should be placed on every page of your website prior to the closing HEAD tag.

There are countless methods for adding that pixel to every page of your website.

1. Partner Integration

Facebook has multiple partners that help integrate the pixel for you.

2. Facebook WordPress Plugin

If you have a self-hosted WordPress website, you may want to try out Facebook’s own plugin.

3. Google Tag Manager

Google Tag Manager is what I use.

I won’t reinvent the wheel here since I’ve already written extensively about how to install the base pixel code (read that linked post), and the focus of this post is creating website custom audiences. But, it’s important that you don’t skip this step.

Add Pixel Events

To get the most out of website custom audiences, you need more than just the base pixel code on every page of your website — you need to utilize pixel events, too.

Pixel events are how you define conversions and other critical actions that are occurring on your website. By using pixel events, Facebook not only knows that someone visited, but that they performed an important action. This information can be used in ad optimization, conversion tracking, and — of course — targeting.

Once again, I’ve written about this elsewhere, but let me help you get this done…

1. E-Commerce Partner Integration

If you use Shopify, for example, many of these events are already being created for you. Here’s a list of partners that may help with this process.

2. Use the Event Setup Tool

The Event Setup Tool has the potential to be great. No code and streamlined. Yet, as I write this, it’s flawed. Maybe it’s good enough for your purposes.

3. Create Pixel Events Manually

I create my events manually, and I use the Pixel Event Generator to provide the code that I need to use.

However you do it, it’s important that you utilize events and parameters for a multitude of reasons, but it will become clearer when you set up website custom audiences based on pixel events.

Create a Website Custom Audience: Basics

Go to Audiences within the Business Tools menu.

Click “Create Audience” and select “Custom Audience.”

Select “Website” as your source.

It will look like this…

You can include people who meet ANY or ALL of the conditions you set (“ANY” is set by default).

This will only matter if you add multiple conditions later (more on this in a minute). In most cases, just stick with the default here.

If you have multiple pixels, make sure that the right one is selected.

You’ll be able to create an audience of all website visitors, people who visit specific web pages, visitors by time spent, and from your events.

We’ll get into the details of all of these in a moment. All website visitors is the default.

You’ll need to determine the time window for when and how long someone is in your audience.

By default, this duration is set to 30 days, but it can be anywhere from 1 to 180 days. While 1 day will be the most relevant, it will also generate the smallest audience; a 180-day duration will include less relevant visitors, but it will also generate more targeting volume. Know that this is a rolling window that updates dynamically.

You can choose to include more people or exclude people (if you left the default at “ANY” at the top).

This allows you to create more conditions and refine the audience.

I rarely, if ever use this. Instead of including and excluding people in the same audience, I’ll create simple audiences based on a single rule so that I can choose to either target or exclude that audience in the ad set.

When you’re done, name your audience and (optionally) add a description. Then click the “Create Audience” button at the bottom.

Website Custom Audience: All Website Visitors

The default, and likely most used, audience is for all website visitors.

This is the audience that websites with less traffic will use most often to get volume, rather than isolating visitors to specific pages. It doesn’t matter what they did or how long they were on your website to be included in this audience.

There is certainly value to an audience like this, but understand that it includes EVERYONE — your most valuable customers, accidental clicks, and everything in between.

Website Custom Audience: People Who Visited Specific Web Pages

This is a multi-purpose audience that has so many uses that we can’t list them all here.

Whenever I write a new blog post (like this one), I create a website custom audience for that page.

I can then exclude that audience when promoting that particular blog post. I can also target that audience when promoting a related product.

Whenever I publish a new free opt-in, I create a website custom audience for the confirmation page the user is redirected to after submitting their contact info.

I can then exclude people who already registered when promoting that opt-in, and I can target those who opted in when promoting an up-sell.

I’d recommend creating an audience of people who visited important landing pages. You can then target them with a special offer (excluding those who already converted).

You can create an audience of people who visited any page of your website that includes a keyword within the URL.

This has the potential for picking up multiple pages — a category of content — that will create more volume. You can then target those people when promoting a related product or related content.

These ideas are just scratching the surface for this audience type, but it should provide some inspiration and direction.

Website Custom Audience: Visitors by Time Spent

Visitors by Time Spent helps you remove your lower quality visitors from an audience.

You can create an audience of your top 5%, 10%, or 25% visitors in terms of time spent on your website.

If you want, you can further filter by pages visited.

While this approach is great for isolating valuable visitors, know that it’s also slicing your audience into a much smaller fraction. It may not be ideal for websites with light traffic. Or you may simply want to use a longer duration and lower budget.

Website Custom Audience: From Your Events

This one is a whole lot of fun, and it’s a big perk to utilizing events with parameters.

The events that appear as options will be those that have been receiving activity on your website.

Once you select an event, you can click the “Refine by” link.

This will allow you to refine by URL/Parameter, Aggregated Value, or Device.

At this point, you’re only limited by your own creativity and the events you have on your website. But, here are a few examples of audiences you could create…

All purchases during the past 180 days. These people may be likely to purchase again, or this may be a good source for a lookalike audience.

All registrations during the past 180 days.

All people who viewed 4 or more pages during the past 180 days (high-quality visitors).

All people who completed 2 or more purchases during the past 180 days.

All people who spent $500 or more in aggregate on my website during the past 180 days.

Everyone who scrolled at least 50% on a blog post during the past 180 days.

Scroll depth is actually a custom event that I’m using on my website, along with time on page to help track, optimize for, and target high-quality website visitors.

How to Target or Exclude a Website Custom Audience

When creating an ad set, you can target a website custom audience by entering it in the custom audience text box.

You can also click the “Exclude” button and exclude one or multiple custom audiences.

When using custom audiences, be careful about how you do any other targeting and filtering in the audience targeting. For example, you may want to select a handful of countries or even go Worldwide, depending on the size of the audience you’re targeting.

I would leave all other targeting at the defaults unless you have a specific reason not to.

Dynamic Ads

When you hear the term “remarketing,” you may also think of dynamic ads. Well, that’s another complex topic in itself. But, know that much of the targeting and excluding that occurs there is done dynamically — not because you created audiences, but because you set up the proper pixel events.

A Note on Reach Optimization

When I create hyper-targeted (and small) audiences that I want to target, I often won’t optimize for conversions. When you do that, Facebook optimizes to show to only certain people in that audience. But these super small audiences are relevant, and I want to reach everyone.

That’s why, when we’re talking about hyper-targeted audiences in the hundreds of people, I’ll use the Reach objective.

I will then optimize for Reach and utilize frequency capping.

Reach optimization isn’t magic, and it shouldn’t be used in very many cases. But this is a time when I find it useful.

How Should You Use Remarketing?

I hope I provided plenty of ideas and inspiration within this post about how you can use website custom audiences for remarketing. Know that there isn’t a right or wrong path. The audiences you can create are often unique to your website, products, and events that you’ve created.

Remarketing is a go-to strategy for me. I use it for driving traffic, re-engagement, building my email list, and selling products. It may not be the primary audience I target in all of these cases, but they are certainly in the targeting mix — and I also use these audiences regularly for exclusion purposes.

What other ways do you use remarketing?

Learn More About the Facebook Pixel

Want to master the Facebook pixel? Take your learning a step further with the Facebook Pixel Masterclass, a video series covering advanced topics related to the pixel. We’ll go into detail related to pixel events, custom conversions, tracking, optimization, and targeting.

Or, if you aren’t ready for the advanced topics, check out my Facebook Pixel Basics free video series (this is also included within Facebook Pixel Masterclass). You can register by clicking the link below…

[GET THE VIDEO SERIES]

It includes eight lessons covering what the pixel is, why it’s important, how it works, how to add it to your website, and how to test that it’s working.

Enjoy!

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The post Facebook Website Custom Audiences: A Definitive Guide for Remarketing appeared first on Jon Loomer Digital.

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[NOTE: This post has been updated and completely rewritten from an original publication.]

If you are a consultant, work for an agency, or ever need to advertise for others — or are a company working with someone who manages your Facebook ads — you may need to share a Facebook pixel or advertising audience.

You can do this. Both parties need to have Business Manager accounts. You can share a pixel with a partner. You can share an audience with an ad account. Everyone will rejoice.

As we move forward, we’ll look at this from the perspective of the consultant, agency, or entity that needs access to the pixel or audience.

Let’s take a closer look…

Why Share Audiences and Pixels?

If your client is an established brand that has advertised on Facebook before, they likely have the Facebook pixel on their website. They also may have audiences that they have used before that proved to be successful.

As a new advertiser working with this client, you can start from scratch with a new audience or leverage what was created before. Starting from scratch with a new pixel for optimization and tracking or a new custom audience for targeting is messy and will likely negatively impact results.

You’re going to want access to that pixel and those audiences. It’s time to talk about how.

Add a Partner to Business Manager

Hopefully, you and your client are already using Business Manager. If not, this will be required for what we’re going to do today. You can set up a new Business Manager account by going here.

Now, they can go to their Business Manager Settings.

Go to “Pixels” under Data Sources.

Select the pixel and click “Assign Partners.”

To grant you access to the pixel, they’ll need to enter your Business ID.

If you’re not sure what this is, click on Business Info at the bottom left of your own Business Manager.

You’ll see the Business ID at the top.

You should now have access to their pixel.

Share an Audience

In a perfect world, once your client adds you as a partner, they should be able to share both the pixel and any audience they want to share with you. Well, my friend. This is not a perfect world.

This is where it gets a little weird. You can share all kinds of stuff with a partner, including access to:

• Pages
• Ad Accounts
• Catalogs
• Apps
• Pixels
• Instagram Accounts
• Offline Event Sets
• Block Lists
• Lines of Business
• Custom Conversions
• Leads Access
• Domains

Custom audiences? Hello? No?

To share an audience (not a saved audience, but custom or lookalike audience), all they need to do is select the audience(s) they want to share and click the “Share” button.

If your ad account was already added to their Business Manager, they can simply select it here. Otherwise, they can enter your Ad Account number and click “Share.”

They can allow access to both targeting and insights or targeting only.

When your client views their audiences, they will see a column for “Sharing” and see which audiences they are sharing.

Likewise, you will now see this audience in your list, with a note that it is being shared with you.

The post How to Share a Facebook Advertising Audience or Pixel appeared first on Jon Loomer Digital.

Meta pixel events and custom conversions are important tools that can amplify your marketing and advertising efforts. Given some crossover between the two, it may be challenging to understand the difference between them as well as when and how to use each. This post is meant to provide some clarity.

First, if you haven’t read my guides on how Facebook pixel events and custom conversions work, I encourage you to do so:

• Facebook Pixel Events: An Introduction
• Facebook Custom Conversions: The Ultimate Guide

Throughout this post, we’ll discuss how to utilize each (if at all) in the following processes:

• Conversion tracking in Ads Manager
• Conversion optimization
• Targeting
• Dynamic ads

When we’re done, I’ll walk through exactly how I use Facebook pixel events and custom conversions.

Conversion Optimization

If you want to get the best results, you’ll want to take advantage of Facebook optimization. When creating an ad set, Facebook will optimize for your performance goal. This means that they’ll show your ads to people within your audience most likely to perform that action.

If you optimize for a conversion, Facebook will optimize for the specific conversion event that you define for Facebook at the top of the ad set.

You can select a standard event, custom event, or custom conversion.

First, know that there’s certainly value in setting your conversion event as any registration, purchase, or some other standard event. That creates volume that may help with optimization.

But, maybe you want to set a goal that is more specific, like the precise product that you want to sell. Know that you can still do that with custom conversions.

You can do this either by creating a custom conversion based on a standard event and parameter…

…or by product purchase thank you page URL (either using the standard event or not)…

You can also map a custom event to a custom conversion.

Conversion Tracking in Ads Manager

When running Facebook ads with the goal of a conversion, you will want to be able to measure success. To accomplish this, you’ll need to define your conversion goal so that Facebook can report on how many of those events occur as a result of someone seeing or clicking your ad.

First, know that when optimizing for conversions, Facebook will report on the goal conversion that you set in the step above as your default “Result.”

Know that when you hover over the number in that Results column (while optimizing for some type of conversion), Facebook will report on all custom conversion events that resulted from someone seeing or clicking on your ad.

But, maybe you want to see how many conversions happened when you weren’t optimizing for a conversion. You still can. This can be incredibly valuable.

Click to customize columns.

You can add columns of Total, Value, or Cost for any standard event or custom conversion.

We’re back to the same problem we faced with optimization! No ability to select a standard event based on parameters or a custom event.

If you’re reading closely, you probably know the answer. Map your standard event with parameters or custom event to a custom conversion. Do that and you can add a column to your Ads Manager for reporting.

Targeting

You can’t simply target a pixel event or custom conversion. But you can create a website custom audience that’s based on a pixel event (not a custom conversion) and target it within your ad set.

This is where it gets interesting and potentially complex. The audiences you can create are only limited by the number of pixel events (standard and custom) and parameters you use.

When you create a website custom audience, you will have the ability to select “From your events.”

You will be able to select from both standard and custom pixel events here — whatever events are active on your website.

First, you can choose to create an audience based on an event without refining by parameters. This could give you volume for more targeting power.

For example, here’s an audience of all purchases…

But, you can also refine by URL/PARAMETER or aggregated value.

So, you could create a website custom audience based on an event that occurred on a particular page (purchase event by confirmation URL) or based on product name using parameters.

You could create an audience of all purchases with a value of more than $100.00.

If you refine by Aggregated Value, you could even create an audience of all people who made at least two purchases during a given time period.

Or you can create an audience of people whose sum of all purchases over a given period of time is greater than or equal to $500.

Once again, your possibilities for targeting are only limited by how much you use pixel events. This is where putting in the work to use standard events with parameters as well as custom events really pays off.

Dynamic Ads

If you have an e-commerce company and want to benefit from Dynamic Ads, it’s a must that you use standard events with parameters (custom events and custom conversions don’t apply).

The ability to target Dynamic Ads based on the above categories relies on your diligent use of standard pixel events and parameters. That is how Facebook knows that someone viewed, added to cart, or purchased a particular product.

Summary

I created the following matrix to try and summarize how standard events (with and without parameters), custom events, and custom conversions can be used.

An important point: While you can’t technically track and optimize for standard events by parameters or custom events (with or without parameters), you still have options. All you need to do is first map that event to a custom conversion.

Can you get away with using ONLY pixel events and not custom conversions? Only if you have no interest in defining the specific conversion (product name and other details) for the purpose of optimization and tracking. Not a great idea.

Can you get away with using ONLY custom conversions and not standard or pixel events? First, not if you run an e-commerce website and want to utilize Dynamic Ads. But otherwise, you’d need to have the smallest of websites with a minimum number of conversion types to consider this approach.

Best Practices and What I Do

Note that this post isn’t meant to instruct you on which pixel events, parameters, and custom conversions to create. That’s going to vary from business to business. Instead, I hope this provides clarity on how each is used. But, I would like to explain how I use them.

For every product I launch, I create a standard event in Google Tag Manager and use the parameters to define the product, currency, and value.

I create a custom conversion for that product to isolate it for optimization and tracking in Ads Manager. Note that I create my custom conversions for product purchases and registrations based on confirmation page (mainly because it’s easier and my website is set up to do it this way).

I create a website custom audience for that purchase, but again I base it on the confirmation page URL.

You may not be able to create your purchase custom conversions or website custom audiences based on URL if you don’t have a unique confirmation page for each product purchase. That’s where you’d instead base those on pixel events and parameters.

I still use standard event parameters so that I can create some of those unique website custom audiences I discussed earlier. Otherwise, you could make the argument that standard event parameters are less necessary for a website like mine.

This same process applies for all of my free opt-in products. I create custom conversions and website custom audiences based on the confirmation page URL, and I add standard events with parameters.

I also create custom events based on time on page and scroll depth to measure, optimize for, and target high-quality visits.

The pixel events and custom conversions you use will depend on your business. But this is what I do.

Learn More About the Facebook Pixel

Want to master the Facebook pixel? Take your learning a step further with the Facebook Pixel Masterclass, a video series covering advanced topics related to the pixel. We’ll go into detail related to pixel events, custom conversions, tracking, optimization, and targeting.

Or, if you aren’t ready for the advanced topics, check out my Facebook Pixel Basics free video series (this is also included within Facebook Pixel Masterclass). You can register by clicking the link below…

[GET THE VIDEO SERIES]

It includes eight lessons covering what the pixel is, why it’s important, how it works, how to add it to your website, and how to test that it’s working.

Enjoy!

The post Facebook Pixel Events and Custom Conversions: Best Practices appeared first on Jon Loomer Digital.

[NOTE: This post has been updated from its original publication.]

Any business serious about conversion tracking and optimization needs the Facebook pixel installed on their website. But getting the pixel and events installed correctly has been a chore, particularly for those who are less technical or lack the staff and resources to handle some basic code.

That changes with the Facebook pixel Event Setup Tool. Or it potentially does (more on the issues with this tool later). While you will still need to add the base pixel code to your website, the Event Setup Tool is meant to provide a codeless, seamless method to integrate pixel events.

It has enormous potential for simplifying the pixel event creation process, no matter your technical expertise. Before we get to the juicy stuff of using this tool, we’ll need to take a couple of steps back.

In this post, you’ll learn:

• How to install the base pixel code (if you haven’t already)
• A refresher on pixel events
• How to use the Event Setup Tool

Install the Pixel First

First, there’s no way around getting the base pixel code installed on your website. If you haven’t done that yet, you’ll need to before dealing with events.

The Facebook pixel is a unique piece of code that connects activity on your website to Facebook. It is the pixel that gives you access to all of the following, and more:

• Retargeting with Website Custom Audiences
• Attribute conversions to your advertising
• Optimize advertising for Landing Page Views
• Optimize advertising for conversions
• Track marketing performance with Facebook Attribution
• Track customer funnel with Facebook Analytics

If you haven’t yet installed the pixel, go here.

What Are Pixel Events?

Adding the base pixel code connects your website to Facebook. With your unique pixel on every page of your website, Facebook will be notified when a page of your site is loaded.

If you do nothing else, you’re limited in terms of how much you can get from the pixel. You can create Website Custom Audiences to retarget those who visit your website, which is amazing. But, the extent of your targeting will be limited without pixel events. And you’ll need those same pixel events for better tracking and optimization.

[READ THIS INTRODUCTION ON PIXEL EVENTS]

A pixel event is a modifier that adds details to the information sent to Facebook. Events allow Facebook to be notified that not only was a page visited, but a purchase (or registration, lead, search, etc.) was completed.

Standard pixel events (expanded since first announced) include:

• Add Payment Info
• Add to Cart
• Add to Wishlist
• Complete Registration
• Contact
• Customize Product
• Donate
• Find Location
• Initiate Checkout
• Lead
• Purchase
• Schedule
• Search
• Start Trial
• Submit Application
• Subscribe
• View Content

Events become particularly useful for conversion tracking and optimization. They allow you to connect your advertising efforts to a specific number of resulting conversions and, if applicable, the related revenue. Once Facebook collects this info, it also allows the advertiser to better optimize for a particular event.

Earlier, I described some of the tools that become available to you once you install the pixel. But, once you start using events, each of those tools become more powerful.

What is the Event Setup Tool?

