Facebook Ads Conversion Tracking for Holiday 2021

A few days ago, when I was in the Facebook Ads Manager, I saw a notification for performance tracking during holiday season. There’s a link there that took me to a post by Facebook that started talking about some of the different ways that either we as advertisers or they as Facebook can work to make sure that our performance tracking is as accurate as possible. And they got me thinking that, we are going into a really important portion of the year for many businesses, some people have it make or break during holiday season whether they hit all of their annual goals or not.

So, today what I want to do is give a bit of a recap on the adjustments that have been made for privacy rules over the course of the year, and talk about how that’s impacting performance tracking on Facebook. Then I want to talk about some of the suggested things that you can do from the advertiser perspective. Whether it’s suggested from the Paid Media Pros or Facebook themselves to make sure that your performance can tracked as accurately as possible. And then I’m also going to talk about some of the things that Facebook says that they’re working on to make sure that you can get all the data in there as well.

I want to start by revisiting some of the adjustments that have been happening on Facebook and give a little bit of a recap about why we’re even doing this video in the first place. Why do we even need to address it? I want to start off by giving a quick recap of how we got here. What is even happening with Facebook conversion tracking to where we need to make video. It’s all a result of the iOS 14.5 updates, and its cascading effects that it’s having across the digital marketing space. Basically, with iOS 14.5 on any of the platforms, you’ll be required to ask users for their permission to track them across apps and websites owned by other companies.

My guess is that the vast majority of you watching this video have seen a pop up quite like this off to the right. Where it says, “Allow Facebook to track your activity across other companies’ apps and websites”. In this instance, other companies as the advertiser would mean your website. If you’re running Facebook Ads and you send somebody to your website and you want to be able to track their conversions, you are part of the other companies’ websites. There were some debates about the language here that it’s not very friendly to the advertisers and quite frankly, it’s not. Because the only options you get are Ask App Not to Track or Allow.

Although, it’s now October of 2021, and the latest stat I have is from July of 2021, only 17% of people had opted to allow tracking. Means 83% of people asked the app not to track. So, we’re effectively losing 83% of the signals for anybody who opted into iOS 14.5. So it’s quite a big deal and this is why we’re in this predicament that we’re in now. The question is, how does this actually impact your tracking if people don’t opt in? Effectively, all of your Pixel-based conversions will be tracked less and less as time goes on. That means that your optimization events will be narrowed. The attribution windows on the platform have already been shortened and the optimization actions that you can do within the platform because of the loss of signal on optimization events. Pixel conversions being tracked less, but also some of the breakdowns in the platform have gone away and we don’t have access to them.

Let’s dive into a couple of those just a little bit more. For the attribution model on Facebook, we used to have a tool like this, that said that you could choose different windows to compare performance. And you could change your default attribution window on your account at a campaign level and I believe almost in an ad set level depending on how you have the account set up. You can view everything from 1 day, 7 day or 8-day view and or click attribution windows. We had a lot of control here and the default attribution model for Facebook ads was a 28 day click and a 1-day view. Moving forward because of this change, that click attribution was shortened by 75%. The default attribution is now only a 7-day click and a 1-day view.

You cannot find 28-day click attribution performance in the platform anymore unless it’s a legacy campaign. Then your data has not changed as long as it’s within the data window of, I want to say the past 3 years. But moving forward, we will not be able to track any click conversions past that 7-day window. Additionally, I mentioned the breakdowns in the platform. This used to be one of my favorite tools of how we would optimize performance in the platform. You could go in, look at your campaign, asset, ad creative, and analyze all of the different performance metrics that you had by each of the different age ranges, genders, placement on the platform, geography, all sorts of different things.

Now, you’ll see that off to the left, we do still have everything that is on platform. Meaning link clicks, click through rate, amount spent, all of these metrics that happen only on Facebook. We still have all the data behind that. But when it comes to our conversion tracking, in this instance, the columns off to the right, leads and purchases are both tracked by a website conversion Pixel and we still have insight into the leads and purchase performance for the campaign but the breakdowns are now gone.

So, even though we are seeing performance come through and it is being tracked, we’re not able to break it down the same way that we were before, so this is a big blow to how we optimize campaigns moving forward. Next question is what can we do? How can we get pass this, right? And this is part of the reason that we wanted to do this video and that Facebook put that post out is because there are actions you could take. We’re doing this under the guise of wanting to make sure that everybody’s ready for holiday. That was the reason that Facebook put this out that was the language that they used. But these are things you should be doing whether it’s holiday or not to make sure that your Facebook Ad Campaigns are tracking performance as accurately as possible. And to make sure that you can still get value out of the platform moving forward.

