- If you're making this mistake
with your conversion tracking on Facebook,
then you're most likely going to be paying more per lead
than you need to and not getting the results
that you're hoping for.
And no, I'm not talking about the Facebook Conversion API,
this is something completely different.
And even if you think you've got conversion tracking setup
and working well,
it still won't actually be affecting you.
So in this video, which is brought you by Skillshare,
more on that later on, I'm gonna talk about
what this conversion tracking problem is
and how to fix it.
And I think this one's going to surprise a lot of people
because it's not something
that Facebook often openly talks about.
Okay, so as you probably are already fully aware,
there are two main reasons
why conversion tracking is really important
with your Facebook ads,
one is so we can track our results.
In other words, so we can attribute the leads
and sales that we're getting back to our ads
and see what we're getting for the money
that we're spending.
And second, perhaps more importantly,
is so that Facebook and its algorithm can optimize
and get us better results.
All of that conversion data flowing back
to Facebook is what feeds their optimization machine
and the whole algorithm
and helps it find more people
that are more likely to convert
and to give us the results that we want.
Without all of that valuable data,
Facebook ads would not be anywhere near as effective
as they are,
which is kind of what's at the crux
of this entire problem that I'm getting to.
See, conversion tracking is something
that we set up manually.
And when we do so, we have two choices.
We can either choose between Standard events
or Custom Conversions.
Now, Custom Conversions are an easy way to get set up.
They take a few clicks.
You basically enter the URL of your thank you page
or post-purchase page where you wanna track a conversion.
And that's kind of it.
For somebody who's new to Facebook ads
who has no tech skills
and doesn't like to touch code at all,
it seems like a fantastic option.
So it all sounds pretty good, right?
Well, they do come with a massive downside.
And that downside, as you've probably guessed,
all comes back to that optimization of our ads.
See, when we set up a Facebook conversion campaign,
at the ad set level,
we actually get to choose
which conversion event we want Facebook to optimize for.
So we tell Facebook, "Hey, we want leads or purchases
or whatever that conversion event is."
And Facebook goes out and gets that for us.
Let's say, for example,
you set up an ad set and you put some ads in there.
And the goal is to get people to click on your ads,
go to your website, and opt into your email list.
In that case, you choose your conversion event,
and Facebook will go and try to put your ads
in front of people within your target audience
who are likely to convert into email subscribers.
So as another example,
let's say we wanted to get sales of an E-commerce product.
We would set up a conversion campaign,
and at the ad set level,
we would choose the conversion event that gets triggered
after somebody buys our product.
That tells Facebook,
"Hey, I want you to show these ads to people
within my target audience who are likely to trigger
this particular purchase conversion event."
Now that makes sense, right?
We tell Facebook which event we're optimizing for,
whether it's leads, initiate checkout,
purchases, whatever it may be,
and they go and find people
who are likely to do those things.
But what Facebook don't tell us
when we're setting our conversion events up
is that this isn't actually how Custom Conversions work.
Custom Conversions actually use
a completely different optimization model compared
to Standard events.
Now this information actually comes directly
from solution engineers at Meta.
So they did an interview
on a podcast called "Perpetual Traffic,"
episode 362 and 363.
I'll put a link to that down
in the description below as well
'cause it was a great interview,
so credit to those guys.
Now the reason Custom Conversions use
a completely different optimization model
to Standard events is because with Custom Conversions,
Facebook just doesn't know
what our randomly created Custom Conversions actually mean
because we're creating them.
Our Custom Conversion could be anything.
And there's no way for Facebook to know
what a particular user
on a particular ad account is intending
with their Custom Conversion.
Whether it's leads, initiate checkout, or purchases,
Facebook just doesn't know.
So what Facebook does as a result is it just has to take
all of your Custom Conversions
and lump them together
and treat them like one generic conversion event.
If you're confused, don't worry.
Let's walk through an example.
So let's say you have a webinar sales funnel
where you're selling an information product at the end.