Without the Event Setup Tool, advertisers need to modify their pixel code on specific pages of their websites to collect anonymous event information. This can be done manually, with the assistance of a plugin, or through partner integration.

The Event Setup Tool allows advertisers to add events based on page views or button clicks. Most importantly, no coding is required.

When in your Events Manager, click the Add Events drop-down and select “From the Pixel.”

You will now see the option to use Facebook’s Event Setup Tool.

Before we move forward, determine on what page the pixel event will occur, whether by viewing a URL or clicking a button. Enter the URL for that page here…

After entering the URL for this page in the step above, click “Open Website.” That will open a new window for that particular page that includes a Facebook dialog at the top left.

If any events have already been created for this page, you’ll see them here.

Set Up an Event by URL

One option is to set up a pixel event by URL. In other words, if someone loads a particular URL, this is a sign that a conversion is complete. An example would be a thank-you page following registration for a webinar or purchasing a product. This should be a page that users will only visit once.

Click the “Track a URL” button. You’ll now see this…

You’ll want to choose an event that has occurred once a person visits this URL. Facebook provides several standard options…

I am going to choose “Complete Registration.”

You also have the option of tracking the entire URL or portion of the URL.

“URL Equals” would limit qualified URLs to a single URL whereas “URL Contains” could result in multiple qualified URLs.

Once you’re done, click “Confirm.”

You will now see that event listed.

Set Up an Event by Button Click

This has the potential to be the most valuable application of the Event Setup Tool. Updating button code to track conversions on click is very technical. I can tell you that I rarely got it to work properly on my website.

Click “Track New Button.”

Suddenly, the page grays out and highlights appear for links and buttons that would qualify.

By selecting a link or button here, Facebook will begin reporting on events whenever a visitor clicks it. Once you select your button or link, Facebook will ask you to connect that click to an event.

I am going to choose “Lead.” Then click “Confirm.” Once again, you’ll see that event listed under “Events on this Page.”

Since I previously created an event based on URL, I have two listed (you may have only one).

Test Your Event

From the image above, note that you can edit or delete an event before finishing. Once you’re finished, click “Finish Setup” at the top right.

Facebook now asks to review your events.

If it looks good, click “Finish.”

Back on your Events Manager screen in Facebook, you’ll get a notification that your event setup is complete.

Click the blue button to test your events. You’ll get a page that looks like this…

Note that while in test mode, Facebook will only track the events on that page that you trigger, not the events triggered by other website visitors. Assuming the link to that page you were just working on is in the text box (it should have prefilled), click “Open Website.”

If you created an event by URL, you have already triggered an event. Otherwise, click the link or button on that page that triggers your button event. Then go back to the testing page in Events Manager.

Here is what that page looks like now for me…

In the middle column, you’ll see those two events were created via Event Setup Tool. In the far right column, you’ll see the last time that event was triggered. In other words, these were set up properly!

The Problems With This Tool

The Pixel Event Setup Tool has been available long enough now that all of the bugs should have been worked out of it. We should be beyond versions 1, 2, and 3. And yet… The tool still has some major flaws.

When it was first released, the Pixel Event Setup Tool didn’t allow the ability to add parameters. Parameters are additional details about a conversion (like value, product name, quantity, etc.). While parameters are now partially integrated in this tool, their availability is rigid and not incredibly helpful.

Here’s an example when creating a purchase event…

The only parameter options I’m given are for value and currency. However, we should be able to provide parameters for other items, including the name of the product (content_name) and type of product (content_type). The product name, in particular, is a critical item.

But, even the parameters available aren’t good enough. As you can see from the image above, my options for value are:

• Use Value from Initiate Checkout (Recommended)
• Choose Value on Page
• Don’t Include Value

This is painful. I don’t use the Initiate Checkout event. I tried, using the Pixel Event Setup Tool, and ran into all sorts of technical roadblocks of bugginess. I don’t include the value on the confirmation page. I tried to include it for this purpose, but Facebook didn’t detect it. And providing no value should not be an option.

WHY CAN’T I JUST MANUALLY ENTER THE VALUE??

This is a regular issue. I want to provide the name of a product for a CompleteRegistration event, but it’s not an option. There is no flexibility when it comes to parameters. Why not? It would seem to be an easy addition, and it would make this tool a slam dunk.

I’ve also run into general bugginess with Facebook’s detection of buttons, links, and values. It may be a browser compatibility issue in some cases, but the highlights often don’t line up.

These are big problems. Until they are addressed, the Pixel Event Setup Tool simply isn’t a viable option for serious marketers. It’s otherwise a nice little tool with big potential. It can solve small tasks if all you want to do is add a standard event without details. But that’s about it.

Adding Code Manually

I’m sure Facebook will eventually address this. In the meantime, I’ll continue to use partner integration or add code manually.

Of course, Facebook scrapped their valuable manual pixel event creation tool with the redesign of Events Manager. We saw this as an opportunity and created the Pixel Event Generator that you can us at no cost. It allows you to select an event, enter parameters, and copy the relevant code to be pasted on your website.

Learn More About the Facebook Pixel

Want to master the Facebook pixel? Take your learning a step further with the Facebook Pixel Masterclass, a video series covering advanced topics related to the pixel. We’ll go into detail related to pixel events, custom conversions, tracking, optimization, and targeting.

Or, if you aren’t ready for the advanced topics, check out my Facebook Pixel Basics free video series (this is also included within Facebook Pixel Masterclass). You can register by clicking the link below…

[GET THE VIDEO SERIES]

It includes eight lessons covering what the pixel is, why it’s important, how it works, how to add it to your website, and how to test that it’s working.

Enjoy!

The post How to Use the Facebook Pixel Event Setup Tool appeared first on Jon Loomer Digital.

[NOTE: This post has been updated and completely rewritten from its original publication.]

You have the Facebook pixel. You may even be using pixel events with parameters. But if you aren’t using custom conversions, you’re doing it wrong.

Let’s walk through what custom conversions are, how to create them, and how you might use them.

What Are Custom Conversions?

Custom conversions are a way for advertisers to define a conversion event for the purpose of tracking and optimization. Most frequently, they are used for the tracking and optimization of very specific conversions.

Without custom conversions, you can only track and optimize for standard and custom pixel events. For example, you can track and optimize for all purchases or all registrations. You wouldn’t be able to track how many purchases of a specific product occurred or optimize for the purchase of a specific product with events.

Without custom conversions, you may not be able to get Ads Manager reporting for custom events (it’s possible this is a bug that not everyone deals with). Only a couple of my custom events show up among metrics that can be used for adding columns to my reports. If I map those events to custom conversions, I can then include them in reporting.

While custom conversions and pixel events have similarities, they aren’t the same. Events and custom conversions can both be used for tracking and optimization. But really, their similarities mostly stop there.

Pixel events typically require additional code, while custom conversions do not. Website Custom Audiences can be created based on pixel events, but not custom conversions.

Pixel events and custom conversions work in tandem. You can’t get the most out of pixel events without also using custom conversions. In a separate post, we’ll talk more about best practices, and how you should use standard events, custom events, and custom conversions together.

How to Create Custom Conversions: Basics

Within the Business Tools menu on the left, select Events Manager.

After selecting your pixel, click the menu item for Custom Conversions on the left side of Events Manager.

Click the “Create Custom Conversion” button and you’ll get a pop-over like this…

Let’s first cover the items that will always apply, no matter how you set up your custom conversions.

Name your custom conversion something descriptive so that you know exactly what it’s for. You can use the description field as well if necessary, but it’s optional (I can’t say I’ve ever used it).

Select your data source for the conversion event. This will typically be your pixel, but it could also be an offline event or app event. For the purpose of this tutorial, I’m focusing on the pixel. If you have multiple pixels, make sure you select the right one! If I’m going to screw up this process, this is where it usually happens.

At the bottom, you can enter a conversion value. This isn’t required and will be set to $0.00 if you don’t enter anything. But you should enter something if the conversion is anything with a monetary value.

When creating a custom conversion, you’ll need to select a conversion event. You’ll choose from standard events, custom events, and custom conversions. Let’s walk through each of them.

How to Create Custom Conversions: Standard Events

The options that appear under Standard Events will rely on the events Facebook finds on your website. Let’s use a common one: Purchase.

We now need to create our rules for defining this conversion. We’ll have options of URL, Referring Domain, and Event Parameters.

Let’s talk through use cases for each…

URL: Likely most common with this option. You want to track and optimize for the purchase of a specific product. Maybe you aren’t using event parameters and you have a unique confirmation page for each product. If so, using this makes sense.

REFERRING DOMAIN: Maybe you simply want to track how many of your sales were referred by Google. You could create this custom conversion and then add a column to your Ads Manager reporting.

PARAMETERS: If you use event parameters with your purchase events, you could create a custom conversion for a specific product. This is a good solution if you don’t have unique confirmation pages by product. This way, you can still track and optimize for the specific product purchase.

How to Create Custom Conversions: Custom Events

First, let’s select our custom event.

Since you aren’t basing this custom conversion on a standard event, Facebook needs to better understand what the event is. By default, Facebook will automatically choose a standard event to categorize your custom conversion based on information they have on your business.

Personally, I have doubts about Facebook doing this automatically. Based on information Facebook has on my business? Why does that matter? Shouldn’t it be specific to the conversion itself?

While this is the default, you can also customize it and select a standard event that you believe best represents the conversion event.

The rules you use and parameters available will depend upon the custom event — and the options are essentially limitless. But here’s an example using my Time on Page custom event and related parameters for 30 seconds.

How to Create Custom Conversions: All URL Traffic

The final type of custom conversion you can create based on pixel activity is for All URL Traffic. Such a conversion is defined by the URL, referring domain, or UTM parameters.

Once again, you’ll need to choose a standard event that most closely represents the conversion event you’re focused on.

One of the most common reasons you might use this is for a conversion confirmation page, but you don’t otherwise use pixel events. You could instead simply create a custom conversion for the confirmation URL.

The event parameters that are used here are actually pulled from your UTM parameters (if you use them). So, there are potentially creative custom conversions you could create if UTM parameters are part of your tracking strategy.

How to Optimize for a Custom Conversion

As discussed, one of the primary values of custom conversions is ad set optimization. Let’s talk about how that’s done.

When creating your campaign, select an objective that would allow for using the Website conversion location. Objective examples include Sales, Leads, and Engagement.

Within the Conversion Location section of the ad set at the top, set it to “Website” and select your pixel.

You can then select from a list of standard events, custom events, and custom conversions. The custom conversions will be labeled as such.

Make sure that within Optimization & Delivery, you are optimizing for conversions. By doing this, you not only optimize for a conversion but for the conversion you defined at the top.

How to Track and View Reported Conversions

If you set a custom conversion as the conversion event at the top of your ad set in the step above, Facebook will automatically report on it within the “Results” column.

However, you may not set that custom conversion as your conversion event — if you have that option at all (which you won’t when optimizing for an action that isn’t a conversion). You can still add a column to view your custom conversions.

Click the Columns drop-down and select the option to customize columns.

On the left, click on Custom Conversions and find the custom conversion you want to track. You can add columns for Total, Value, and Cost.

Also, a little known tip: To see all conversions of any type that resulted from your ad when optimizing for conversions, hover over the number in the Results column.

What’s great about both of these options is that they allow you to uncover hidden conversions that may not have been your priority or goal when running your ads — but they happened anyway! For example, someone may have clicked your ad promoting a blog post, but while there they decided to make a purchase. This is how you find those purchases.

How I Use Custom Conversions

I create custom conversions for all of my custom pixel events, which allows me to track and optimize for those events.

I also create a custom conversion for every product I sell and free registration I offer. In each case, the rules of these custom conversions use URL rules based on the thank you page. These are what I use for tracking and optimization when promoting those products.

Of course, what I do is not necessarily right for you. Hopefully, this post has inspired ideas of how custom conversions can be most beneficial to your business.

The post Facebook Custom Conversions: The Ultimate Guide appeared first on Jon Loomer Digital.

The Facebook pixel allows advertisers to better track, optimize, and target. These are the three most critical aspects of advertising, leading to the success or failure of your efforts. To make the most of the pixel, you need to utilize the Facebook pixel and events on your website. Not only must you utilize events, but you must do it right.

This post is your introduction to Facebook pixel events. It will help you better understand what pixel events are and how to use them.

First: The Base Facebook Pixel Code

If this is your first exposure to the Facebook pixel and events, know that pixel events can’t live independently. You must first have your base Facebook pixel code installed on every page of your website.

The base pixel code is what identifies the data as being connected to your ad account.

If you haven’t done this yet, read this post that outlines three primary methods to get the base pixel code added to your website — including what I do.

What Pixel Events Are

The base Facebook pixel code is what alerts Facebook that someone loaded a page on a website connected to a particular ad account. If you only have the base pixel code, your website sends page views, and nothing more.

If you use pixel events, you can define actions that occur on your website. The most common events we think of might be purchases, registrations, or leads. When using events, Facebook knows when these actions occur.

You notify Facebook of these actions with the addition of a pixel event. Most often, these pixel events fire when specific pages with their related code loads (though they could fire on button clicks or other custom actions).

For example: A visitor hits a landing page for a product (View Content event fires by visiting this page). They add the product to their cart but haven’t completed the purchase yet (Add to Cart event fires). They then submit their payment info and complete the purchase, redirecting to a confirmation page (Purchase event fires).

Sending this information to Facebook helps in three primary ways…

1. TRACKING: You’re able to connect your advertising to actual sales that occurred on your website because Facebook associates a person who saw or clicked your ad with a conversion.

2. OPTIMIZATION: Since Facebook knows who has converted on your website, you can optimize to reach other users similar to them.

3. TARGETING: You can target the specific people who performed these events.

Standard Events

At the time of publication of this blog post, there are 17 predefined standard Facebook pixel events (18 if you include Page View, which is included within the base pixel code). Facebook is likely to add more, as they already have during the evolution of pixel events.

• Add Payment Info
• Add to Cart
• Add to Wishlist
• Complete Registration
• Contact
• Customize Product
• Donate
• Find Location
• Initiate Checkout
• Lead
• Purchase
• Schedule
• Search
• Start Trial
• Submit Application
• Subscribe
• View Content

Here’s a grid that includes all of the standard events, what they mean, and the code for implementation (with parameters, as necessary).

Standard events are helpful for a couple of reasons. First, the predefined code makes it easier for publishers to add events to their website.

Second, an event utilized on websites around the world means more data for optimization. If a person has shown to make online purchases on other websites, they may also be more likely, combined with other factors, to purchase on yours.

Custom Events

If you have an event that falls outside of the 17 standard events, you can create a custom event. This, of course, will be a bit more technical. While most often used for targeting (you can create a Website Custom Audience based on standard and custom events), you can still track or optimize for custom events if mapped to a custom conversion.

We’ll go into more detail on custom conversions in a separate post. However, you can read about two custom events that I have created for my website (and how you can create them, too):

• Create Facebook Pixel Events for Time Spent
• Create Facebook Pixel Events for Scroll Depth

Parameters

So far, we’ve discussed how to notify Facebook when a conversion occurs. Facebook may know, for example, that someone completed a purchase. But, how do we provide details of that conversion? That’s where parameters come in.

Parameters provide details like currency, value, quantity of items purchased, and the actual name of the product purchased or acted on.

It looks like this…

Only certain parameter are valid for each conversion event. In most cases, parameters are optional. The exception is the Purchase event, which requires currency and value.

More details can be found here on which parameters are available for each event.

Adding Events to Your Website

Event code needs to be added after the opening BODY tag. There are three primary ways to add events to your website:

• Manually
• Partner Integration
• Event Setup Tool

Ideally, you can utilize partner integration that makes this easier, particularly for standard events. For example, if you have an e-commerce website on Shopify, much of the work is likely done for you.

You could use the Event Setup Tool, which is Facebook’s codeless method for adding pixel events. As of this writing, the Pixel Event Setup Tool is far from perfect (generally related to bugginess and a lack of parameter flexibility).

If given the option (and no partner integration), I prefer to set up events manually. Unfortunately, Facebook scrapped their tool that seamlessly provided the code you’d need when creating events. My team created a new option for you, called the Pixel Event Generator. Try it out!

Some Notes on Tracking, Optimization, and Targeting

I want to add some clarification regarding tracking, optimization, and targeting related to pixel events…

TRACKING: You can add columns for standard events within Ads Manager, but not custom events. Also, you can’t add separate columns based on parameters. For custom events and specific products, you’ll need to map your events to custom conversions for tracking purposes.

OPTIMIZATION: Like tracking, you can optimize for a standard event, but not custom events. Optimization would be for the aggregate of all purchases, for example, rather than the purchase of a specific product. Once again, you could optimize for a custom event or specific product purchase by first mapping the event to a custom conversion.

TARGETING: Understand that you can’t just drop a name of a pixel event in your ad set targeting. You need to first create a Website Custom Audience and select the pixel event. You would then use that audience for your targeting.

We’ll get into more details on these topics in separate blog posts.

Facebook Analytics and Attribution

One final point. Know that the pixel and events aren’t only helpful for advertising. They also help with analysis of organic content. When using Facebook Analytics and Facebook Attribution, you can measure your performance, regardless of whether the source of traffic came from an ad.

These are two very deep topics on their own that will be discussed separately.

The post Facebook Pixel Events: An Introduction appeared first on Jon Loomer Digital.

[NOTE: This post has been updated and completely rewritten from an original publication in 2017.]

You hopefully know by now that the Facebook pixel is important — it’s really freaking important. It’s the Facebook pixel that allows you to create powerful audiences for ad targeting, run dynamic ads, track conversions, and optimize for conversions.

Some marketers remain slow to add the pixel — or add it correctly. The most common reason is intimidation. They assume the process is complicated and overly technical.

While the pixel can get technical (particularly related to standard and custom events), it is extremely simple to apply it for its core utility.

Let’s take a closer look at three different methods that allow you to install the pixel easily and properly today…

Create Your Pixel

It’s possible that you don’t have a pixel yet. If so, go to Events Manager by finding it in your Business Tools menu at the top left in Business Manager…

On the left, click to Connect Data Sources (you may first need to hover over the green circle with a white + in it).

Select “Web” and click “Get Started.”

Select “Facebook Pixel” and click “Connect.”

Name your pixel. You can also enter the URL of your website to check and see if it was set up before.

Now click “Continue Pixel Setup”…

Locate Your Pixel for Manual Install

If you just created your pixel and clicked “Continue Pixel Setup” in the step above, click to “Install Code Manually.”

Now, click the green button to copy your code.

If you previously created your pixel and tried to install it at another time, click the Add Events drop-down and select “From a New Website.”

For more details, read this post on finding your pixel or watch the video below.

1. Install Your Code Manually with Google Tag Manager

First, know that there are a million and one ways to install your pixel code manually. The goal: Add the base pixel code immediately before the closing HEAD tag on every page of your website.

This can be done with WordPress plugins, creative programming, and sometimes within theme settings. I’ve done it these ways before. But I’ve since graduated to Google Tag Manager (I’ll need to cover more about why in a separate post).

If you choose to use Google Tag Manager, follow these two primary steps…

1. Create a Tag.

Name your tag something like “Facebook Pixel – Base Code.”

Use the Custom HTML tag type and paste your base pixel code (found in the prior step) here.

2. Select Your Trigger

In the Triggering section below your tag, edit and select the “All Pages” Page View trigger.

