Ever since the policy changes of iOS 14 many marketers have wondered if the value of audience based marketing will remain worth the investment. Without the additional advantages of on-platform tracking it’s been a struggle for many teams to make up for the increased insight they’re used to.
Fortunately there are still many tools that allow you to take audience tracking into your own hands. One of those tools rising in popularity is the Facebook Conversions API. Formerly known as Facebook Server-Side API, Conversions API lets advertisers send web events from their servers to Facebook ad manager. This provides greater visibility and tracking of your Facebook ad’s performance with your website.
Neglecting to utilize this tool will cost you in the long run, especially in today’s cookie-less online world. Let’s dive into why.
API is an acronym for application programming interface. Many applications and platforms use API to communicate between different systems. This is how your website is able to communicate with your Facebook ads to track your conversions. Even allowing you to send data back and forth between your other sales channels like Shopify for example.
This isn’t to be confused with a Facebook Pixel. Placing the Facebook Pixel on your site allows Facebook to collect event and conversion data for Ads Manager. This type of data collection is done through Facebook. The difference with the Conversions API is using your data, from your site, and sending that back through Facebook. This collects things like purchase ID, customer ID, order events.
It’s not about figuring out if the pixel or API tracking is better for you. Both should be used in unison to help Facebook optimize the algorithm and better understand your audience types.
Ever since the iOS update many marketers have experienced a greater gap in conversion data tracking between their sites and their ad campaigns. While it doesn’t quite fill the entire gap, Conversions API does offer you better access to your data and tracking the type of events happening on your site from your Facebook ads.
It tracks events such as:
The increased tracking into these insights can help you better measure the success of your ad campaigns through metrics like ROAS, cost-per-ad, and other metrics around the value of your funnel.
Once connected to your Facebook business manager you’ll have access to a tool that allows you to analyze the quality of each event. This tool can help you understand more about your traffic based on the type of event they completed. Things like page views and quick bounces won’t have much quality to them but more actionable events like email sign ups or add to carts can provide deeper analytics into your potential customer.
The Conversions API will send this private user data back to Facebook to match the insight to the user’s Facebook Account. This is how Facebook is able to better optimize its algorithm for more relevant user experiences and engagement with your ads.
Setting up your Conversion API to a platform without a native integration can be a bit tricky as it’ll require some coding knowledge. Facebook offers many helpful resources on walking you through the process and chances are that your other sales platforms that you’re trying to connect to will also have helpful resources.
But whether you’re looking for additional expertise on setting up your API or getting the most out of the results, my team is available to help. If you want to meet to learn about our Facebook strategies or discuss a personalized partnership with my team then we’re available to meet. It’s up to you, simply click here and book some time so we can evaluate the best path forward for you.