In that funnel,
you're going to trigger
lots of different conversion events.
For example, when somebody signs up
or registers for the webinar,
that would a conversion event to signify a lead or a signup.
When somebody then visits the sales page for your course,
that might trigger a View Content event
or an event to signal that they have viewed the sales page.
Then you'll have an event
for when they trigger the initiate checkout process.
And finally, there'll be an event for when they purchase
so we can send all that information back to Facebook.
Now if you're using Standard events,
Facebook would track
each of those particular events individually.
So they would track the leads individually,
they would track the View Content individually,
the initiate checkout, and then the purchase.
And they would group those together.
Facebook knows exactly what each of those events are
and what they mean
because they're the standard set of events
that Facebook provide for us.
Now if you were to choose to optimize,
let's say for leads, at the ad set level,
Facebook could then optimize for that specific event type.
It can take all of the lead conversion data,
aggregate that data,
and then it can go out and try to find you more people
who are likely to complete that specific event.
And that is going to get you better performance.
Now let's compare that to Custom Conversions.
If you were to use that same funnel,
you would have to create
a separate Custom Conversion for each event.
So you would create a Custom Conversion
for when somebody signs up,
you would create one for when somebody visits
the sales page,
a separate one for when somebody initiates
the checkout process,
and then you would have a Custom Conversion
for that specific purchase.
Now you know what each of those are
because you label them however you want to label them,
something that's memorable for you
and something that signifies what each event relates to.
But Facebook doesn't actually know.
So in this situation,
if you were to create an ad set
and you chose to optimize for your Custom Conversion
that happens when somebody registers for the webinar,
Facebook would try and optimize for that,
but they wouldn't just optimize
for that webinar registration event.
It would actually be mixing
all of those Custom Conversion events and signals
and try to just find more people
that are going to convert in general.
It can't differentiate.
And so you can see
how the results are likely not going to be as good
as Standard events in that situation
because it's not specific.
And so for that reason alone,
I don't recommend using Custom Conversions
in many situations at all.
My default is Standard events,
and I recommend you do the same.
Basically, Standard events
will most likely get you better results,
so it's a pretty good reason to choose those instead.
Now there are other reasons
why I like Standard events as well,
and there are also some situations
where you might use a Custom Conversion.
And I'm gonna talk about both of those things.
But before I do, I wanna take a quick moment
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Okay, so back to why I prefer Standard events
to Custom Conversions.
The other big reason is AEM
or Aggregated Event Measurement.
Now this is something that Facebook actually brought in
as a result of the iOS 14 privacy changes.
And basically, what we need to do is any event
that we wanna track with our ads now has to be part of AEM.
And we can only choose eight conversion events.
That's 10 fingers, I don't know why I did that.
We can only choose eight conversion events
to track with AEM.
Anything outside of those eight,
and it's not going to be tracked properly by Facebook.
So it's really important.
Now the downside of Custom Conversions is,
if you have multiple lead magnets
and multiple sales funnels,
then you need to create lots and lots of Custom Conversions
to track all of those different lead magnets
and all those different points
and all those different funnels.
Now that quickly exhausts those eight events.
You simply can't squish that down to eight events.
You're gonna have many, many more,
which is going to cause big problems with your tracking.
But we don't have that problem with Standard events.
Because with Standard events,
we simply use the same event over and over and over.
For example, if we have multiple lead magnets,
well, for each of those lead magnets,
we would still use the lead Standard event.
And we just use that same lead event
on every single one of our lead magnets.
And that means that we just need to add
that lead event once in AEM,
and that's all good to go.
Likewise, we have our initiate checkout event,
our purchase event.
We just add that once to AEM,
and we can add those for all of our different products,
and it doesn't take up lots and lots of different events.
And so now you might be wondering,
"When do we use Custom Conversions?"
And really, the only situation
where I think they are helpful is for events
that you want to track
but you don't necessarily want to optimize for.
So for those events,
it might be situations where you wanna be able to see
in the Ad Manager when a certain event occurred,
when these Custom Conversions were triggered.