Save your new tag and publish your changes.

2. Use a Partner Integration

Instead of installing the code manually, choose the option to “use a partner.”

There are a whole bunch of options to choose from…

I’m not going to go into every integration, for obvious reasons. But, let’s look at Shopify, a popular option, as an example.

I recommend turning on Advanced Matching.

Select your Online Store in Shopify.

Within your Shopify preferences, paste your Facebook Pixel ID.

Note that this isn’t your entire pixel code, but rather the numeric value that represents your Pixel ID within the code.

Once you’re done, verify your connection.

If you get a green dot, you’re good!

3. Use the Facebook WordPress Plugin

One of the integration options is WordPress. I assume this will be another likely choice for many. So let’s walk through it, too.

First, I recommend turning on Advanced Matching.

Download the Facebook WordPress plugin.

Install and activate your plugin as you normally would.

Enter your Pixel ID (see the Shopify example if you need it) and turn on Advanced Matching.

Then verify your pixel.

If you get a green dot, you’re good to go. We won’t worry about adding events for now. That will be another post!

Learn More About the Facebook Pixel

Want to master the Facebook pixel? Take your learning a step further with the Facebook Pixel Masterclass, a video series covering advanced topics related to the pixel. We’ll go into detail related to pixel events, custom conversions, tracking, optimization, and targeting.

Or, if you aren’t ready for the advanced topics, check out my Facebook Pixel Basics free video series (this is also included within Facebook Pixel Masterclass). You can register by clicking the link below…

[GET THE VIDEO SERIES]

It includes eight lessons covering what the pixel is, why it’s important, how it works, how to add it to your website, and how to test that it’s working.

Enjoy!

The post 3 Ways to Add the Facebook Pixel to Your Website appeared first on Jon Loomer Digital.

[NOTE: This post has been updated and completely rewritten from an original publication.]

The Facebook pixel isn’t new. And yet, I still hear from advertisers, publishers, and businesses who aren’t currently using the Facebook pixel — or aren’t using it to its full potential. Excuses range from confusion and intimidation to ignorance regarding whether it’s needed at all.

Is the Facebook pixel needed? Heck yeah, it is. For every reason imaginable.

Without the Facebook pixel, you’re limiting yourself from the most popular targeting options. You aren’t able to accurately track conversions (how in the world do you without the pixel?). You can’t optimize for conversions. You can’t do any of the fun stuff.

You know… the fun stuff that leads to measurable results?

If you’re not familiar with the Facebook pixel, it’s a snippet of code unique to your ad account that should be placed between the HEAD tags of every page of your website .

It looks like this (here’s where to find yours)…

Once it’s there, magic can happen. Without it, no magic.

The Facebook pixel allows you to utilize the following…

1. Targeting with Website Custom Audiences

Everything on this list is important, but I would have a fraction of the success I’m having with Facebook ads without Website Custom Audiences. They are amazing.

When the pixel is on your website, Facebook knows when someone visits. They know what page they visited and when. As a result, you can create some pretty amazing audiences.

• All of your website visitors during the past 1-180 days
• People who visited a particular page or group of pages
• People who visited a particular page but not others
• People who were within the top 5%, 10%, or 25% of most time spent on your site
• People who executed certain events

I target all of my website visitors for volume.

I target people who read posts on my website related to the Facebook pixel (like this one) when promoting my Facebook Pixel Masterclass video series.

I exclude people who already registered for the Facebook Pixel Basics free video series when I promote it.

I target those who spend the most time on my website to cater to quality visitors.

Or I can reach the highest quality visitors by targeting people based on scroll depth, utilizing a custom event.

I also target all people who registered on my website by targeting the CompleteRegistration standard event.

We can go on and on. Do you see how much I love using Website Custom Audiences? Not possible without the pixel.

2. Optimization for Ad Delivery

When you create a Facebook advertising campaign, you provide an intended audience who will see your ads. Of course, not everyone will see your ads. And, in most cases, you don’t want everyone to see your ads.

Why? Because Facebook has smart systems that help you show your ads to the right people within your audience. It’s called optimization.

When you have Facebook optimize for an action, your ad will be shown to people within your targeted audience who are most likely to perform that action. Not everyone will see your ad. Facebook won’t even try to show it to everyone. They are helping you save money by avoiding those who simply don’t perform the action you want.

Facebook can do this because of the ridiculous amount of activity data they have on users. People spend an insane amount of time on Facebook clicking, engaging, and converting. That data is used to help you get the most out of your ads.

If you’re not using the Facebook pixel? You’ll be limited to optimizing for lighter actions like link clicks, impressions, engagement, and reach. But once you have the pixel, you can optimize for an actual conversion.

3. Conversion Tracking with Events and Custom Conversions

If you utilize the Facebook pixel, you can define a conversion using pixel events and custom conversions. This allows Facebook to know when a conversion happens so that your ad reports can reflect them. Otherwise, how do you know if your ads were working?

When editing your ad set while using the an objective that allows for a website conversion location, you can tell Facebook which specific conversion you want to get — your goal for success. You can select from standard events, custom events, and custom conversions.

By selecting a standard event, like a general “Purchase,” Facebook will report on all purchases that happen as a result of someone seeing or clicking on your ad (regardless of what product they purchased).

Or you can ask Facebook to track the purchase of a very specific product by selecting a custom conversion (assuming you created it previously).

This way, these conversions will automatically be reported for you within the “Results” column.

No matter what conversion you are tracking or action you are optimizing for, also know that you can customize your reports to see how many conversions resulted from someone seeing or clicking on your ad. Click to Customize Columns…

From there, you’ll see standard events and custom conversions in the menu on the left.

By adding these columns to your report, you may be surprised by what you discover. When you may have optimized for Landing Page Views or Engagement, Facebook will report on those metrics to help you determine whether the campaign was a success. But, you may have actually received some conversions that you didn’t even know about!

4. Dynamic Ads

If you have a big e-commerce site, you need the pixel. It’s a must.

But even if you’re using it, you may not be taking advantage of Dynamic Ads…

If you have hundreds or thousands of products, it may not be reasonable to create individual ads based on the specific pages people visited and actions they took. But with the pixel, you can create dynamic ad templates…

This way, what appears in the ad will depend upon user behavior. Again, thanks to the Facebook pixel.

The Total Package: RESULTS

The bottom line is this: If you don’t have the Facebook pixel on your website, you have an uphill battle. Your targeting is second-rate. Tracking your results is damn near impossible. You can’t optimize for the action you actually want.

And that’s bad. I want you to have success. And without the pixel, you’re making it extremely difficult for yourself.

Facebook Pixel Basics Video Series

I created a free video series that covers all of the important basics of the Facebook pixel called, naturally, Facebook Pixel Basics. You can register by clicking the link below…

[GET THE VIDEO SERIES]

It includes eight lessons covering what the pixel is, why it’s important, how it works, how to add it to your website, and how to test that it’s working.

Enjoy!

The post The Importance of the Facebook Pixel appeared first on Jon Loomer Digital.

Facebook made a big update to Events Manager recently, and it’s resulted in plenty of confusion. One of those points of confusion: Where did my base pixel code go?

Previously, there was a “Set Up” drop-down which was self-explanatory and easy to find. Now, however, it’s not so clear or obvious.

Let’s walk through where to go now…

First, go to Events Manager from your top left menu in Business Manager. You’ll see Events Manager under “Manage Business.”

Next, select your pixel under “Data Sources.”

Now, click the “Add Events” drop-down and select “From a New Website.”

Choose the option to “Install code manually.”

Finally, click the button to “Copy Code.”

You will want to paste that code before the closing HEAD tag of every page of your website (not just pages where conversions occur).

Easy and straight forward? Not really. It was easier before the change.

Here’s a quick video, if that helps…

What About Pixel Events?

In case you’re also looking for a way to manually create pixel events with parameters (Facebook inexplicably scrapped their tool with the redesign of Events Manager), we have a solution for that, too.

Go here for the Facebook Pixel Event Generator. Select an event and optionally provide parameters, and we’ll give you the event code you’ll need to use.

Facebook Pixel Basics Video Series

I created a free video series that covers all of the important basics of the Facebook pixel called, naturally, Facebook Pixel Basics. You can register by clicking the link below…

[GET THE VIDEO SERIES]

It includes eight lessons covering what the pixel is, why it’s important, how it works, how to add it to your website, and how to test that it’s working.

Enjoy!

The post Where Is My Base Facebook Pixel Code? appeared first on Jon Loomer Digital.

How much do you know about the Facebook pixel? Do you know what it is, how to install it, and what it’s for? Let’s find out!

There are 20 questions in this quiz. When you’re done, I’ll give you a score.

If you want to learn more, check out my three-part training (the first part is free!), Facebook Pixel Masterclass.

The post Quiz: Test Your Facebook Pixel Knowledge appeared first on Jon Loomer Digital.

During the past couple of weeks, I’ve walked you through how to create custom Facebook pixel events that allow you to track, optimize for, and target visits based on time spent on a page and scroll depth. Today, we’ll take that a step further and combine the two.

The reason for this is simple. While both time on a page and scroll depth are good indicators by themselves of visit quality, they each have a weakness. You can spend three minutes staring at the title without scrolling (or simply load the page and walk away). You can scroll through a post in 10 seconds and not spend any time reading it.

Several people asked me whether the two can be combined, and I have good news: They can!

Today, we’re going to isolate that ultra-valuable audience of people who scroll at least 70% of a blog post AND spend at least two minutes reading it. If you read either of the past two weeks’ posts, portions of this post will be repetitive. But I want to be sure that, if you missed those posts, you know how to set up the base pixel in Google Tag Manager and test the events.

Add the Base Facebook Pixel

I assume you have the base Facebook pixel code already installed on your website. Just in case, let’s walk through this anyway.

We’re doing this within Google Tag Manager. While there are likely ways to do it elsewhere, the variables and triggers provided by GTM make it easier to execute.

1. Create a tag and name it “Facebook – Base Pixel.”

2. Choose “Custom HTML” as the tag type under Tag Configuration.

3. Paste your base pixel code in its entirety within the HTML text box. Below is an example, but you should use your own code unique to your ad account.

4. Under Triggering, we want our base pixel code to execute on all pages of our website.

Create Variables

There are a couple of variables that we created during the past two weeks that we’ll use here. If you haven’t created them yet, let’s do that now. We need the pixel to record the percentage scroll depth and time on a page, so we add variables in Google Tag Manager.

1. Create a variable called “DLV – gtm.timerEventNumber” using the Data Layer Variable type. Use the data layer variable name “gtm.timerEventNumber.”

2. Create a variable called “DLV – gtm.timerInterval” using the Data Layer Variable type. Use the data layer variable name “gtm.timerInterval.”

3. Create a variable called “DLV – gtm.scrollThreshold” using the Data Layer Variable type. Use the data layer variable name “gtm.scrollThreshold.”

Create Scroll Depth Trigger

We want Facebook to fire an event as a visitor progresses on a page related to scroll depth.

1. Create a new trigger in Google Tag Manager and name it “Blog – Scroll to 50%.”

2. Select the “Scroll Depth” trigger type.

3. For vertical scroll depths, use percentages of 50, 60, 70, 80, 90, and 100.

4. Enable this trigger on “Window Load (gtm.load).”

5. Set to page path contains “/blog/”. I’ve decided to focus only on blog posts, but this is again optional. You could skip this step and it would execute on any page.

Create a Timer Trigger

We want Facebook to fire an event for every 30 seconds a visitor is on a page.

1. Create a new trigger in Google Tag Manager and name it “Blog – 30, 60, 90, 120, 180 seconds.”

2. Select the “Timer” trigger type.

3. For interval, use 30000 milliseconds (30 seconds). You can use a different interval if you please.

4. Set a limit of 6. Again, this is optional, but in my case I wanted to record events at 30, 60, 90, 120, 150, and 180 seconds.

5. Set to page path contains “/blog/”. I’ve decided to focus only on blog posts, but this is again optional. You could skip this step and it would execute on any page.

Create a Trigger to Combine Scroll Depth and Time Spent

We want Facebook to fire an event when a visitor spends at least 120 seconds and scrolls at least 70% of the way through a blog post.

1. Create a new trigger in Google Tag Manager and name it “Blog post – 120+ seconds AND 70% scroll.”

2. Select the “Custom Event” trigger type.

3. Enter “^gtm\.(timer|scrollDepth)$” for the event name and check the box for using Regex Matching.

4. Select to have the trigger fire on “Some Custom Events.”

5. Fire the trigger when DLV – gtm.timerEventNumber is greater than or equal to 4. Since we’re using intervals of 30 seconds, this equals 120 seconds.

6. Fire the trigger when DLV – gtm.scrollThreshold is greater than or equal to 70.

Create a Tag

Now, we are going to create a new tag in Google Tag Manager that will reference the trigger and variables we just made.

1. Create a new tag and name it “Facebook – Blog – 120+ Seconds AND 70% Scroll.” Names are up to you, of course.

2. Use the Custom HTML tag type.

3. Paste the following code within the HTML text box…

It should look like this…

4. Under Advanced Settings > Tag Sequencing, check the box next to “Facebook – Blog – 120+ Seconds AND 70% Scroll fires.”

5. Select the “Facebook – Base Pixel” tag under setup.

6. Under Triggering, select the trigger that we created previously.

Test Your Event

Let’s make sure this event is working. Within your Events Manager, select your pixel and click on Test Events on the left.

Open a separate window or tab and go to a page of your website where this event should trigger. Scroll through the entirety of that page, and it should appear within this window.

You can also use the Facebook Pixel Helper to test in this same way.

Create Custom Conversions

I’ve created a custom conversion for this event. We’ll need this for tracking and optimization.

1. Instead of “All URL Traffic,” select “Blog Tracking” under Custom Events.

2. Click to Add a Rule.

3. Instead of “URL,” select “Event Parameters.”

4. Select “Time and depth” as your custom parameter.

5. Enter “120” next to “Contains.” I’ve only created one custom parameter under this event, so this rule should pick it up.

6. Name it, select a category (probably “Other”), and set a value (probably leave it blank).

You can test these custom conversions just as you tested your event. You should also start to see activity within your list of custom conversions. Note that the activity will be lower than what you were seeing with time on page and scroll depth alone. These are now the best of the best visits!

Add Columns in Ad Reports

This is information you should monitor within your ad reports, particularly when you drive traffic to blog posts. To do that, click to Customize Columns…

And then find your new Custom Conversion and check the boxes to add it to your report.

Optimize for High-Quality Traffic

If you would normally run campaigns to promote blog posts, let’s do it a little differently.

First, use the Conversions objective rather than Traffic.

When you set Optimization for Ad Delivery at the ad set level, select the custom conversion you’ve created.

By setting up campaigns this way, Facebook will attempt to show your ads to people most likely to spend at least two minutes and scroll at least 70% on a blog post.

Create Website Custom Audiences

We can now create audiences based on the new event we’ve created…

This lets you focus on targeting those who actually READ your blog post — beyond those pesky Blog Post Title scanners and quick scrollers.

Your Turn

This approach has changed my Facebook advertising. It gives me a much clearer view of the quality of visitor I’m driving and allows me to optimize for that type of visitor. This isolated audience also gives me an option for targeting of a small, value-packed group.

Are you doing something similar? What do you think?

Let me know in the comments below!

The post Create the Ultimate Facebook Pixel Event for Quality Traffic: Time and Scroll appeared first on Jon Loomer Digital.

A week ago, we discussed how to create Facebook pixel events for time spent on a page. This week, let’s create Facebook pixel events for scroll depth.

If you read last week’s post, portions of this post will be repetitive. But I want to be sure that, if you missed that post, you know how to set up the base pixel in Google Tag Manager and test the events.

I’ll go through even more detail in my upcoming Facebook Pixel Masterclass (the first lesson is free).

The Problem: Low-Quality Traffic

As discussed a week ago, the foundation of my marketing strategy is driving traffic to my website. I use organic content, email updates, and Facebook ads to send a constant pipeline of people to my site. That starts my funnel, where I hope to get them on my email list (usually via a free offer) before making a single-product sale and, hopefully, ongoing membership.

The quality of this funnel is reliant on the quality of that initial traffic. If my website is flooded by low-quality visits (typically reflected by a quick exit), my other efforts will fall apart.

I had become increasingly skeptical of results I was seeing from Traffic campaigns promoting blog posts using Landing Page Views optimization. I would occasionally see runs of too-good-to-be-true results. After digging further, the culprits were typically source country or placement (Audience Network almost always sends low-quality traffic).

Why does this happen? Simple: Facebook cares about volume and costs without care regarding quality. They don’t hide from this fact, either…

When optimizing for Landing Page Views (after clicking the ad, the website and Facebook pixel load), Facebook will try to get you the most LPVs for the lowest cost. It doesn’t matter whether those are three-second or three-hour views. Facebook doesn’t care.

This may not matter when it comes to sales. A $100 sale is a $100 sale. But there is a huge variance in the quality of a Landing Page View.

The Solution: Facebook Pixel Event for Scroll Depth

Scroll depth means how far down the page someone scrolls when viewing a page. While time on a page is a good indicator of quality, a visitor could theoretically spend three minutes staring at the title, and that’s not a high-quality visitor. We need another indicator of visit quality. Logging visits that result in viewing most or all of a post is a good option.

We want Facebook to track, report, optimize for, and even target based on how far someone scrolls on a page of our website. We can force Facebook to care about the quality of the traffic they are sending.

By creating a Facebook pixel event to create a log of visits based on 10-percent multiples (50, 60, 70, 80, 90, and 100 percent), we can then do the following specific things:

1. Create Custom Conversions based on these events
2. Add columns to our ad reports for number and cost of these events to get a clearer view of ability to drive quality traffic
3. Optimize for any of these specific events to focus on targeting and driving high-quality visits
4. Create website custom audiences of those who performed these events for high-quality targeting

A member of my team did this for me using Google Tag Manager. I am going to walk through the specific steps so that you can do it, too.

Add the Base Facebook Pixel

I assume you have the base Facebook pixel code already installed on your website. Just in case, let’s walk through this anyway.

We’re doing this within Google Tag Manager. While there are likely ways to do it elsewhere, the variables and triggers provided by GTM make it easier to execute.

1. Create a tag and name it “Facebook – Base Pixel.”

2. Choose “Custom HTML” as the tag type under Tag Configuration.

3. Paste your base pixel code in its entirety within the HTML text box. Below is an example, but you should use your own code unique to your ad account.

4. Under Triggering, we want our base pixel code to execute on all pages of our website.

Note that I won’t have the events we’re going to create execute on every page (that’s up to you). But the base pixel absolutely should.

Create a Trigger

We want Facebook to fire an event as a visitor progresses on a page related to scroll depth.

1. Create a new trigger in Google Tag Manager and name it “Blog – Scroll to 50%.”

2. Select the “Scroll Depth” trigger type.

3. For vertical scroll depths, use percentages of 50, 60, 70, 80, 90, and 100.

4. Enable this trigger on “Window Load (gtm.load).”

5. Set to page path contains “/blog/”. I’ve decided to focus only on blog posts, but this is again optional. You could skip this step and it would execute on any page.

Create Variable

We need the pixel to record the percentage scroll depth, so we add a variable in Google Tag Manager.

Create a variable called “DLV – gtm.scrollThreshold” using the Data Layer Variable type. Use the data layer variable name “gtm.scrollThreshold.”