So, the first is that you need to verify your domain and set up aggregated events in the Facebook platform. This is going to be the foundation for how you can still utilize your conversion tracking pixel as accurately as possible. And rather than spend time on that today, we do have a full video where Joe walks you through how to set up Facebook Ads aggregated events as well as verifying your domain. So, if you’re interested in that, you can check the video at the top of the screen right now. It’ll walk you through everything start to finish and then you’ll be all set up on that respect.

The next thing you can do is set up Conversions API. This is going to be a solution that will almost definitely require a developer. I put the link down here at the bottom, so you can go check out the directions on how to set up Conversions API. But what this does is it utilizes an integration between Facebook and your server to give data back into the ad platform back into the Facebook Ad system to tell them when somebody has converted, what different actions they have taken. So, that you don’t need to be as reliant on the Facebook Pixel and the web browser and hoping that the cookies have been trapped all the way through. This is not a solution for the faint of heart. This is a bit more technical.

Again, you’ll need a developer for it, but if you can, this would be a great way to help augment the conversion tracking in your Facebook Ads account. Aside from the technical aspects, there are some other things you can do that are a bit more of an admin perspective. One that I think is very important that also gets overlooked quite a bit is to establish your performance benchmarks. In the table off to the left, we have performance that was tracked by Facebook and Google Analytics over the course of the first 7 months of the year basically as broken down by different weeks. So, the purchases column are the purchases as tracked by the Facebook ads platform.

The GA number purchases column is the Google Analytics purchase column and then the percentage column is effective Google Analytics purchases divided by Facebook purchases. Then the green line here that you see on April 25^th is the week that this account that Facebook iOS 14.5 rolled out and that we started seeing those on our own phones in person. So, to set up any type of benchmarks in this example obviously I’ve used Google Analytics, that you can use your own CRM, your own Ecommerce platform, whatever it is. But make sure that you have something that has been tracking Facebook performance for quite a while. That will still be tracking it moving forward so that you can compare the number of purchases you’re seeing in that system versus Facebook. Because the expected outcome is that Facebook is effectively losing visibility, but it doesn’t mean that you’re losing the sales. We’re just losing the ability to attribute them to performance.

I do want to put a visual to the data table that we have here to kind of show you exactly that metric. Here, although it’s a little bit blurry, the green trending line is the number of Google Analytics purchases. The red line is the percentage of Google Analytics purchases to Facebook purchases. And the green line that goes right up and down is basically just to demark where the iOS 14.5 rollout was. As you can see here, the number of Google Analytics purchases is relatively stable. That green line does have a couple of spikes. It comes back down but overall, it averages around that 150 mark, but the percentage trend line as you can see here is different.

The access for that one is off to the right and before the 14.5 roll out, it was anywhere between about 40 and 60%. And once we hit April 25th, when 14.5 started to roll out, now we’ve dumped up to 60 and we have multiple different weeks of up over 100 well into the 80s. It’s clear that things have changed, but the number of Google Analytics purchases tracked is important because that has not changed. Which means that your overall sales for this account have not changed but Facebook visibility has. So, the good news is that you’re still getting sales. The bad news is that Facebook can’t see them.

Now, we have to start thinking about how we optimize our Facebook account with less and less data. Which if you’ve paid attention to a lot of videos on this channel, you know that the more data you have, the better you’re going to be able to do things. How can we accommodate our management style for lower data points? If you’re one of the fortunate people to have enough volume flowing through your campaigns, you likely don’t to make big adjustments just yet aside from your expectations. So, this specific Ad set that we’re looking at the look-alike leads event 1%. This has been trending over the course of January into July, and you can see the performance stats off to the right. You can see in April, we start having the dotted lines underneath the leads and cost per conversion columns, because those metrics are now starting to be augmented by Facebook’s machine learning for conversion tracking.

Over the course of the year, this Ad set has done really well having like an $18 cost per lead but now it’s down into about 43%. So, it’s getting worse and worse as time goes on but there’s still a decent amount of volume in this specific Ad set. So, it might not need to take big action. So, if you have lots of conversion performance and you’re still meeting the minimums to get out of the learning phase, you likely don’t need to take larger action aside from saying, okay, we’re used to a sub $20 cost per lead. Now, we have to get used to a $43 cost per lead. You might need to augment what your expectations are on that respect but otherwise, you’re probably good if you’ve got enough conversion volumes coming through. If you don’t, we’re going to need to start to think about things a little bit more critically.