But it's unlikely that you're ever going to select
inside an ad set to optimize for that particular event.
So these might be obscure events
that happen deep in the funnel
that you're never going to actually set an ad set
to optimize for but you still would like to see it.
And so that's where you might use Custom Conversions.
As I said,
it's a really unusual situation where that might happen.
It's not common.
But if it does, then yeah, you go ahead.
You set up a Custom Conversion,
and that's totally fine.
You don't have any downside to doing that.
Now if you are using Custom Conversions currently
and you wanna know what to do about it,
well, the simple answer is,
switching to Standard events is the best option for you.
Now the good news here is,
it's actually pretty simple to make the switch.
As I said at the start of the video,
a lot of people gravitate towards Custom Conversions
because they're easy to set up.
You don't need to mess around with code.
But the thing is, Facebook have added features now
that allow us to set up Standard events
in a way that's almost as easy.
And I'll show you how to do that now.
Okay, so if we switch over to my demo account now,
what I'm going to do is simply go over
to the Events Manager screen.
And from here,
we just go down to Add Events,
and we choose From the Pixel,
and we click Open the Event Setup Tool.
Okay, now all you need to do here is enter
the URL of the page
where you want to set up a conversion event.
Now remember, you wanna choose the pages that people see
after they complete a conversion event here.
So let's say it's the thank you page
after I opt into a lead magnet
or things like your post-purchase pages.
So for this example,
I'm going to show you a lead event being triggered
when somebody opts into my email list.
So the URL for that,
I'm just going to enter here.
And then I'm gonna click Open Website.
Now you'll see that's opened my thank you page,
and I've got this tool here called
the Facebook Event Setup Tool in the top corner.
Now I can simply click Track a URL.
I can select whatever Standard event I want to use,
in this case, it's a lead.
And then the URL,
I like to do contains,
and I like to strip the HTTP,
and I like to strip the trailing slash as well.
The reason for that
is because some pages might not load with HTTPS.
If that happens, I still wanna trigger my event.
And then the trailing slash,
now sometimes that gets added,
sometimes it doesn't.
It's a little bit weird.
And by removing it, it makes sure we capture everything.
Now, after I do that,
this doesn't have a value because a lead in itself,
they don't actually purchase anything.
And I just click Confirm.
Now that is set up.
You can see events on this page.
We've got lead setup.
I'm gonna click Finish Setup, Finish,
and then I'm just gonna skip that.
Okay, so now I'm gonna go back over to my thank you page,
and I'm going to hold Shift and refresh that page.
Now making sure in my Pixel Helper tool here
that my pixel is firing correctly.
I've got two on here just because it's a demo.
So there's the pixel that I'm actually looking for,
and it's firing correctly.
So I'm gonna go back to my Facebook Event Manager.
And if I refresh this page,
you can see the lead event is now down the bottom here.
If you click on the dropdown and click Manage,
ah, View Details, actually,
we can see, okay, there aren't any shown here.
That's okay, what we're going to do
from here is go to Test events,
and you can see that I've got the lead event processed
via the Event Setup Tool today at 3:36.
And guess what, it is 3:37 now.
So that is the event that I just triggered.
So that confirms that the lead event is actually working.
It's firing correctly.
It's showing up in my test events.
And that means that my conversion tracking is all set up
using Standard events and the Event Setup Tool.
So it's pretty simple to do.
Anyone can do this.
Hopefully, that has shown you how to do that part.
So my recommendation to you is to go through
and replace all of your Custom Conversions
with Standard events using this method
or you can use whatever method you prefer
for Standard events setup.
This is just the simple method.
Now something else that's really important
is the Facebook Conversions API.
If you haven't already set that up,
make sure you do it.
I've got a video right here that you can click now.
Go watch it and set up the Facebook Conversions API
if you haven't done so.
I've hope you've enjoyed this video,
and I'll see you in the next one, bye.
(upbeat music)