Create a Tag

Now, we are going to create a new tag in Google Tag Manager that will reference the trigger and variable we just made.

1. Create a new tag and name it “Facebook – Blog – Scroll 50%-100%.” Names are up to you, of course.

2. Use the Custom HTML tag type.

3. Paste the following code within the HTML text box…

It should look like this…

4. Under Advanced Settings > Tag Sequencing, check the box next to “Fire a tag before Facebook – Blog – Scroll 50%-100% fires.”

5. Select the “Facebook – Base Pixel” tag under setup.

6. Under Triggering, select the trigger that we created previously.

Test Your Event

Let’s make sure this event is working. Within your Events Manager, select your pixel and click on Test Events on the left.

Open a separate window or tab and go to a page of your website where this event should trigger. Scroll through the entirety of that page, and it should appear within this window.

You can also use the Facebook Pixel Helper to test in this same way.

Create Custom Conversions

I’ve created custom conversions for each of the six interval scroll depth events that should be firing.

1. Instead of “All URL Traffic,” select “Blog Tracking” under Custom Events.

2. Click to Add a Rule.

3. Instead of “URL,” select “Event Parameters.”

4. Select “Scroll Depth” as your custom parameter.

5. Enter “50%” next to “Equals.”

6. Name it, select a category (probably “Other”), and set a value (probably leave it blank).

7. Repeat for 60%, 70%, 80%, 90%, and 100%.

You can test these custom conversions just as you tested your event. You should also start to see activity within your list of custom conversions.

Add Columns in Ad Reports

This is information you should monitor within your ad reports, particularly when you drive traffic to blog posts. To do that, click to Customize Columns…

And then find your new Custom Conversions and check the boxes to add them to your report.

Optimize for High-Quality Traffic

If you would normally run campaigns to promote blog posts, let’s do it a little differently.

First, use the Conversions objective rather than Traffic.

When you set Optimization for Ad Delivery at the ad set level, select one of the custom conversions you’ve created.

Feel free to experiment with the different time intervals to see if it impacts your results.

By setting up campaigns this way, Facebook will attempt to show your ads to people most likely to scroll at least 70% on a blog post.

Create Website Custom Audiences

We can now create audiences based on these new events we’ve created…

This lets you focus on targeting those who actually READ your blog post — beyond those pesky Blog Post Title scanners.

Your Turn

This approach has changed my Facebook advertising. It gives me a much clearer view of the quality of visitor I’m driving and allows me to optimize for that type of visitor. This isolated audience also gives me an option for targeting of a small, value-packed group.

Are you doing something similar? What do you think?

Let me know in the comments below!

The post Create Facebook Pixel Events for Scroll Depth appeared first on Jon Loomer Digital.

In this post, I’m going to walk through how to create a custom Facebook pixel event based on time spent on your website (all pages or a section of your website). That event will help you better track, optimize, and target those who spend the most time on your website.

[READ ABOUT HOW TO CREATE A PIXEL EVENT FOR SCROLL DEPTH.]

This is a big deal. It’s more than simply creating a custom audience of those who spent the most time on your website, as is already easily possible (top 5%, 10%, and 25%). This provides more granularity of those audiences, but two most important capabilities of this approach are through measurement and optimizing for this type of visitor.

The Problem: Low-Quality Traffic

The foundation of my marketing strategy is driving traffic to my website. I use organic content, email updates, and Facebook ads to send a constant pipeline of people to my site. That starts my funnel, where I hope to get them on my email list (usually via a free offer) before making a single-product sale and, hopefully, ongoing membership.

The quality of this funnel is reliant on the quality of that initial traffic. If my website is flooded by low-quality visits (typically reflected by a quick exit), my other efforts will fall apart.

I had become increasingly skeptical of results I was seeing from Traffic campaigns promoting blog posts using Landing Page Views optimization. I would occasionally see runs of too-good-to-be-true results. After digging further, the culprits were typically source country or placement (Audience Network almost always sends low-quality traffic).

Why does this happen? Simple: Facebook cares about volume and costs without care regarding quality. They don’t hide from this fact, either…

When optimizing for Landing Page Views (after clicking the ad, the website and Facebook pixel load), Facebook will try to get you the most LPVs for the lowest cost. It doesn’t matter whether those are three-second or three-hour views. Facebook doesn’t care.

This may not matter when it comes to sales. A $100 sale is a $100 sale. But there is a huge variance in the quality of a Landing Page View.

The Solution: Facebook Pixel Event for Time Spent

We want Facebook to track, report, optimize for, and even target based on the time spent on our website. We can force Facebook to care about the quality of the traffic they are sending.

By creating a Facebook pixel event to create a log of visits based on 30-second multiples (30, 60, 90, 120, 150, and 180 seconds), we can then do the following specific things:

1. Create Custom Conversions based on these events
2. Add columns to our ad reports for number and cost of these events to get a clearer view of ability to drive quality traffic
3. Optimize for any of these specific events to focus on targeting and driving high-quality visits
4. Create website custom audiences of those who performed these events for high-quality targeting

A member of my team did this for me using Google Tag Manager. I am going to walk through the specific steps so that you can do it, too.

Add the Base Facebook Pixel

I assume you have the base Facebook pixel code already installed on your website. Just in case, let’s walk through this anyway.

We’re doing this within Google Tag Manager. While there are likely ways to do it elsewhere, the variables and triggers provided by GTM make it easier to execute.

1. Create a tag and name it “Facebook – Base Pixel.”

2. Choose “Custom HTML” as the tag type under Tag Configuration.

3. Paste your base pixel code in its entirety within the HTML text box. Below is an example, but you should use your own code unique to your ad account.

4. Under Triggering, we want our base pixel code to execute on all pages of our website.

Note that I won’t have the events we’re going to create execute on every page (that’s up to you). But the base pixel absolutely should.

Create a Trigger

We want Facebook to fire an event for every 30 seconds a visitor is on a page.

1. Create a new trigger in Google Tag Manager and name it “Blog – 30, 60, 90, 120, 180 seconds.”

2. Select the “Timer” trigger type.

3. For interval, use 30000 milliseconds (30 seconds). You can use a different interval if you please.

4. Set a limit of 6. Again, this is optional, but in my case I wanted to record events at 30, 60, 90, 120, 150, and 180 seconds.

5. Set to page path contains “/blog/”. I’ve decided to focus only on blog posts, but this is again optional. You could skip this step and it would execute on any page.

Create Variables

We need the pixel to record the event number and interval so that this can be executed in the tag (coming up). So we need to create two variables in Google Tag Manager.

1. Create a variable called “DLV – gtm.timerEventNumber” using the Data Layer Variable type. Use the data layer variable name “gtm.timerEventNumber.”

2. Create a variable called “DLV – gtm.timerInterval” using the Data Layer Variable type. Use the data layer variable name “gtm.timerInterval.”

Create a Tag

Now, we are going to create a new tag in Google Tag Manager that will reference the trigger and variables we just made.

1. Create a new tag and name it “Facebook – Blog – 30 Seconds or more.” Names are up to you, of course.

2. Use the Custom HTML tag type.

3. Paste the following code within the HTML text box…

It should look like this…

4. Under Advanced Settings > Tag Sequencing, check the box next to “Fire a tag before Facebook – Blog – 30 Seconds or more fires.”

5. Select the “Facebook – Base Pixel” tag under setup.

6. Under Triggering, select the trigger that we created previously.

Test Your Event

Let’s make sure this event is working. Within your Events Manager, select your pixel and click on Test Events on the left.

Open a separate window or tab and go to a page of your website where this event should trigger. Wait a while, and it should appear within this window.

You can also use the Facebook Pixel Helper to test in this same way.

Create Custom Conversions

I’ve created custom conversions for each of the six interval timer events that should be firing.

1. Instead of “All URL Traffic,” select “Blog Tracking” under Custom Events.

2. Click to Add a Rule.

3. Instead of “URL,” select “Event Parameters.”

4. Select “Time on page” as your custom parameter.

5. Enter “30 seconds” next to “Equals.”

6. Name it, select a category (probably “Other”), and set a value (probably leave it blank).

7. Repeat for 60, 90, 120, 150, and 180 seconds.

You can test these custom conversions just as you tested your event. You should also start to see activity within your list of custom conversions.

Add Columns in Ad Reports

This is information you should monitor within your ad reports, particularly when you drive traffic to blog posts. To do that, click to Customize Columns…

And then find your new Custom Conversions and check the boxes to add them to your report.

Optimize for High-Quality Traffic

If you would normally run campaigns to promote blog posts, let’s do it a little differently.

First, use the Conversions objective rather than Traffic.

When you set Optimization for Ad Delivery at the ad set level, select one of the custom conversions you’ve created.

Feel free to experiment with the different time intervals to see if it impacts your results.

By setting up campaigns this way, Facebook will attempt to show your ads to people most likely to click and spend 30+ seconds on a blog post.

Create Website Custom Audiences

As you probably know, there are already ways to target some of your highest quality website visitors. You can target based on time spent on your website…

You can also create audiences of people based on number of PageView events…

And we can now create audiences based on these new events we’ve created…

While the Time on Site audience will allow you to reach those who spent the most aggregate time on your website and the PageView audience allows you to target those who viewed the most pages, this lets you focus on those who spent a specific amount of time on any blog post.

Your Turn

This approach has changed my Facebook advertising. It gives me a much clearer view of the quality of visitor I’m driving and allows me to optimize for that type of visitor. This isolated audience also gives me an option for targeting of a small, value-packed group.

Are you doing something similar? What do you think?

Let me know in the comments below!

The post Create Facebook Pixel Events for Time Spent appeared first on Jon Loomer Digital.

If you want to know how many conversions were driven by an ad, Facebook is very good about helping you uncover that information. They are eager to show how responsible the ad was for your impact.

Strangely, it’s a different story when it comes to organic distribution — whether it be of a purely organic post of an otherwise paid ad. This is a huge missed opportunity.

We scraped the top of this recently in a post about Facebook Lead Ads and organic distribution. Make sure you read that post.

Today we’ll talk more about conversions from organic distribution, the ways you can track it, and how it ultimately impacts our actions as marketers.

1. Facebook Ads and Organic Distribution

A little-known secret: Ads Manager isn’t giving you all of the data.

If your ad is particularly effective, there will be a viral component. Those you target will comment, like, and share your ad. As a result, their friends and followers will have the opportunity to see your ad, too, even though you didn’t pay to reach them.

And if you didn’t pay to reach this new viral audience, guess what? Ads Manager doesn’t report on it. It only reports on paid distribution.

The problem is that most brands and advertisers completely forget about this. When we measure the effectiveness of an ad, we only look at Ads Manager. But there is the potential for a completely different story that is left untold.

If the ad lacks virality, the difference in this impact will be minimal. But for other cases, you may be grossly underestimating the impact of your ads.

The result: We think an ad isn’t performing well, so we turn it off. Meanwhile, it was driving more conversions than we knew.

2. Organic Posts and Conversions

Here is the really weird thing: Facebook does everything it can to show that your ads were effective (related to your paid distribution). Some would argue that Facebook’s attribution model (7 days after a click, 1 day after a view) takes too much credit for conversions at times.

And yet, Facebook makes no attempt whatsoever to show the conversions you generate with an organic post.

Here’s an example of the metrics that Facebook provides for a post I published that was never promoted as an ad. It only has organic distribution…

This is not, on the surface, a particularly impactful post. It only reached about 3.5% of my potential audience. It didn’t get much engagement. Facebook only reported on 133 link clicks.

These types of numbers are why I rarely share promotional content to my page, instead reserving that content for ads only.

But, guess what? This pedestrian post drove more than 100 leads, according to Google Analytics…

The numbers Facebook provided made me feel like the post was a waste of time. And yet, it generated 116 completely free leads. Particularly during these high competition times, I could easily spend more than $200 for those results.

And that’s from a poorly performing post!

3. Tracking Conversions with UTM Parameters

If you’re wondering how I determined that post generated 116 leads, it’s because I used UTM parameters. In other words, I altered the end of my URL so that Google Analytics could track my traffic and report on those who arrived on my website from that specific link.

You can create your own with the Google URL Builder (or freehand if you’re a pro).

When you use that new URL, find out the results within the “Campaigns” section of Google Analytics.

4. Conversion Attribution Consistency

Of course, you shouldn’t have to go through all of this to track the number of conversions coming from your organic post. Facebook should display it.

And one reason Facebook should display it is that this method is imperfect for one primary reason: attribution consistency.

As discussed earlier, Facebook reports a conversion when a targeted user clicks on your ad and converts within 7 days or views your ad without clicking and converts within a day. Facebook also tracks you across devices.

Google can’t do this. They have no idea if you saw an ad without clicking and later acted on it. We know that Facebook and Google Analytics will never match up. It’s not because one is trying to mislead you. They simply have access to different information.

As a result, the use of UTM parameters is merely a Band-Aid for uncovering the full picture when Facebook could easily provide this information.

5. Facebook Attribution Tool

Some of you may be ready to shout at me about the Facebook Attribution Tool. Yes, this tool can help you uncover how many conversions you get from both paid and organic efforts on Facebook.

But there are two primary issues with this that don’t solve our problem.

First, it displays both paid and organic conversions coming from Facebook, but it doesn’t separate those that weren’t the result of a post you shared. But this is a smaller issue.

The bigger issue is that these stats aren’t post-specific. You’ll get a sense of conversions driven from Facebook (organic and paid), as well as other sources, but you aren’t given information on the number of conversions driven organically by a specific post.

This is incredibly frustrating since we know that Facebook has this information. They’re just choosing not to show it.

6. The Disappearance of Organic Distribution Metrics

While doing the research for this post, there’s also been a change that impacts our ability to even see the basic organic distribution metrics associated with our ad.

When viewing a post published to my page from Facebook’s Pages mobile app, I’m able to see the difference in organic and paid distribution of that post (assuming I promoted it).

But what about the organic distribution of a post that only exists as an ad?

There was a time when you could go to the permalink of your ad, and Facebook would display organic and paid distribution — just as displayed above with a page post. This helped understand the viral impact of the ad, even if it didn’t help uncover organic conversion information.

As far as I can tell, this is no longer the case…

Another place that previously helped display total reach, organic and paid, of an ad was the Page Posts section within Ads Manager. Well, whether it’s a bug or intentional, it now displays all zeros for me…

For whatever reason, Facebook now makes it insanely difficult to uncover any organic distribution information related to an ad.

7. Why Doesn’t Facebook Make This Easier?

So, let’s try to look at this from Facebook’s perspective. Why don’t they display this information?

The first explanation would be that it’s not possible. But that would seem unlikely, particularly for those page admins who are already using the Facebook pixel. What’s so different about a paid post and organic post that allows Facebook to report on paid, but not organic, conversions? The organic post itself has every other metric.

And since Facebook provides the general organic conversion numbers within the Facebook Attribution Tool, I’m even more inclined to believe it’s possible.

I’m left to assume this is a business decision on the part of Facebook. What is the danger of displaying this information? Let’s think about it…

Facebook’s been criticized for putting such a focus on organic reach. Well, actually, I’d say that highlighting organic reach has resulted in complaints about not reaching more people. And the implied goal of highlighting that metric is to get people to spend money to reach more.

But, what if reach isn’t all that important after all? What if you’re getting a bunch of conversions from that organic post? A post that you otherwise presumed hadn’t been that effective?

In my case, I could have spent more than $200 to get the same impact of a poorly performing, strictly organic, post. That certainly made me think about my distribution of paid and organic efforts.

8. The Missed Opportunity

This all seems like a colossal missed opportunity. It really shouldn’t be that hard. Create a prompt that encourages the page admin to connect their pixel, if they haven’t already. Then report on organic conversions that happen as a result.

I don’t know if this would change behavior, leading marketers to spend more or less on ads. But I do know that it would provide a much clearer picture regarding the impact they are making.

Was this ad effective? Well, these are the numbers based on those I paid to reach, but…

Was this organic post effective? Well, these are the numbers based on how many people it reached and other basic metrics, but…

This is especially important for those running ads for others. It’s possible that these advertisers are currently missing a portion of their impact. A full picture may keep clients happy.

Show us the conversions, Facebook. Paid and organic. There’s really no excuse.

Watch Video

I also talked about this on the video below…

Your Turn

What are your thoughts on organic conversions?

Let me know in the comments below!

The post Facebook and the Mystery of Organic Conversions appeared first on Jon Loomer Digital.

Advertising on Facebook and Instagram involves details which can seem complicated. To nurture skills, advertisers often look for simplified how-to instructions for topics, particularly to help them have conversations with people who are less involved with the details of Facebook advertising mechanics.

Facebook occasionally releases “one-sheeter” reference documents. Often times, these new or amended resources are not heavily promoted. Typically, these take the form of a Facebook quick reference guide focused on a specific topic.

These documents can be great references with clear, thoughtful design to communicate complex ideas in a succinct format.

This short article will help provide an easy resource to bring some of these Facebook one-sheeter resources together. Feel free to bookmark it! While this list is by no means exhaustive, it captures some of the main topics.

Video Requirements and Ad Specs

Video Requirements One-Sheeter: This resource has an easy-to-use chart layout showing the various design requirements and recommendations for different ad placements.

Conversion Lift and Media Campaign Testing

Conversion Lift One-Sheeter: This resource provides a quick guide on how a Conversion Lift test works on Facebook.

Facebook Test and Learn Tool: This is related to the Conversion Lift tool, but provides a reference for the various other options available through Facebook’s Test and Learn products. This resource deserves a mention here, even if it is not in the same one-sheeter format.

Bidding

Facebook Bid Strategy Guide: This guide includes graphical examples of the differences between three bidding strategies: Target Cost, Cost Cap, and Bid Cap.

**This Bid Guide resource is what inspired the creation of this article!

Value Optimization with Minimum ROAS Bidding: A bit of a more specialized feature that allows you to work with Facebook’s ad delivery optimization to achieve a minimum return on ad spend.

Facebook Pixel and App Events

Facebook Tracking Pixel: A single-page resource all about the tracking pixel, which is used by Facebook to measure (and optimize) activity on a website, and associate it with activity on Facebook’s suite of properties.

App Events: This is similar to the Tracking Pixel resource, but this tool is focused on events within an app that you own or manage.

Click-to-Messenger Campaigns

Click-to-Messenger Tips: A reference sheet for tactics that can improve Click-to-Messenger campaign performance.

The Power5

Power5 – Rewriting the Playbook for Marketing Excellence: Facebook has begun showcasing some best-practice principles for advertisers. In a single page called the Power5, this tool is meant to capture the various concepts in one place.

For more on the Power5, check out the Power5 Hub, complete with case studies and deeper details.

Advertising Transparency

Ads Related to Politics or Issues of National Importance: Facebook has increasingly made efforts to establish transparency in their ads and ad policies. This resource helps advertisers understand when and what actions they need to take when these topics apply to their content.

Facebook Ad Frequency

Controlling Frequency: This resource provides an overview of Facebook’s various options for controlling the frequency of advertising impressions.

*Bonus: Jon wrote an article all about managing Facebook ad frequency, and I wrote another about considering an ideal frequency, in case this topic is of specific interest to you.