The account that we’ve been using here is optimizing for a purchase event but if you’ve gone through and verified your domain and set up your aggregated events management, you can then start to utilize your other optimization actions as long as they are part of that aggregate event set. We might need to shift from purchase up to search or initiate checkout or Add to Cart, because those have enough volume that Facebook can optimize for them.

Now, this isn’t a perfect science. Just because somebody adds to cart doesn’t mean they’re going to purchase. Just because somebody will add something to a cart doesn’t mean they’re going to purchase. But it also could still be a better outcome than having you optimize for purchase and not have enough volume to seek good results. This might be a scenario where it makes sense to utilize Facebook campaign experiments to test if the Add to Cart or purchase optimization action works best for you.

Now, getting into some of the suggestions from Facebook, they want you to be patient with your optimizations. Allow time before you analyze performance because of the nuances and delayed data and the modeling of reporting that they’re using, they suggest that you wait 72 hours or the full length of the learning phase to close before you evaluate and optimize performance on conversion optimized campaigns. You can still review on a day basis, but it might make sense for you to wait a little bit longer to make sure that the data has solidified and it’s actually accurate before moving forward. So, thinking about this from a holiday campaign management perspective just because yesterday’s staff don’t look like what you wanted them to. That doesn’t mean that as time goes on, they won’t get better.

Ideally, if you can wait until that 7-day learning phase is closed before you make adjustments, but Facebook suggest at least 72 hours. So, 3 days before you optimize and adjust based on the performance that you’re seeing. For the similar reason of aggregated and estimated conversion performance, Facebook suggests that you analyze the campaign level, not the creative. I think that this suggestion is probably meant from a good place but it feels nearly impossible. If you see a creative that’s not performing well, probably make sense to not let it keep running but this is a suggestion that Facebook has.

I don’t know if I can totally cosign on it but as you’re reviewing your campaigns, make sure that taking into account maybe a little bit more weight to the campaign and Ad set level and the ad level and the creative level maybe don’t be as harsh on it because Facebook says that it might not be as accurate. Seems tough. I’m personally going to have a hard time getting over this but this is an official suggestion from Facebook. So, take it as you will.

Respect the learning phase. This is always been true. It’s only more true now. The goal is to get out of the learning phase as soon as you can by having enough conversion volume coming through on Facebook for it to optimize and feel settled, and so it can go after those actions for you. There are a few ways that Facebook suggest that you do this. You can either make sure that you have enough volume coming through. You can consolidate ad sets which we’ll talk about here in a second. But the idea is that if you are in the learning phase, maybe don’t go making a bunch of other changes because you’re only going to reset that phase and make it harder for Facebook to learn and adapt.

So, I mentioned combining Ad sets and basically, what we’re trying to do here in the same way that we need to make sure that we choose a conversion action that has enough volume, we’re trying to make sure that our budget is consolidated enough, we’re trying to make sure that our audience is consolidated enough so that Facebook can make the right decisions and get out of that learning phase. The first suggestion is that if you have campaigns, for example, targeted to only men and some targeted to only women. As long as the creative is the same, they suggest that you combine those into one target set so that it can use the budget more efficiently across the two audiences.

The example of targeting men and women is very very basic. But if you’re thinking about different interest targets, if you’re thinking about different behaviors, having different look-alike audiences, in my example, I personally have started grouping all of my look-alike audiences into one Ad set rather than having each look-alike audience in multiple Ad sets. Because it’s only segmenting the budget further being a little bit more controlling and seeing better results from what I’ve been calling a super look-alike audience where all of them are together. So, think about ways that you can combine your audience if you’re using the same creative to a point where you’re not losing insights on the audience that are so integral that you would sacrifice performance.

And then the next point is basically reiterating the whole thing. Make sure that you have enough budget, a large enough audience and enough conversion volume coming through in a single asset to get out of the learning phase as soon as possible. This could be a time of year where we sacrifice the die-hard marketer in us that wants to know how each individual creative works for every audience and has a very controlled budget. We might need to start combining those together to see better results from the Facebook ads platform this year.