Honorable Mentions

The following are great resources, but not technically in one-sheeter format…

1) Facebook Account Security

Facebook recently posted a blog entry on their Facebook Business News page, called: “Tips to Keep Your Facebook Account and Business Page Secure“.

2) GDPR

What is the General Data Privacy Regulation (GDPR): Here is a page to initiate understanding of GDPR and how it matters for advertisers.

GDPR Developer FAQs: This is a basic overview with some common questions from developers related to GDPR.

That’s it… for now!

All of the resources above have much greater detail and context than these simple Facebook one-sheeter pages can cover. Hopefully, this may provide a starting point on these topics. In most cases, there are links within each of these page for further detail.

Your Turn

Do you have any quick reference guides you like to use?

Let me know in the comments below!

The post A Short Reference of Facebook One-Sheeter Guides appeared first on Jon Loomer Digital.

A few days ago, I wrote about Facebook’s new Event Setup Tool that simplifies adding pixel events to your website. This is a huge development because Facebook pixel events aren’t fully utilized by marketers as they should be.

Why do you need to use pixel events? How can events benefit your marketing? Let’s break down a few of the primary ways…

[Learn more about how to master the Facebook pixel for 2019 in my upcoming training. SIGN UP HERE.]

1. Advanced Website Custom Audiences

If you have the base pixel installed on your website, you can create audiences like…

• All website visitors
• Visitors based on URL visited
• Visitors based on time spent

All are great! But, if you add events to your pixel, you can also create Website Custom Audiences based on these actions.

You could, for example, create an audience of all people who have performed any purchase on your website during the past 30 days.

Of course, it could be a search, lead, registration, or any other event that happens on your site.

For extra credit, you can add event parameters, which provide more details to the transaction. For example, adding the “Purchase” event allows you to create an audience of those who performed any purchase. Add parameters, and you can create audiences of those who purchased a specific product or spent over a certain amount.

Here’s an example of an audience that consists of people who performed purchases that, in aggregate, were equal to or greater than $100…

2. Conversion Optimization

One of the powers of Facebook ads is the ability of the algorithm to optimize to help you reach your ideal audience. One way Facebook can do this for you is optimizing to show ads to people most likely to convert — or perform the specific conversion action you want.

If you want to use the Conversions objective, you’ll need to select a pixel event to optimize for…

While you can optimize for a Custom Conversion (typically a specific product), optimizing for a broader event action (like “Purchase”) gives Facebook more data to help you effectively optimize.

3. Conversion Tracking

How effective are the Facebook ad campaigns that you’re running? Without the pixel and events, your focus is likely on a combination of Cost Per Click, Click Through Rate, and Engagement Rate. But these may have little, if any, connection to whether conversions occurred.

If you use pixel events, you can add a column specifically for the total number, unique number, value, cost, and unique cost of any standard event.

And if you use event parameters and utilize a product catalog, you can break reporting down by product ID.

While you can (and should) track results by Custom Conversion, you are limited to 100 of them per ad account. There are no such limitations to events.

4. Facebook Analytics

Facebook Analytics is a pretty awesome marketing tool. It’s a free tool (described by my friend Andrew Foxwell), “designed to help you visualize your entire sales funnel, understand the lifetime value of users, and see how your organic and paid strategies intersect.”

Facebook naturally has valuable data from interactions with your Facebook page and posts (organic and paid). But, how valuable are those interactions? Do these people buy from you? Are some reactions and interactions more valuable than others?

Well, you won’t know the answers to these questions without the Facebook pixel and events.

The number of valuable reports that you can generate with Facebook Analytics is too many to cover in this blog post. But, you can create funnels to view the percentage of your top of the funnel that ultimately converts…

You can track customer lifetime value…

You could also look at a breakdown of age, gender, and country by purchase value…

You can create a cohort of those who registered and then eventually purchased a product…

You can run a breakdown of the demographics of those who make a purchase to view info based on age, gender, country, city, language, and more…

Compare the stickiness of someone who registered for something to those who made a purchase…

This is just scratching the surface regarding the reporting available to you with Facebook Analytics. But none of it is available without the use of pixel events.

5. Facebook Attribution

Facebook Attribution is yet another powerful tool that not enough marketers are using and benefiting from. As I described in my introduction to this tool, Facebook Attribution is designed to help you understand the impact of your content and ads across multiple publishers, channels, and devices. Note that this includes and goes beyond Facebook — not only the organic referrals from Google and others, but your non-Facebook advertising efforts.

There are limitless use cases of Facebook Attribution, but let’s lay out a few.

View the top sources of website purchases by channel…

View the number of conversions that occurred on mobile after viewing your content from desktop…

Or vice versa…

In order to get any of this information, you’ll need to utilize Facebook pixel events.

6. Dynamic Ads

If you manage ads for an e-commerce brand, dynamic ads are invaluable. They allow you to dynamically show ads to people based on their interaction with that or other similar products in the past. This is done, in part, with ad templates and product catalogs that are provided to Facebook.

These are most useful for those with dozens, hundreds, or thousands of products, particularly those with high ad spend. You don’t need to manually create ads for all of these products, or focus only on a select few. You can hyper-target those expressing interest with a highly relevant ad.

You shouldn’t be surprised to learn this, but you need the Facebook pixel and events to utilize dynamic ads. This is how Facebook knows what stage of the funnel a visitor has reached (add to cart, add payment info, add to wishlist) and organize what products were viewed by product ID.

Your Turn

The reality is that Facebook pixel events aren’t only beneficial, they are required for any serious Facebook advertiser. The benefits are simply too great, and I’m undoubtedly missing some here.

Are there any other benefits of Facebook pixel events that I’m missing here? Let me know in the comments below!

The post The Value of Facebook Pixel Events appeared first on Jon Loomer Digital.

Facebook advertisers have a deep toolbox available to help reach their ideal audience. One underutilized and underappreciated group they can target is their referral traffic.

How much of your traffic comes from Google? From Instagram? From somewhere else? Are the behaviors, needs, and expectations of these people different from your typical visitor?

Knowing the referral source could allow you to create advertising that caters specifically to their needs.

I have admittedly long taken for granted that not everyone has the ability to create referral Custom Audiences. I’ve been able to do this for years. It’s not because I have access to any Facebook features that others do not. It’s simply due to how my pixel is set up.

My pixel collects parameters along with the standard PageView event. These parameters allow Facebook to collect things like referrer, language, post category, post tags, and more related to the visit.

I have a third party tool that does this for me. While I’ll provide details on that, you don’t necessarily need to use a third party tool to accomplish this. I’ll also provide the manual solution for everyone else to create the custom parameters that will help you generate referral Custom Audiences.

Custom Parameters: Test

You may already be adding parameters to your pixel for certain events, like purchases. In that case, you may include details like product ID and price. But we can do the same for the base PageView event.

In order to create Custom Audiences based on referral source (and other information mentioned above), we need to collect parameters for all visits with our pixel. In a moment, I’ll get to how you set this up. But first, let’s test to see if you have this set up already.

If you use a plugin that injects your pixel code, you may have a setting like I do to control whether your visits as an administrator get tracked.

For this test, you may either want to turn this off or simply log out first. Then, do the following…

1. Install the Facebook Pixel Helper Chrome plugin (it’s free).

2. Go to Google.

3. Type in a search that would bring up results to a blog post or page on your website. Be as specific as possible to make sure you get the results you want.

4. Click the link in the Google Search results that redirect you to that page on your website. You will now be referral traffic from Google.

5. While on that page of your website, click the Pixel Helper icon.

Here’s what my results look like:

I have a section for AdvancedEvents. That’s where my parameter info is. I click to expand and the following details are revealed…

As you can see, the following parameters were collected:

1. Login Status
2. Post Tag
3. Post Category
4. Language
5. Post Type
6. Object Type
7. User Agent
8. Object ID
9. Referrer

Note that there may be others that my pixel collects, but these are the items that were relevant in this case. If I went directly to my home page without a referral from Google (or somewhere else), I wouldn’t see parameters for Post Tag, Post Category, or Referral.

Keep in mind that you may still have Custom Parameters, but organized differently. My plugin organizes them under AdvancedEvents, but it may appear differently for you.

Add Custom Parameters: Pixel Caffeine

The reason I’ve long added these parameters is that I use the free Pixel Caffeine WordPress plugin (not an affiliate link).

[SIDE NOTE: I don’t use affiliate links. I get nothing from Pixel Caffeine for referring them.]

Within my Pixel Caffeine general settings, I have all of the Advanced Tracking checked…

Add Parameters to PageView Event: Manually

Of course, I realize not everyone uses Pixel Caffeine. In fact, it occurred to me during research for this post that most websites don’t collect parameters on every page view. As a test, I went to several websites (including as a Google referral), and I couldn’t find a single one that tracked this information.

I reached out to an engineer at Pixel Caffeine to find out how someone would do this manually. They were very kind to provide the info.

When you go through the manual pixel setup process, Facebook provides the base pixel code that you need to paste before the closing HEAD tag in the template of your website.

If you paste this base pixel code manually into your template or into either a plugin or Google Tag Manager, you should be able to do this.

We need to inject some additional code after ‘PageView’ and before the closing SCRIPT.

As a result, Facebook should then track the referrer for every page view of your website.

Note that I haven’t tested this myself, but I’ve been assured it will work. Please report back.

Create Website Custom Audience

Once you start collecting this information, you should be able to create Website Custom Audiences for these relevant groups. Note that it may take a day or two to show up.

When creating a Website Custom Audience, you should see an option for “From Your Events.” Under it, select the “PageView” event.

Next, click “Refine by” and then “URL/Parameter.”

Click the drop-down where “URL” appears. You will now see relevant parameter options that you are tracking. Select “referrer.”

If you want to create an audience of all referral traffic from Google, I’d select “Contains” and enter in “google.com” below it.

I’d avoid containing traffic that only includes “google” as it’s possible that this will pull in traffic that includes Google in a URL or UTM parameter. In those cases, it’s not guaranteed to always be referral traffic from Google.

After doing this, of course, it occurred to me that the domain is different depending on the country. You may also want to include other variations of the Google domain, like google.co.uk. Or, include far more variations at once by using google.co.

You may not want to create Custom Audiences of referral traffic from Google. Maybe it’s from Pinterest. It’s the same process. Simply create your audience based on the Pinterest domain instead.

The duration you use for this Website Custom Audience is up to you. Keep in mind the volume of referral traffic that you get when setting this.

Alternate Method: Facebook Analytics

Thanks to Yan Yanko for alerting me of an alternative. If you are using Facebook Analytics, you can also create a filter for referral traffic. In fact, you should be able to create a filter for many of the things that would otherwise be covered with parameters. You could then create a Custom Audience from that.

At the top of Facebook Analytics, click the “Add Filter” button…

Then click “Create new filter” > “had matching web parameters” > “Referral Domain” > “contains” > “google.”

Then, at the top right click the “…” and select “Save Filter.”

After saving the filter, go back to the same menu at the top right and select “Create Custom Audience.”

I assumed that this would only work if you had the necessary parameters set up with your pixel, but Yan assures me it’s a workaround that works.

Other web parameters I see when creating filters in Facebook Analytics:

• Current Domain
• Current URL
• Referral Domain
• Referral URL
• Session Exit URL
• Session Landing URL
• Session Referrer Domain
• Session Referrer URL
• Session Traffic Source
• Session Traffic Source by Search Engine
• Session Traffic Source by Social Network

There are also several UTM-related filters. I had assumed these would only appear and work if you were using these parameters. That doesn’t appear to be the case.

Try it and report back!

Target Referral Traffic

Now that you’ve created the Website Custom Audience of referral traffic, you can target these people!

Within the ad set, enter the name of the audience you just created…

You may want to use the Worldwide region, but it’s up to you at this point. Only you know what kind of volume you get from these referrals.

Is there something specific that people search for when they come to your website as a result of a referral? If so, can you then serve them an ad related to this need?

Your Turn

I hope this guide helps you set up the ability to target referral traffic with Facebook ads. Have you done this before? What results do you see?

Let me know in the comments below!

The post How to Target Referral Traffic with Facebook Ads appeared first on Jon Loomer Digital.

Facebook Business Manager is an incredibly useful and powerful tool for advertisers. If you’re running Facebook and/or Instagram ads, it’s the command center of all account connections and activities. There’s no doubt it has streamlined various processes and made it much easier to connect employees and accounts.

But that said, who actually knows and understands all the complex ins and outs of Business Manager?

Let’s be honest: very few of us. 

How many of us have scratched our head when a button is inexplicably moved or a layout has been changed without notice? How many have tried to connect our organization into a Business Manager account and ended up super frustrated and needing an adult beverage?

Let’s be honest: many of us.

As a result, most advertisers successfully connect their pages, people, and pixels, and then they’re pretty much afraid to break anything so they don’t go any further. In short, most folks vastly under-utilize this essential tool.

We can do better.

When I built the first Business Manager training course last fall, I interviewed several dozen agencies and consultants about how they actually use it. I asked them to be brutally honest about the hiccups they’ve had, the mistakes they’ve made, and the ongoing issues they run into. My research led to some pretty shocking discoveries, including:

1. Multiple agencies had every employee listed as an admin of every client Facebook Page and ad account.
2. Several other agencies had employees utilizing personal profiles to connect into ad accounts via settings, therefore not using Business Manager at all.
3. My personal favorite! One consultant had hired 34 different “contractors” in Pakistan to do posting on client Facebook pages and once he fired them, he never deleted them as admins of those pages.

It’s time to get serious.

As a Facebook/Instagram advertiser today, it’s a MUST that we keep our Business Manager fully functional and up to date for not only our purposes, but for the purposes of client protection and security as well.

We all need a checkup once in a while. It keeps us healthy. It also ensures the best security on our accounts, something that’s absolutely imperative these days.

So, let’s do this.

If you want to modify almost anything within Business Manager, it has to be done via Business Settings. You can navigate to that area via Business.Facebook.com.

Once you’ve clicked on the blue button in the upper right corner, it’ll bring you into the navigational menu that you can click around in.

Step One: Clean Up Admins and Employees

Within Business Manager, we all have Admins and Employees. These are the fine people we’ve connected into our organization at some point. You can then attach them to ad accounts, pages, and other assets.

1. Admins

It’s important to remember that old employees and admins can always be removed within Business Manager. You can find these within “People” in the upper left hand side of the navigation bar under settings. Anyone that has a small badge to the right of their name is an admin.

Ask yourself: does anyone have a badge who actually shouldn’t?? Admins have a lot of power within your Business Manager, so these should be used very sparingly. I reserve these only for the Business Owners, or those controlling access to the Business Manager.

2. Employees

Your employees are users who’ve been added into the account at some point. They are likely connected to assets, such as pages and ad accounts. But should they be?

Here’s an example: I no longer work with Jackson, so I’d like to remove him. You can do this by clicking in the upper right corner of that employee record and hit “Remove.”

You can also review the ad accounts, pages, catalogs, and other assets that person is attached to. If you want to remove them from a particular account, click on the asset and then on the right hand side, click the X on the asset name.

Great work cleaning up your admins and employees!

Step Two: Disconnect Old Ad Accounts and Pages

How much time do you spend getting rid of old ad accounts and pages you’re no longer connected to? If you’re like the dozens of agencies I polled last fall, it’s not much time at all — which can be hugely problematic!

There are different excuses for not taking action and here are some of the most common:

• Agencies want to stay connected to old accounts and keep tabs on a new agency. (I do not endorse this tactic!)
• Some agencies frankly don’t know how to do it properly.
• Then there’s downright laziness, meaning some folks just don’t look at their account list in Business Manager very often.

In order to truly stand out as advertisers, we’ve got to stay on top of everything — which includes cleaning up old accounts and pages — as annoying and time-consuming as that might be.

1. Reviewing Old Ad Accounts

Reviewing your list of ad accounts is actually quite simple. Within Business Settings, you can click on Accounts and review the list under Ad Accounts.

Be sure to look at the accounts themselves. You can also review the people connected, which level of access they have, and then ask yourself if that person really needs access. If you’re an agency, consider if you need to be connected or is it just cluttering up your Business Manager.

If you need to remove yourself or your agency, you can do that by clicking “remove” in the upper right corner.

2. Reviewing Old Pages

The process for reviewing the Facebook pages you’re connected to is similar to ad accounts. You go into Business Settings, click the page you want to remove and select it from the top right corner.

Step Three: Ensure Your Pixels are Perfect

Pixels lead to some of the most frustrating scenarios within Business Manager. But if you share the pixel properly, you can attach it to an ad account, utilize it within Facebook Analytics, and dial-in your dynamic ads. So, it holds a lot of power.

1. Is the pixel shared properly?

The first thing I check on with pixels is if they are shared into the Business Manager properly. If not, this may be why you’ve run into permissions issues in the past.

Check the listing of pixels, under the data sources > pixels area. Are all your pixels showing up here?

If not, you may need to share the pixel into Business Manager. At this stage, it’s important to note a few things:

1. The person trying to share the pixel has to own it.
2. You need to share it into the Business Manager that you want to own that pixel. So if this is a client’s pixel, they need to do this within their own Business Manager.

To share, click in the upper left corner and head to Events Manager > Pixels area.

Once there, hit “details” on the pixel, which brings you into the main admin screen.

Then, hit share. This brings you back into the Business Manager pixel area we were at earlier.

2. Are Partners, People, and Ad Accounts Connected Properly?

For each pixel within your Business Manager, you can assign a partner, person, and ad account to that pixel. Review each of these and ensure things are all connected, so you have no more permissions issues. This process also ensures your pixel will work as intended.

Still tons more!

Even for those of us who have been using Business Manager for years, there’s always still tons more to learn. You can always be improving, reviewing, and ensuring security is top notch for your clients.

The post Time For a Facebook Business Manager Checkup appeared first on Jon Loomer Digital.

Multiple factors contribute to whether your Facebook advertising campaigns succeed or fail. Copy, imagery, optimization, bidding, placement, and countless other factors all matter. But nothing matters more than targeting.

In order to have this consistent, dependable success, you need to graduate beyond interests, which is best for top-of-the-funnel targeting. For sustained middle and bottom-of-the-funnel results, it’s imperative that you master warm targeting with Facebook Custom Audiences.

Custom Audiences began as a simple concept, launching with the ability to target current customers by email address in 2012. It’s nearly six years later, and advertisers have a cupboard full of ways to target customers and those who engage with them — both on and off of Facebook.

Below is a close-to-complete guide of the ways that you can use Custom Audiences to target warm audiences of people who are ready to act. It’s close-to-complete for a couple of reasons:

1. There are nearly limitless variations you can create based on variables
2. Facebook is constantly adding to these options

But consider this list a starting point. Many of these options are buried, and you’re bound to be exposed to a few for the first time. I encourage you to read through and experiment with the audiences that you can leverage.

Customer File

It’s the granddaddy of Custom Audiences. Originally, this type of audience and “Custom Audiences” were used interchangeably.

With this method, advertisers upload a customer list to Facebook with up to 15 identifiers. Facebook then searches out those same people on the platform. Typically, you can expect anywhere from 30-70% of your list to match up to Facebook users. When you’re done, you can use this to target or exclude users on Facebook.

The primary advantage of creating Customer File Custom Audiences is that those on that list are a customer at some level. They either provided an email address or made a purchase from you. As a result, this will be a valuable list for targeting that can be used for all purposes.

Of course, there are some inherent weaknesses with this method.

First, uploading a customer file results in a one-time, static audience. What that means is that as your customer list updates, your audience doesn’t — at least, it doesn’t without the help of a third party tool. If you don’t update it some way, the audience will be outdated and lose its effectiveness.

Another weakness is that the identifiers that a customer provides to you may not be the same information they provide to Facebook in their profile. Notably, a customer may provide you a different email address than what they publish for their friends. This will make the match rate less successful.

1. Upload, Copy/Paste, or Import

Using this first method, advertisers can provide Facebook with a customer file consisting of up to 15 identifiers by uploading…

…copying and pasting…

…or importing via MailChimp integration.

2. Lifetime Value Lookalikes

The thought here is that you first upload an entire customer list with up to 15 identifiers, as you would above. But you then include a column for Lifetime Value for each customer.

This list wouldn’t be used for targeting, but instead becomes a source so that Facebook can generate a Lookalike Audience of people similar to your most valuable customers. More on Lookalikes at the bottom.

Website Custom Audiences

And now it gets good. Real good.

Website Custom Audiences allow advertisers to create audiences based on actions performed on the pages of their own website. This is thanks to the Facebook pixel, which is a snippet of code added to your website.

The granularity of the audiences you can create depends partly on the amount of traffic as well as your diligence creating detailed pixel events.

What’s nice about WCAs is that they update in real time, and the match-up rate is high. Below is a sampling of the powerful audiences that you can create.

3. All Website Visitors

4. Visitors by Device

5. Visitors by Frequency

6. People Who Visited Specific Web Pages

You can include an entire URL, partial URL, or multiple URLs or keywords. There are a million and one uses for this type of audience.

7. Visitors by Time Spent

Not all website visitors are created equal. Focusing on those who spent the most time — though a smaller audience — can lead to amazing results.

8. From Your Events: Page View

Assuming you have the Facebook pixel installed on your website with events, the applicable events that have fired will appear for you…

The PageView event is one example.

9. From Your Events: Purchases

10. From Your Events: Registrations

11. From Your Events: Adds-to-Cart

12. From Your Events: Searches

13. From Your Events: By Search String Parameter

In the example above, you can create an audience of people who performed any search on your website. But you can also focus on searches by specific keywords.

14. From Your Events: By User Agent Parameter

What operating system and software were people using when they visited your website?

15. From Your Events: By Language Parameter

The language setting on someone’s browser can help you surface content to the right people in the proper language.

16. From Your Events: By Referrer Parameter

17. From Your Events: By UTM Parameter

UTM parameters are tracking codes you can add to the end of links broken down into campaign source, medium, name, term, sq, and content. At minimum, you need to include a source. Here’s an example of such a link…

Homepage

You can create an audience based on any of these UTM parameters…

Using the example link above, we could create the following audience for the “email” medium.

18. From Your Events: By Value Parameter

You can create audiences based on the value of purchases made on your website, assuming you’re using the value parameter with your Facebook pixel event code.

19. From Your Events: By Currency Parameter

20. From Your Events: By Content Name Parameter

21. From Your Events: By Content ID Parameter

22. From Your Events: By Aggregated Value

Earlier, you saw how you could create audiences based on a single purchase. But you can also do so based on all purchases someone made in aggregate.

App Activity

If you have an app (mobile or web) utilizing the Facebook SDK, you can create audiences of people based on their activity within that app. This can be a great opportunity for re-engaging and pushing people further along the funnel.

23. Anyone Who Opened the App

24. Most Active Users

25. Users by Purchase Amount

26. Users by Segment

Segments will be defined by you…

Offline Activity

Back in 2016, Facebook launched Offline Event Sets, allowing advertisers to provide Facebook with offline data that could then help show whether such sales were influenced by your ads. This was extremely valuable for brick and mortar stores, in particular, who struggled to show the impact of their ads.

About a year later, Facebook followed that up with Offline Event Custom Audiences, allowing you to create audiences of those who purchased something offline.

27. People Who Interacted Offline

28. From Your Events

When you send Facebook your offline data, you include a column that indicates the event performed. This can then be used to refine your offline event audience.

Engagement: Video

A great top-of-the-funnel audience is anyone who engaged with a video (or multiple videos) you’ve published. Someone can view your video — with or without sound — and automatically be added to an audience for you to target later.

29. People who watched at least 3 seconds of your video

Clearly, a 3-second view would be the lowest quality but result in the largest audience.

Other options (though all are set up identically otherwise)…

30. People who watched at least 10 seconds of your video

31. People who watched at least 25% of your video

32. People who watched at least 50% of your video

33. People who watched at least 75% of your video

34. People who watched at least 95% of your video

Engagement: Lead Form

Facebook Lead Ads allow advertisers to collect leads (email addresses and other contact info) without sending a user away from Facebook. Thanks to this Engagement Custom Audience, those who engage with the form can be added to one of three different audiences for targeting and exclusion purposes.

Advertisers can create audiences based on the interaction with one, multiple, or all forms you have during a given time period.

35. People who opened your form

This includes everyone who opened the form, whether they submitted it or not.

36. People who opened but didn’t submit your form

37. People who opened and submitted your form

Engagement: Fullscreen Experience

Facebook launched Facebook Canvas in its continued attempts to keep people on Facebook and improve the user experience. Canvas presents an immersive mobile experience for users who can view videos, images, product feeds, text, and more in one view.

For publishers, the one issue with this was losing the traffic and potential targeting power that goes along with sending someone to your website. This was changed with the launch of Fullscreen Experience Custom Audiences. You can create audiences of people who engaged with any Canvas, or one or more specific Canvases.

38. People who opened your canvas

39. People who clicked any links in your canvas

You can provide links within your Canvas, though they don’t need to go to your website. That’s where creating these audiences can be helpful. Think, for example, about a Canvas promoting a product with a button that sends users to an Amazon page.

Engagement: Facebook Page

The Facebook Page Engagement Custom Audience is a sneaky effective audience to target. You may assume that those who visit your website will be more effective than those who interact with you on Facebook, but that is not always the case.

In fact, it makes sense. Interacting with you on your website doesn’t mean they’ll interact with your ad on Facebook. And if someone has engaged with you on Facebook before, they’re likely to do it again.

40. People who engaged with your page

This is the broadest audience of all people who engaged with your page in any manner…

41. People who visited your page

42. People who engaged with any post or ad

This can be particulary effective when looking for an audience to target with your ads…

43. People who clicked any call-to-action button

44. People who sent a message to your page

A small audience, but potentially very valuable…

45. People who saved your page or any post

Engagement: Instagram Business Profile

Is your business on Instagram? If so, you can create an audience of those people who engage with your profile there — in nearly identical ways as with your Facebook page above.

Your Instagram profile will need to be a business profile, and you’ll need to connect it to your Business Manager in order to access this feature.

46. People who engaged with your business on Instagram

47. People who visited your Instagram profile

48. People who engaged with any post or ad

49. People who sent a message to your Instagram profile

50. People who saved any post or ad

Engagement: Event

It’s an old school feature, but many marketers still run Facebook Events. I’m not talking about the pixel events this time, but the posts on Facebook that alert people of an upcoming party or other activity.

Thanks to this Engagement Custom Audience, you can create audiences of people based on their specific activity with any event or specific events.

51. People who responded Going or Interested

52. People who responded Going

53. People who responded Interested

Lookalike Audiences

It may be cheating a little bit to include Lookalike Audiences because these aren’t people who are connected to your business in any way, but this is — at least loosely — part of the Custom Audience family.

Lookalike Audiences allow you to target those who are similar to people who are already connected to or interacting with you. Facebook does this by looking at a source audience (your Facebook Page or a Custom Audience), finding the similarities among those people, and finding a larger group of people who are similar to them.

This is particularly useful when your source audiences are small and you need to start somewhere.

54. Based on a Page

55. Based on a Custom Audience

Your Turn

Any other audiences I missed? Let me know in the comments below!

The post Facebook Ads Guide: 55 Custom Audiences to Target People Ready to Act appeared first on Jon Loomer Digital.

Facebook Analytics is a terrific tool that not enough marketers are using. Andrew Foxwell documented a few of the benefits recently. But, how do you get the most out of it?

In this post, I’m going to provide a few examples of some powerful Facebook Analytics reports and how it all comes back to the Facebook pixel and Events. Ultimately, I’ll help you understand how to get those Events set up so that you can start getting the most out of Facebook Analytics today.

Let’s dive in…

Examples of Facebook Analytics Reports

Andrew provided a couple of examples in his post of reports that you can create with Facebook Analytics. Let’s detail a few more ways you can use it.

Here’s an example of a funnel from a Facebook post comment all the way through a website purchase…

Maybe you want to know how much a typical visitor is worth. Well, here’s a look at Customer Lifetime Value over time…

You could also look at a breakdown of age, gender, and country by purchase value…

Go ahead and create a cohort of those who registered and then eventually purchased a product…

Not sure how long people stick around? Here’s a look at user retention following the initial interaction…

Who are your best customers? Well, run a breakdown of the demographics of those who make a purchase to view info based on age, gender, country, city, language, and more…

Here’s a comparison of the stickiness between those who registered for something and those who made a purchase…

Amazed yet? Well, this is just a sampling. You can add limitless segments and variables to find every possible needle in the haystack.

Facebook Analytics, The Pixel, and Events

At this point, you might be thinking… “Wow. Amazing. But creepy. How in the world does Facebook know all of this?”

I have one word for you: Events.

When people think of Facebook Events, they usually do so in connection with Facebook ads. Events are snippets of code (added outside of the Facebook pixel) that help Facebook identify when a specific “event” occurs.

For example, you create a “Purchase” Event. That code is added to the confirmation page signifying a purchase has completed. That page loads. Facebook knows that a purchase happened.

Events that you can create:

• Purchase
• Generate Lead
• Complete Registration
• Add Payment Info
• Add to Cart
• Add to Wishlist
• Initiate Checkout
• Search
• View Content

In each case, you can add parameters (conversion value, currency, content ID, etc.) to provide more details. For example, the purchase was for Product X and the value is $100.

Typically, you’ve added the Facebook pixel and Events for your advertising. This allows Facebook to track how many conversions occurred (was the campaign effective?). It also allows Facebook to optimize for a particular conversion.

But we haven’t been able to use this for organic activity. Paid engagement may make up a small percentage of your traffic, registrations, and purchases. Facebook Analytics, of course, doesn’t care whether the activity was paid or organic.

Making more sense? Yeah, you need to take advantage of Events.

Set Up Facebook Events

Hopefully, you now see how important it is that you add Events to utilize the powerful data within Facebook Analytics. Let’s do that!

If you haven’t installed the Facebook pixel on your website yet, there are numerous ways to do it (click that link for a few). At the moment, I use the Pixel Caffeine WordPress plugin (it’s free). Do whatever is best for you.

Just installing the pixel, though, isn’t enough — at least if you want to take advantage of Facebook Analytics. As mentioned above, you also need to be sure to use Events.

To utilize Events, you’ll need to inject code (in addition to the base Facebook pixel code that should already be on your website). As a result, when someone loads a page with an Event code on it, Facebook can report that the Event has occurred.

While viewing your pixel, click the “Set Up” button at the far right.

If you use an integration or tag manager (Google Tag Manager, Shopify, WooCommerce, etc.), great. Click that option for instructions on how to get everything set up.

But otherwise, click to “manually install the code yourself.” In the second step, Facebook provides information for adding your Event code.

Example: Set Up Purchase Event

We could go through every Event, but it’s not necessary. If you understand how to set this up for one, you’ll understand it for them all. Let’s start with a purchase.

Click the option for “Purchase.”

The nice thing is that as you add info for parameters, Facebook spits out the code you’ll need to use. Above is what I’d need for the purchase Event for my Facebook Analytics training program.

Then Facebook provides details on where specifically to add that code (after the opening BODY tag)…

You can also test it after adding the tag to make sure it’s working.

Inline Events

Are there examples where users aren’t redirected to a confirmation page? In that case, you’ll need to generate an inline Event. These Events execute when a button is pushed.

At the top of Event creation, you’ll see the option for “Track Event on Inline Action.”

You will then be shown the inline code to use…

Integration and Tag Managers

The instructions above are for doing all of this manually. But adding Events may actually be much easier — if not automated — depending on your integration or tag manager (assuming you use one).

As I mentioned earlier, I use the Pixel Caffeine WordPress plugin. Creating Events with this plugin is very easy.

Under Conversions/Events, fill out the area to “Add New Tracking.”

You won’t need to add any code. Just tell the plugin what Event to create and you provide the parameters. Click “Pass Advanced Data” to send even more details to Facebook…

And that’s it! Event created.

If you use any of these other integration methods, click for those details.

• Wix Premium
• BigCommerce
• Magento
• Shopify
• WooCommerce
• WordPress
• Google Tag Manager
• Adobe Dynamic Tag Management
• Segment
• Tealium
• Squarespace
• Weebly

Your Turn

How are you using Facebook Analytics? What reports are you creating?

Let me know in the comments below!

The post Facebook Analytics, the Pixel, and Events appeared first on Jon Loomer Digital.

One of the many benefits of the Facebook pixel is that you can track and later retarget those who perform specific actions on your website. You can segment your audience in very specific ways based on page views, registrations, purchases, searches, and more.

Let’s take a closer look at how and why you should create these audiences. First, I’ll guide you through the basics. In the end, I’ll show you seven specific examples of audiences that you can create.

What Are Pixel Events?

Assuming the Facebook pixel is installed on every page of your website, you can add code to specific pages to capture and track the details of an event (registration, purchase, search, etc.). In addition to the tracking and optimization power of pixel events, you can create audiences of those who performed certain events on your website for highly relevant Facebook ad targeting.

If you aren’t using the pixel — or you’re using the pixel, but without events — you’ll be limited regarding the types of pixel event-related audiences that you can create.

Are You Using Events?

If you’re not sure whether you’re using events, there’s a good chance you aren’t. From the “Pixels” area of your Ads Manager, click the “Set Up” button at the far right…

If you use a certain integration or tag manager (WooCommerce, Shopify, Google Tag Manager, etc.), click that option. Otherwise, click to manually install the code yourself.

The first step is installing the pixel. Facebook does a very good job of explaining how to do this. Make sure the base pixel code goes between the HEAD tags of every page of your website.

The second step is to add your events. Facebook has improved their documentation here to streamline this for you. Simply click the button by one of the events and enter the details (for a specific product, for example), and Facebook will spit out the event code that you will add.

Here’s what the event code looks like for the purchase of a product with the “pixel-training” ID valued at $100…

Instead of manually adding this code, you may also want to install a WordPress plugin. Pixel Caffeine is a free WordPress plugin that I use.

Audiences From Your Pixel Events

Assuming you are using the pixel and events on your website, you can now do some pretty cool things with Website Custom Audiences.

Click to create a Custom Audience…

And select “Website Traffic”…

You should now see that you can create audiences “from your events”…

What events appear here will depend upon the events used and found on your website.

Refine by Parameter

After selecting an event, you’ll see a link to “refine by” with the first option of “URL/Parameter.” Refining by a parameter will make special use of your events.

Parameters are the things that provide details of an event. For a purchase, parameters can include things like the value, currency, and number of items.

Refine by Aggregated Value

The second option when clicking to refine is “Aggregated Value.”

With this option, you can create audiences of people who performed a certain action multiple times. For example, an audience could be created for those who come back multiple times to make purchases totaling more than $1,000 in aggregate.

Now let’s take a look at seven specific Facebook Website Custom Audiences that you can create based on pixel events…

1. Any Registration

Let’s start generally. My website has multiple ways that you can register for something (two different webinars, two different video series, newsletter, and a Quick Video Tutorials subscription). I can (and do) create individual audiences for all of those actions. But I could also create an audience of all people who registered on my website.

This is especially useful for websites that don’t get significant volume for a single lead magnet, but there are several ways to register on the site.

2. Any Purchase

Once again, I offer several products on my website. I create audiences for each product, but I can also create an audience of all who have purchased anything on my website.

This is one of the most valuable audiences that you can create.

3. Referred by Google

If someone purchased on your website, how did they get there? Were they referred by Google? This is an easy audience to create…

4. Viewed Two or More Pages

It’s always helpful to isolate those who are most active on my website. One way to do this is by using “Frequency” within parameters. You can apply frequency to any event, but let’s focus on the PageView event…

This allows me to target those who have viewed the most pages on my website — in aggregate.

5. Purchased Multiple Items

When someone checks out, do they purchase one item or multiple items? You can separate those who purchased more than one item at a time…

6. Aggregate Purchase Value

Anyone who purchased from me is a valuable customer. But what about those who purchase again and again? We can apply aggregate value to isolate those who spent the most money…

7. Performed a Search

When people use the Search function on your website, they are looking for answers. This can be valuable information. By creating audiences based on searches, you can create ads targeting these people, promoting the solution.

In the example above, people came to my website searching for “pixel.” I can target them when promoting my Facebook pixel training program.

Your Turn

This is just scratching the surface. There are dozens and dozens of audiences that you can create based on activity on your Facebook pixel. But this should help you understand the types of audiences that are possible.

Have you started creating these? What are examples of some that you use?

Let me know in the comments below!

The post Facebook Website Custom Audiences Based on Pixel Events appeared first on Jon Loomer Digital.

Advertisers can do some amazing things with Facebook ads, largely thanks to the Facebook pixel. The problem for many e-commerce brands, however, is that utilizing the “good stuff” has required some technical dirty work that often confuses and intimidates those without technical resources.

Thanks to a new integration with WooCommerce that started rolling out on Tuesday, this suddenly becomes much easier to do for many e-commerce brands.

The Pixel, Audiences, Product Feeds and Dynamic Ads

First, understand how important it is that e-commerce websites take advantage of the Facebook pixel and all it can offer. A quick refresher…

The Facebook Pixel: The pixel is a single snippet of code unique to your ad account that you would add to every page of your website.

There are many different ways to add that pixel, depending upon how your website is set up.

Audiences: Once the pixel is added to your website, you can create many different Website Custom Audiences for Facebook ad targeting.

Create audiences of people who visited a specific page or visited more often, for example. Then create ads that are hyper-targeted based on that behavior.

Events: In the case of an e-commerce site, you can also create events based on a user’s specific behavior. For example, custom code added with the pixel on certain pages will signify a standard event (add to cart, registration or purchase, for example) or custom event.

You can also create audiences based on those events…

Product Feeds: E-commerce websites using the Facebook pixel can also generate product feeds that can be used in dynamic ads and collections ads.

Once Facebook has a feed of products from your website, you can populate ads dynamically with product name, price, description, image and more from that feed.

The Problem

This all sounds great, but the problem has been the technical expertise needed to execute all of these things. Simply getting the pixel added in the first place can be a chore for those who aren’t technical. But customizing with events and generating a product feed add a whole new level of complexity that most aren’t willing or able to take on.

Facebook provided integrations for Magento, Shopify, BigCommerce and Segment in the past. And now that integration is also available for business websites using WooCommerce.

Facebook for WooCommerce Extension

That problem is solved, thanks to the Facebook for WooCommerce extension.

When setting up your pixel, you have the option of copy and paste or integration.

After this roll-out, there will now be six different integration options (Shopify, WooCommerce, Google Tag Manager, Magento, BigCommerce, and Segment).