But it’s not all on us and they understand that. Facebook is working to help a little bit. So, here are the things that Facebook is working on. They’re trying to improve the conversion modeling. So, they’ve put in more time and resources to increase the conversion reporting accuracy. Honestly, sounds grow it also is just in their best interest. If you’re not seeing good results, you’re not going to keep putting ad dollars into Facebook. Not like this is going above and beyond but they at least are doing it.

Since July of 2021, they’ve expanded their conversion modeling capabilities for the default attribution of 7-day click and they’ve been improving the 1-day click attribution even further than it already have been. And then in September of 2021, they expanded modeled reporting for website purchase conversion value, so your return on ad spend from your website purchases could be improved over the next few months. Which again going into holiday is very critical to a number of different businesses to make sure you’re seeing the performance that you need to out of the campaigns.

They’re also accelerating investments on the app tracking side. So, they are trying to work to make sure that you’re seeing better performance coming from your view through attribution for app events and making view through attribution for default web events a little bit better as well. They’re also working on tracking web conversions for people who don’t own the top-level website that they work on. So, marketplaces where multiple small businesses can sell goods under the same web domain. In this instance, I’m thinking things like Etsy are probably the right type of things that they’re trying to figure out here. They’re trying to work on making that a little bit more accurate as well because those users don’t really have the ability to put a Facebook Pixel on those platforms.

Lastly, they’re working on extending the ability to measure in-app conversions that scan cannot track. So, basically, they’re trying to get conversion measurement in apps that have already been installed and they’ve been working to discover bugs. In this example, they talk about the scan network and how it was under reporting by about 10%, but they are trying to improve that and they’re trying to do that across all the different platforms to be honest. So, they’re working on making everything as accurate as possible. We’re not going to get all of the nitty-gritty details but just know that Facebook is working on it. Which again, it’s not always that you can trust an ad platform to work in your best interest but in this instance, it’s in Facebook’s best interest to work on your best interest.

They are going to do everything they can to make sure that conversion tracking is as accurate as possible and is counting as much attribution back to their campaigns as they can. Otherwise, you as an advertiser will not invest in the platform anymore. So, in this instance, we are aligned. Facebook does want to track all the performance just in the same way you want. So, this is one that I feel a little bit better can sleep a little bit better at night that Facebook is trying to do what we want and what we need from them.

So, as a quick wrap up to this entire video. Facebook conversion tracking is only going to get more difficult in this holiday season unfortunately. It’s been getting difficult as the year goes on and it’s not going to be a lot better in this holiday season unless you start to take action and Facebook makes some good advances. So, you do need to be ready for that, but they are working on their side it. They’re trying to make sure that Facebook can track as many conversions as possible across as many platforms as possible but you also have to do your job.

Verify your domain and get your aggregated event set up and if you can set up Conversion API, all the better to you. I absolutely encourage it. Make sure that you’re setting other benchmarks from other platforms and you’re utilizing other forms of tracking. Whether it’s UTN tracking, something along those lines. Definitely need to make sure that you have multiple different ways to try attribute back to Facebook, or any other platform for that matter during the holiday season.

Lastly, make sure that you adjust your campaign goals and management style accurately for this holiday season. We need to optimize for a goal that has enough volume coming through and we also need to make sure that we don’t go too crazy on all of the changes. Because the learning phase is going to get more disrupted, and with conversion modeling is going to be a little bit more difficult. That also means that in some other areas, you might need to be patient to let data settle and come in and see how accurate it’s going to be before you make adjustments. Now I know this is going to be very difficult for short run promotional things.

Like in the US, we’ve got Black Friday on Friday and then Cyber Monday on Monday. Between those two things there’s only 4 days aggregate that we have to optimize. That’s probably not going to get out of the learning phase. It’s going to be a little bit of a battle of wills of do you give it a little bit of time to rest before you optimize. Do you make changes real time? I would encourage you to at least be a little bit more patient than maybe you normally would be in years past. And try and see if you can get a little bit more data through before you make a decision on how to adjust campaigns.

Overall, this holiday season is going to be very impactful on a lot of businesses just in the way it always is every single year. The only problem is, it’s gotten a little bit more difficult for us advertisers to see and attribute performance back to the Facebook Ads platform. So, although there’s no perfect scientific method for overcoming these hurdles and seeing great results. I wish all of you the best of luck. Hopefully, everything goes well and make sure that you’ve done your part ahead of time to try and attribute performance back to Facebook as well as you can.

If you’ve heard of any other specific strategies for Facebook for the holiday season coming up or if you have any additional questions that we didn’t address in this video, we’d love to hear from you in the comments.

Written by Michelle Morgan