If you use WooCommerce, you will need the Facebook for WooCommerce extension to implement this integration.

Once that extension is installed and activated, you’ll have access to this new dashboard…

First, select the Facebook page that will be related to this website.

Then select your Facebook pixel, and Facebook will automatically add it to every page of your website. The proper events will also be added.

Facebook also auto-generates your product feed for you based on the products you created within your WooCommere set-up. Facebook will tell you how many products you have in your inventory.

Once you click “Finish,” your feed will be available for Facebook ads — notably for dynamic ads and collections.

That’s it!

Your Turn

Thanks to this update, “more than half of all e-commerce sites on the internet can use Facebook’s most advanced ad products without having to know code,” according to Andrew Biggs, direct response product marketing manager at Facebook.

Do you sell products on your website via WooCommerce? How much does this integration help you?

Let me know in the comments below!

The post Facebook for WooCommerce: Pixel and Dynamic Ads Integration appeared first on Jon Loomer Digital.

Every Thursday, I host three one-on-one sessions, and the discussion almost always inevitably focuses on one thing: A Facebook ad campaign process that actually works.

What I’m about to outline is a process that I have worked and reworked, tweaked and refined. It’s specifically for advertisers who don’t currently have a large, built-in audience to target for leads and sales.

Let’s get to it…

[Tweet “Here is a simple, repeatable Facebook ad campaign process that actually works…”]

The Problem

The process I see from far too many advertisers is painfully simple: Target interests and Lookalike Audiences to build leads and sell stuff.

While this simplified process can be successful for a while, it doesn’t lead to long-term success. Your campaign will ultimately run out of gas.

I’ll say it over and over again, but the number one reason that advertisers fail with Facebook ads is targeting. They go straight for the jugular by targeting people who don’t know them to get the lead or sale.

Sure, this can work for a while. Cost per lead and sale will eventually creep up to the point that it is no longer viable. If you want consistent results, you need a better long-term plan.

The Solution

Instead of a simple one-step process (target one audience that doesn’t know you to build leads or sell stuff), it’s a little more complicated than that. It doesn’t need to be a lot more complicated. But I recommend focusing on three objectives at a time — all the time.

1. Build the Audience

Back in the day, most people interpreted this as increasing page likes. Or it could have meant building your email list. But I’m not talking about either one here.

If you don’t have a large, built-in audience, you need to aggressively and efficiently build an audience in volume. We’ll do this by promoting helpful articles (driving traffic and building a Website Custom Audience) and videos (building an Engagement on Facebook Custom Audience).

2. Build Your Leads

The mistake is that most advertisers start here, targeting people who don’t know them. We won’t do that. We’ll target the audiences created in Step 1 to build leads by offering them a related freebie in exchange for an email address.

This could be an ebook, webinar, video series, coupon code, you name it. But it needs to be valuable. And we’ll build these leads by both driving people to a landing page and using Facebook Lead Ads.

3. Sell Stuff

Once again, far too many advertisers start and finish here. While you could certainly target the audience generated from Step 1, you’ll undoubtedly have more success targeting those generated from Step 2.

Now let’s get to the details…

Build the Audience

I recommend two ongoing campaigns with two separate objectives to build your audience. For each objective, target the types of audiences you may have been targeting without this process. They can be Lookalike Audiences or interests. This is top of the funnel type stuff.

But the key here is that you’re not wasting your money on this entire audience trying to get them to opt-in or buy something. Lookalike Audiences and interests aren’t all that accurate. And even if they are, many of those people may not be ready to buy or even provide an email address yet.

This step helps separate those who are potential customers from those who aren’t by providing low barrier, no-strings-attached, helpful content.

1. Build a Website Custom Audience

The objective of this campaign should be Clicks to Website. Within this campaign, promote your most successful blog post. Something that helps people, solves a problem and doesn’t sell anything. Those who would be interested in the solution that this blog post offers need to be your target audience.

Alternatively or concurrently, you can also use a carousel ad to promote multiple blog posts. Again, they need to be helpful. Solve problems that your target audience would have.

For this to work, you’ll of course need the Facebook pixel on your website. Create the following Website Custom Audiences:

• Visited Your Website – 30 Days
• Viewed [Popular Blog Post] – 180 Days

For argument’s sake, let’s assume you like to target both Lookalike Audiences and interests. So create two different ad sets.

• Ad Set #1: Lookalike Audiences
• Ad Set #2: Interests

Don’t get crazy with the interests. Select a few good ones. If you need help finding relevant interests, use Audience Insights.

When promoting a single blog post, make sure to exclude those who have already read that blog post (using the second WCA you created above). We’ll also want to exclude anyone who registered or bought in the “Build Your Leads” and “Sell Stuff” steps. Details to follow.

Feel free to mostly use Facebook’s default settings in Power Editor (yes, you should use Power Editor). I prefer daily budgets over lifetime, but that’s up to you. I also prefer to be charged for the impression rather than the click, but that is also a personal preference.

Don’t do any manual bidding. Have Facebook optimize for the website click.

2. Build an Engagement on Facebook Custom Audience

Another way to quickly and efficiently build a relevant audience in volume is through video views. Create a short, helpful video that solves your target audience’s problem. Make sure to use captions because most videos are watched without sound.

The objective of this campaign should be Video Views. Create two ad sets targeting the same audiences as above. You’ll also, though, want to create Engagement on Facebook Custom Audiences as follows:

• Viewed [Your Video] 50% – 30 Days
• Viewed [Your Video] 50% – 365 Days

[NOTE: As I type this, not everyone has Engagement on Facebook Custom Audiences. If you don’t have them yet, you can skip the video.]

What percentage you use is up to you. It depends on the length of the video. Clearly, the smaller the percentage, the larger the audience and less relevant it will be.

You’ll want to exclude the second audience within each of these two ad sets. We don’t want to keep targeting people who watched the video with this video.

We’ll also want to exclude anyone who registered or bought in the “Build Your Leads” and “Sell Stuff” steps.

Stick with the defaults on everything here. Again, it’s up to you whether you use daily or lifetime budgets. But you’ll want to optimize for the video view. Don’t do any manual bidding.

Build Your Leads

Let’s think about this. We have people who have read our helpful blog posts or watched our helpful videos. This tells us that they are in our target audience. So now let’s take them a step further and present them with a free offer that requires an email address in exchange.

Once again, I want you to create two different campaigns for this. The primary reason is to find what works best for you.

1. Drive to a Landing Page

This is the old fashioned way. I’m beginning to favor Facebook Lead Ads, but I don’t think it’s time to abandon the landing page yet.

Your objective should be Website Conversions. Before you get started, create the following Website Custom Audiences:

• Visited Opt-in Thank You Page – 30 Days
• Visited Opt-in Thank You Page – 180 Days

You are going to create two ad sets targeting the following audiences:

• Ad Set #1: Visited Your Website – 30 Days
• Ad Set #2: Viewed Your Video – 30 Days

Exclude the second WCA created for the opt-in thank you page (180 days) as well as the Lead Ad Custom Audience (90 days) that we’re about to create. Also exclude those who bought the product in the next step (we’ll get to that).

Note that you can (and probably should) also create an Email Custom Audience of those who registered. If you can, use a third party tool that keeps it synced at all times (I use DriftRock Flow), and also exclude that audience.

Optimize for conversions, and stick primarily with Facebook defaults.

2. Use Facebook Lead Ads

If you already send people to a landing page, it’s time to start experimenting with Facebook Lead Ads. They are much easier for the user, and can lead to greater volume.

Remember that the Lead Ad needs to be your landing page. So don’t use identical copy and imagery that you’d use when sending people to a landing page. Be more descriptive.

Create the following Lead Ad Custom Audiences:

• Opened and Submitted Lead Form – 30 Days
• Opened and Submitted Lead Form – 90 Days

[NOTE: Once again, these come from Engagement on Facebook Custom Audiences. If you don’t have these yet, skip this step.]

The ad sets and targeting will be the same as when sending people to a landing page. Exclusions will also be the same. To recap, we’re excluding the following:

• Visited Opt-in Thank You Page – 180 Days
• Opened and Submitted Lead Form – 90 Days
• Registered (Email Custom Audience)
• Bought the product we’ll promote (Thank You Page Website Custom Audience – 180 Days)
• Bought the product we’ll promote (Email Custom Audience)

Sell Stuff

Now it’s time to sell our stuff. As you’ve probably figured out by now, the audience we’re about to target will be much smaller than what most advertisers target to sell.

The objective of your campaign should be Website Conversions. You’ll create two different ad sets targeting the following people:

• Visited Opt-in Thank You Page – 30 Days
• Opened and Submitted Lead Form – 30 Days

And we’ll exclude the following audiences:

• Bought the product we’ll promote (Thank You Page Website Custom Audience – 180 Days)
• Bought the product we’ll promote (Email Custom Audience)

For bidding, we will use Daily Unique Reach instead of sticking with the defaults.

Let’s explain why…

Normally, we’re targeting a large audience and we invite Facebook to optimize. By optimizing, Facebook finds the people within our audience most likely to perform our desired action.

But in this case, we’re targeting a much smaller, much more relevant audience. We don’t want Facebook to pick and choose whom to reach. We want them to reach as many of the people who registered as possible.

But we’re only targeting those who registered during the past 30 days. That way, if they don’t buy after a month of ads, we can stop wasting our money on them.

Don’t Forget Your Email Funnel

Part of our process is building our email list and then selling to those people. So we should concurrently email these people consistent messaging to push for the sale.

Most marketers miss this step. They tend to either run Facebook ads to those who opted in for the sale or send them emails for the sale — rarely both. The thought is that if they’re already doing it in one place, it’s a waste of money to do it in both.

Not true. The reality is that not everyone opens your emails. And even those who open your emails don’t act immediately. Additionally, not everyone who sees your ads act immediately.

By running both, you make each method more effective. Someone who saw your email but didn’t act on it may be more familiar with your offer when they see your ad and vice versa.

Your Turn

This is a simple process that anyone can use and I recommend to advertisers of all levels. Anything you’d add?

Let me know in the comments below!

The post Facebook Ad Campaign Process: Build Audience, Leads and Conversions appeared first on Jon Loomer Digital.

The ability to fully understand, appreciate and utilize the new Facebook pixel is what separates the effective marketers from the struggling ones. Most are overwhelmed by the concept and run for the hills. Those who dig in are rewarded…

Look, I don’t blame those who are overwhelmed. The new pixel is confusing, and I’m speaking for the advanced marketers who have figured it out. My goal is to help cut through the confusion to lead you to the reward.

A few posts have been published on this site about the Facebook pixel recently:

• Facebook Website Custom Audiences: A Definitive Guide for Remarketing
• How to Use Facebook’s Upgraded Website Custom Audience Pixel
• Facebook Custom Conversions: A Beginner’s Guide

Needless to say, even if you read all three of these posts, we’re only scratching the surface.

The pixel is more than just remarketing and website custom audiences. It’s optimization. It’s tracking. And it’s a whole lot more, combining what was once multiple pixels into one.

On Wednesday, December 16, I’ll be hosting a live two-hour workshop on the new Facebook in hopes of exhausting this topic. This workshop is for Power Hitters Club members (my private membership) only. If you aren’t yet a member, there’s still time (as I write this, at least).

If you read this after December 16, know that annual PHC members have access to all past replays. If you want to watch that replay, join us!

Understand that even this post in addition to the other three mentioned above won’t detail everything. But the main thing I’ve yet to do is provide an adequate description explaining the differences between the old pixel and the new one as well as the various ways the pixel is now being used.

So let’s do it…

[Tweet “The Facebook pixel has changed, and marketers are confused. Here’s a breakdown of what you need to know…”]

The Old Pixel(s)

Note the “(s).” In the past, Facebook marketers had multiple pixels:

1. Website Custom Audience Pixel: A single pixel used across a website or owned properties
2. Conversion Pixels: Individual pixels used on the success page for each product and opt-in

The old conversion pixel is/was used for tracking and optimizing for conversions. It was required when running campaigns with the Website Conversions objective. In this case, the advertiser would place a conversion-unique pixel on the success page for a single product, allowing Facebook to report and optimize for that conversion.

Know that the conversion pixel will disappear in the second half of 2016. We don’t know when at this point. You don’t necessarily need to do anything right now. But it’s smart to do something sooner than later.

If you have placed Facebook code on a success page that is different from the code on other pages of your site, it is very likely the old Facebook conversion pixel.

Here’s an example:

There is even commented out code at the front indicating that it is “Facebook conversion code.”

To reiterate, you can continue to use this pixel for now. It can exist on your site, even if you start using the new pixel. But you need to know that it won’t work much longer.

The New Pixel: Basics

When Facebook first launched Website Custom Audiences, there were rumblings that the plan was to eventually combine the conversion pixel with the Website Custom Audience pixel. And that just makes sense.

When someone visits a website page where the Facebook pixel exists, the page loads and the pixel fires behind the scenes — alerting Facebook that this particular user visited this particular page.

Here’s an example of the new pixel…

This same code is placed on every page of your website. This is typically done by placing it between the HEAD tags of the template of your site.

This is different, of course, from the old Website Custom Audience pixel because it can be altered based on the action occurring on the page. We’ll get to that later in this post when talking about Standard Events.

Website Custom Audiences

The Facebook pixel is on every page of your site. Now you want to create audiences of people — Website Custom Audiences — based on the specific pages they visited and when.

Remember, you aren’t adding new code now. That pixel is already on your site. Now it’s time to create some rules to isolate people based on their activity on your website.

Within “Audiences” of the “Tools” drop-down in Business Manager, click to create a Custom Audience…

You’ll be creating a Custom Audience for website traffic…

You can choose to create an audience of all of your website visitors during the past 1 to 180 days. Here’s an example of creating an audience for all of my website visitors during the past 30 days…

You can also create audiences of people based on the specific pages they’ve visited during the past 1 to 180 days. This is done by having Facebook isolate pages visited with specific words in the URL.

Here’s an example of a Website Custom Audience of those who visited any page with “facebook-pixel” in the URL during the past 30 days…

That’s just the start, of course. You can do a few other fun things with Website Custom Audiences:

• Target people who visited some pages, but not others
• Target people who haven’t visited in a certain amount of time
• Target people based on other “custom combinations”

That’s all great, but these are other complexities that aren’t all that important to understand right now. Just know that Website Custom Audiences allow you to target people who have visited your website.

Here’s an example of using this audience for targeting in my ad set…

In this case, I’m promoting my post about Custom Conversions, showing it to people who have read posts published in 2015 on my website during the past 180 days. I am also excluding those who have already read the post.

This is done with Website Custom Audiences.

Custom Conversions

The process of creating Custom Conversions is a whole lot like Website Custom Audiences. This is mostly meant to replace your old conversion pixels, but without requiring you to add a new pixel.

Remember: With the old conversion pixels, you needed to add a unique pixel for each product or opt-in to their associated success pages. But with the new Facebook pixel, that pixel only needs to be added to your website once — to every page of your site.

Since the code is already there (right?), this process is extremely easy.

From your Business Manager, click the Tools drop-down and select “Pixels.”

Click “Track Custom Conversions.”

This process is a lot like creating a Website Custom Audience. You’ll want to create an audience of people who visited a specific page that would indicate a conversion is complete. So you’ll want to enter the URL or portion of a URL that would suggest a completed conversion.

So let’s use a theoretical thank-you page for the PHC as an example…

I selected the “Purchase” category, but it could have been one of several others…

Name the Custom Conversion, and you can also assign a conversion value…

One of the differences between Website Custom Audiences and Custom Conversions is that you can optimize for a Custom Conversion when running a campaign with a Website Conversions objective…

There is plenty more you should know about Custom Conversions, including their limitations. You can read the full post on Custom Conversions for more.

Standard Events

This is where it gets confusing for many marketers.

There is yet another way to utilize the Facebook pixel and mark certain pages for conversions — or “events.” It’s a matter of altering the Facebook pixel code that we are placing across the site, depending on the page.

Let’s look at an example…

As you can see here, we are still using the base Facebook pixel code. However, prior to the closing script, we add a single snippet that indicates this is a specific type of event that we want to track. In the example above, that event is an “Add to Cart.”

There are nine different events that you can track or optimize for. Here they are:

One of the primary problems marketers have is understanding how to alter that code if it’s already on every page of their site. There are a couple of plugins you may want to try to help with this:

• Pixel Your Site
• Tracking Code Manager

You could also use Google Tag Manager.

Plenty More

Unfortunately, there are plenty of details that aren’t covered here that you may be needing, but one blog post can’t cover them all.

Some other topics include:

• Dynamic conversion values
• Dynamic Product Ads
• Troubleshooting errors
• Using the Pixel Helper
• Tracking results

While these topics may not have been covered here, hopefully this gives you a good head start and clears up some of the confusion that I know many marketers have regarding the differences between the new pixel and the old pixel, Website Custom Audiences, Custom Conversions and Standard Events.

Your Turn

Are you using the new Facebook pixel yet? What questions do you have?

Let me know in the comments below!

The post New Facebook Pixel: Audiences, Custom Conversions and Standard Events appeared first on Jon Loomer Digital.

[AUDIO VERSION: I also recorded an audio version of this blog post. Click below to listen. Let me know if this is something you find helpful!]

If you are running Facebook ads that lead to any sort of conversion, directly or indirectly (sales, lead or opt-in), it’s a must that you use conversion tracking. Google tracking isn’t enough.

But even if you use Facebook conversion tracking, do you know when to use it? Do you know the difference between optimizing for and tracking pixels? Do you know how to set the conversion value? And do you know how to track for multiple conversions?

Answering these questions is precisely the purpose of this blog post.

[Tweet “You’re doing it wrong. Here’s how to track and optimize for multiple Facebook conversion pixels…”]

Why Google Tracking Isn’t Enough

Far too many advertisers think that it’s enough to use Google URL parameters, goals and analytics. It’s not.

When you don’t use Facebook’s conversion tracking, you aren’t optimizing for a conversion. We’ll get to why that matters in a minute.

When you don’t use Facebook’s conversion tracking, you aren’t able to break down Cost Per Conversion based on the following:

• Age
• Gender
• Age & Gender
• Country
• Ad Placement

When you don’t use Facebook’s conversion tracking, you aren’t able to break down cross-device performance. Within the custom Facebook ad reports, you can analyze on which devices users saw your ad and on which devices they converted.

How to Create a Conversion Pixel

Within Ads Manager, click the “Conversion Tracking” link on the left…

Then click the green “Create Pixel” button at the far right…

Next you’ll need to choose a category for the conversion you are looking to get. The options are:

• Checkouts
• Registrations
• Leads
• Key Page Views
• Adds to Cart
• Other Website Conversions

Finally, name your pixel and click the blue “Create Pixel” button…

You will then be given your pixel code…

Copy and place that code between the HEAD tags of the “success” page following a conversion (the “Thank you for your purchase!” page). It’s important this goes on the success page — and the page that only someone who just converted will see. That notifies Facebook that a conversion is complete.

Make sure to refresh the page that has the pixel on it. You should then see that the pixel is active…

Facebook will also begin tracking all times that pixel is fired (typically meaning a conversion, but someone — including you — may refresh it), regardless of whether someone reached that page from an ad.

In the example above, that pixel fired 506 times on September 26. That does not mean, however, that my ads led to 506 conversions on that day. I don’t need to run any ads at all for this to track.

When you run ads and connect a conversion pixel to those ads, Facebook will separate the conversions that happened as a result of someone viewing or clicking your ads.

Setting the Conversion Value

When you create your pixel, you’ll have the option of entering a conversion value. This isn’t required, and that value otherwise defaults to $0.00. But it can be very useful for your reporting!

There are two places where you can enter the value and currency for your conversion…

The value should be the cost of your product. This way, you can easily compare the cost of your advertising to the total value of conversions that resulted from those ads.

Tracking for a Conversion Pixel

You’ve created the pixel, but now it’s time to create a Facebook ad that tracks conversions. How else are you going to measure success?

I strongly encourage you to use Power Editor. The reason for this is going to become clearer in a moment. But trust me on this.

You can track for conversions regardless of your objective. Simply click the “Use Existing Pixels” button when creating your ad…

Note that you could have created a pixel at this step as well, but we already created ours!

Now check the conversion pixel you want to track and click the “Select” button…

Optimizing for a Conversion Pixel

Note that in the example above, you can track conversions no matter your objective. However, keep in mind that if your objective isn’t a Website Conversion, Facebook won’t optimize for that action.

Remember that earlier when you created your pixel, you selected the conversion type. Facebook is then able to see which users convert for which conversion type to help optimize accordingly.

When you choose the Website Conversion objective, you’ll be required to select a conversion pixel twice…

The first button is for choosing the conversion(s) you want to track. The second is for choosing the single conversion you want to optimize for.

Note that the same pixel should be selected for both tracking and optimizing. However, while you can select multiple pixels to track (we’ll get to that in a minute!), you can only optimize for one.

Why You Should Track for Multiple Pixels

If you’re driving website traffic, you should seriously consider tracking for conversions. Even if you aren’t leading to a landing page, you should track for any conversion that leads to that content.

For example, I am writing this post about Power Editor. I also link to my Power Editor ebook (there’s that link!). While getting conversions isn’t my main objective, I should still track for it.

In fact, I should consider tracking Power Editor course sales as well. Not that it’s the focus of this blog post, but because a sales funnel is created for it when someone gets the ebook.

So when you click the button to track conversions, you can actually select multiple pixels…

Note that this is only available within Power Editor. The main ads interface only allows you to track a single pixel per ad.

Using the Facebook Ad Reports

Now you need to analyze the success rate of your advertising. Most people use the main campaign dashboard within Ads Manager. That’s fine, but it’s only scratching the surface!

You need to use the custom Ad Reports. Click on “Reports” on the left within Ads Manager…

The ad reports are EXTREMELY valuable. You need to use them! But the default view is pretty worthless. Click the “Edit Columns” button to get access to your gold.

Select whatever columns are important to your report. Make sure you read this post for more info on that.

Since this is a conversion report, you’ll want to select the appropriate conversions within “Actions”…

To add columns for value of your conversions, select the appropriate conversions within “Value”…

And finally, select the appropriate conversion types under “Cost Per Action”…

This will give you a great base report that will show you the number of conversions, total conversion value and cost per conversion for your advertising. But recall that you can also break down performance by things like age, gender, country and placement.

You do that within “Data Breakdowns”…

Some Tips on Tracking for Multiple Pixels

These new reports will be great for breaking down the number of conversions, value of your conversions and the cost per conversion that resulted from your advertising. But you lose some granularity if you track for multiple conversions.

In the earlier example, I tracked opt-ins for my ebook as well as purchases of my Power Editor course. I tracked multiple pixels for conversion since I have different packages that can be purchased.

While I can view total number of conversions, total conversion value and total cost per conversion, it’s not as easy to break this down by product. Instead, Facebook lumps it together.

One way around this is through conversion types. Since I was tracking my ebook opt-ins (Leads) and sales (Checkouts), I can create columns for each of those conversion types (number, value and cost per conversion for each). However, Facebook lumps together all conversions that are of the same type.

Personally, I’m okay with this. But if you really want to isolate what product someone bought and you’re tracking for multiple conversions, consider using different tracking pixel types.

For example, if you’re tracking sales of three different products, consider using the following conversion types:

• Adds to Cart
• Checkouts
• Other Website Conversions

Of course, you should still optimize for the checkout.

Learn More Benefits of Power Editor

Tracking for multiple conversions is just one of the reasons you should be using Power Editor. The rest can be found in my ebook, “The 9 Ways the Pros Are Benefitting from Power Editor — AND YOU AREN’T!”

The post Facebook Power Editor: Track and Optimize for Multiple Conversions appeared first on Jon Loomer Digital.

[AUDIO VERSION: I also recorded an audio version of this blog post. Click below to listen. Let me know if this is something you find helpful!]

It’s a question I get almost daily. You have a Facebook conversion pixel installed on your site. But the numbers aren’t adding up.

Today I’m going to explore the problem itself before diving into the likely explanations.

[Tweet “Are you using Facebook conversion tracking and the numbers aren’t adding up? Read this…”]

The Problem

The problem tends to be when advertisers compare conversion numbers reported from Facebook to the Facebook referred conversions reported by Google. In most cases, Facebook is reporting more conversions than is Google.

Many incorrectly assume this means Facebook is over reporting conversions. That’s usually not the case.

The Wrong Page is Set as a Conversion

The first potential explanation for this problem is that you placed the conversion pixel on the wrong page, so Facebook is reporting inflated conversion numbers.

When you create a conversion pixel, Facebook instructs you to paste it between the HEAD tags “in the webpage where you want to track conversions.”

When a user who was shown your ad on Facebook eventually visits that page that fires the conversion pixel, Facebook is notified. This is how they are able to report the number of conversions resulting from your ad.

Understand that Facebook doesn’t naturally know what a conversion means. You have to define it for them. And if you define it incorrectly, Facebook will report inaccurate results.

The mistake many advertisers make is that they place the pixel on the sales landing page. This is the page a user will visit immediately upon clicking on your ad. If a user visits this page, however, they don’t necessarily convert.

You need to put the pixel on the page a user will see immediately upon completing the conversion. It’s usually a “Thank you for registering” or “Thank you for your purchase” page.

It is a page that only new customers will see, and it notifies Facebook — correctly — that the sale is complete.

Facebook Referrals

The second likely issue is that advertisers are using Google Analytics and incorrectly assume that the number of conversions reported by Facebook should be the same as the number of conversions referred by Facebook, as reported by Google.

These will not add up due to the different ways that Facebook and Google are reporting these numbers.

Facebook Conversions Defined

Your Google Analytics are only reporting conversions that resulted from a direct referral. Even if you created a campaign using URL parameters to track the link used in your ad, Google only reports those conversions that happened in a straight line:

User Clicked Ad > User Converted

Facebook, on the other hand, is much more liberal in their conversion reporting. By default, they count either of the following as a conversion:

• User Viewed Ad and Converted Within 1 Day
• User Clicked Ad and Converted Within 7 Days (previously 28)

Even if you eliminated “view through” conversions where users never clicked your ad, the numbers won’t add up since Facebook will track conversions that weren’t a straight line.

Like this:

User Clicked Ad > User Left Site > User Returned to Site > User Converted

Neither method is necessarily “right” or “wrong.” They’re simply different.

There’s value in knowing whether your ad led to “view through” conversions. And there’s also value in knowing that someone who clicked your ad later converted, even if it wasn’t immediate.

Google ignores these things in their conversion referral reporting.

Changing a Defined Conversion

As mentioned above, Facebook reports a conversion when a user has viewed your ad and converts within a day or clicks your ad and converts within 7 days (previously 28).

However, this may be casting too wide a net. Maybe you want to isolate only those who clicked your ad. And maybe you want to change the number of days to conversion.

First, click “Reports” on the left within your Ads Manager. That will bring up a pretty worthless default report.

You can make the report useful by clicking the “Edit Columns” button. This is also how you can change the definition of a conversion.

When you click the Edit Columns button, you’ll get a dialog like this…

Click on the “Actions” link in the middle menu. At the top you’ll see that the definition of a conversion is set to 1 day after viewing and 28 days after clicking (created prior to the removal of 28-day click attribution).

If you click the “Change Attribution Window” link, you’ll get this…

There, you can choose any of the following to define a conversion (written prior to the removal of 28-day click attribution):

• 1 day after viewing ad
• 7 days after viewing ad
• 28 days after viewing ad
• 1 day after clicking ad
• 7 days after clicking ad
• 28 days after clicking ad

Your Turn

What’s been your experience with tracking conversions between Facebook and Google?

Let me know in the comments below!

The post Facebook Conversion Tracking: Why Aren’t the Numbers Adding Up? appeared first on Jon Loomer Digital.

I obsess over the ads that I run. I check them every morning, afternoon and night. And if you pay attention, you’ll spot some pretty darned interesting things.

The Example

I created a campaign that uses a Facebook video and a text call to action with a link to a product landing page. That landing page focuses on three different pricing options.

[Tweet “If you aren’t using Facebook’s Conversion Tracking, you may be throwing your money away.”]

The Surface Stats

Here are the final six columns of stats for the ads of a campaign within Ads Manager.

This shows the stats that the majority of marketers will focus on. So let’s break this down…

Clicks: You want clicks, so you’ll look at this. If this is how you measure success, here is how we break down the performance of these ads:

• Ad 5: 773
• Ad 1: 110
• Ad 2: 100
• Ad 3: 43
• Ad 6: 14
• Ad 4: 4
• Ad 7: 4

Of course, there’s no context to those clicks. But Ad 5 is pumping out a ton!

Click Through Rate: This will help us better understand the percentage of people clicking.

• Ad 1: 1.243%
• Ad 5: 1.073%
• Ad 6: .639%
• Ad 7: .163%
• Ad 4: .162%
• Ad 2: .132%
• Ad 3: .104%

Average CPM: Some marketers spend far too much time looking at this one. They think that a higher CPM means a waste of money. There’s quite a disparity here regarding average CPM (in reverse order from cheapest to most expensive):

• Ad 2: $.09
• Ad 3: $.14
• Ad 5: $.26
• Ad 4: $.26
• Ad 7: $.30
• Ad 6: $.56
• Ad 1: $3.59

Cost Per Click (Manually Determined): While Facebook doesn’t show this in all cases, a smart marketer will calculate it manually based on total spend over number of clicks. So let’s see how these ads stack up:

• Ad 5: $.02
• Ad 2: $.07
• Ad 6: $.09
• Ad 3: $.14
• Ad 4: $.16
• Ad 7: $.18
• Ad 1: $.29

The Assumptions

If I hadn’t used Conversion Tracking, I would assume that Ad 5 was phenomenal. In fact, there would be no reason to run any other ad. I was getting a ridiculous $.02 per click and that ad got me more than 7X the total clicks of any other ad.

Ad 1, while it got me the second most clicks, also was easily the most expensive per click. It’s also the ad that was eating up most of my budget (nearly half). Some evidence here to stop Ad 1 based on surface stats.

Otherwise, Ad 2 is the one ad I may consider keeping alive. It brought me a $.07 CPC while netting 100 total clicks.

These are assumptions. But when you assume…

The Conversions

I actually did use Conversion Tracking for these ads. In fact, it was set up so that Conversion Value is returned based on any of the three packages a customer may have purchased.

Value of those packages: $19, $29 or $79.

So here are the results when we include Conversions and Conversion Value:

• Ad 1: 13 Conversions, $287 Conversion Value ($31.81 Spend)
• Ad 2: 0 Conversions, $0 Conversion Value ($6.59 Spend)
• Ad 3: 2 Conversions, $48 Conversion Value ($5.85 Spend)
• Ad 4: 0 Conversions, $0 Conversion Value ($.65 Spend)
• Ad 5: 0 Conversions, $0 Conversion Value ($18.41 Spend)
• Ad 6: 0 Conversions, $0 Conversion Value ($1.23 Spend)
• Ad 7: 0 Conversions, $0 Conversion Value ($.73 Spend)

Let’s backtrack…

We had assumed that the top performing ad would be Ad 5 based on a ridiculous $.02 CPC. It also led to 773 clicks, so we thought this would lead to a bunch of conversions. Ad 2 was the other ad we’d consider keeping alive.

Meanwhile, it looked like Ad 1 was a complete waste of money.

But…

Ad 1 was the ad that brought the most conversions and value. Easily. We’re talking a 9X ROI on that ad. Ad 3, another ad we would have stopped, was bringing a 8X ROI.

The ads we thought were performing? No ROI. Nothing. Potentially throwing money away, though an argument can be made for small sample size for Ad 2.

Use Conversion Tracking!

What did we learn here?

We learned that it’s very easy to get distracted by the wrong stats.

We learned that a high Optimized CPM may just be a sign that the ad is highly optimized (which is what it’s supposed to be!).

We learned that if you don’t use Conversion Tracking, you’re going to have a hard time determining which ad is actually leading to revenue. As a result, it’s very easy to make the wrong decisions when managing your ads.

So use Conversion Tracking! It’s really not that hard to do. Go here to learn more about how you can set up Conversion Tracking on your site and for your ads.

The post This is Why You Must Use Facebook Conversion Tracking [EXAMPLE] appeared first on Jon Loomer Digital.

One of my favorite Facebook ads features is Conversion Tracking (it’s actually one of the features I’m highlighting in this week’s FREE webinar). It’s an awesome way to both optimize for and track offsite conversions that come from your ad.

For a few months now, Facebook has offered a “Conversion Value” metric within Ads Manager that was supposed to help you see how much revenue has come in as a result of those conversions. But if you’re like me, it’s looked like this…

That’s not helpful, Facebook!

The problem, of course, is that Facebook makes it very difficult to set a Conversion Value. Nowhere do they make this clear.

If you hover over the Conversion Value tooltip, you get this:

Based on the “conversion details” I set up, huh, Facebook? How about you just tell me where I can do that?

Nothing shows up when you’re creating the pixel. Nothing when you’re selecting the pixel.

[Tweet “Did you know you can set the value of a Facebook conversion? Here’s how…”]

How to Do It

It turns out the only way to set this value is within the pixel itself.

[If you need any help with this, make sure to read my Conversion Tracking tutorial. Or you could sign up for my Power Editor training course!]

This is definitely a case of Facebook burying helpful functionality and making things way more difficult than they need to be. It would make a lot of sense to include a text field where we can enter the conversion value and then Facebook automatically includes that in the pixel. Of course, that would be too easy.

But this is how you do it. And it’s really not difficult once you figure it out.

Conversion Value = ROI

Now when you get conversions, the Facebook Ads Manager will actually display values to go along with those conversions to help you measure ROI.

Want to know what’s working? What to show the value of your advertising? This is it!

The post Facebook Offsite Conversion Tracking: How to Set Conversion Value appeared first on Jon Loomer Digital.

Facebook ads are more powerful than ever, and a big reason for that is Conversion Tracking. But if you use it, do you know what is actually being measured?

Thanks to the new Facebook ads reports — an amazing tool that help advertisers optimize ads with incredible precision — I was recently made aware that the offsite conversions that Facebook reports aren’t always what I thought they were.

Today I’m going to take a look at the following:

• What Conversion Tracking is
• What I discovered in the Facebook ads reports
• How you can use this information

[Tweet “A Facebook conversion might not mean what you think. Here’s what you need to know…”]

What is Conversion Tracking?

First, an explanation is in order.

Conversion Tracking is the ability to track whether your Facebook ads led to offsite conversions.

So, let’s assume you’re using Facebook ads to drive people to an offsite landing page that you control. You are selling a product. With the help of an offsite pixel (a piece of code you put on your website), Facebook can track whether your ad led to a conversion.

This is powerful stuff. You can then compare the cost of your ads to the direct revenue that resulted. This is how you measure ROI with Facebook ads!

Even better, Facebook optimizes for these actions. If you are looking to drive leads, Facebook optimizes for that. Looking for sales, Facebook optimizes.

What I Discovered in the Facebook Ads Reports

This is all great — better than great — but I had some basic assumptions regarding what this meant.

Here’s an example of some results I’ve seen from my reports:

I assumed that this means that 40 people clicked on one ad and 17 people clicked on the other, leading directly to conversions. Well, this isn’t entirely true.

If you hover over the Conversions column, you get the following definition:

The number of conversions that happened on your website as a result of your ad. Actions are counted when they occur within 1 day of someone viewing or 7 days after clicking on your ad (previously 28).

There are two keys here:

• Someone who converted doesn’t have to click on your ad, as long as they were shown it; and
• Users have 7 days (previously 28) after clicking your ad to convert.

Now, I’m not going to say that information about users who saw my ad and converted isn’t helpful. Or the same regarding users who clicked and eventually converted. Both are important.

But what I improperly assumed was that these were ad clicks that led directly — almost immediately, or at least within 24 hours — to conversions.

How You Can Use This Information

Like I said, I still think information about conversions that started in an ad view is important. And I still want to know if someone who clicked on an ad converted later on.

But the key here is that not all actions are equal.

If someone clicks on an ad and converts that day, there is little doubt that the ad was why they converted.

If someone was shown your ad and converted that day, there is far less certainty. We don’t even know if they saw it.

The same can be said for someone who clicked and converted 7 days later. That ad was part of the process. But it certainly didn’t push the customer over the edge.

Luckily, you can edit your columns to provide much more clarity on the types of conversions you are seeing.

When you click on “Edit Columns,” there are advanced settings at the bottom. Select “Use a custom action attribution window” and you’ll see the following:

You can select any of the following columns (written prior to the removal of 28-day click attribution):

• 1 Day After Viewing
• 7 Days After Viewing
• 28 Days After Viewing
• 1 Day After Clicking
• 7 Days After Clicking
• 28 Days After Clicking

This provides far more context behind your conversions.

Remember how Facebook reported previously that my ads had resulted in 57 total conversions? Here’s how that’s broken down when you pull in the “1 Day After Viewing” and “28 Days After Clicking” columns:

So, 43 of my conversions were still the direct result of clicking. That’s actually very good to know.

Now, let’s break down those 43 conversions, pulling out those that happened 1 Day, 7 Days and 28 Days after clicking:

You’ll recall that Facebook previously told me that 43 users clicked on my ads and eventually converted. What we see here is that…

• 25 of 43 (58%) converted within one day
• Another 7 of 43 (16%) converted between days 2 and 7
• One person converted after day 7 and within 28 days

This is again encouraging. Most of the conversions Facebook is reporting are actually due to clicks. And a majority of those conversions happened rather quickly.

Context is Important

The problem is that the further you get away from that first day — even from those first few minutes — the less the correlation is between that ad and the conversion. I’m not saying there’s no correlation. It’s just weaker.

I have other efforts going on to get that conversion. I have emails going out. Reminders on my website. Ads away from Facebook.

The other question I have is regarding the multiple ads I have on Facebook. What about the person who saw variations of my ads and eventually converted?

Based on my results, I doubt that the conversion is reported for multiple ads. Some of my ads didn’t perform at all. Some performed incredibly.

What if a user saw four different ads during a 28 day period and eventually converted without clicking? How does Facebook decide which ad led to the conversion? Is it the ad that was shown most recently that gets credit?

In other words, this measurement — for now — is still a bit of an inexact science. But I will focus more on the 1 Day Click to Conversion than the other splits.

How do you measure offsite conversions? Let me know in the comments below!

The post The Hidden Meaning of Offsite Conversions from Facebook Ads appeared first on Jon Loomer Digital.