To truly understand the success or challenges of your e-commerce business you must be able to track conversions from your Facebook Ad campaigns. You want to know exactly how a potential target interacts with your website after seeing your Facebook Ad. You can monitor what actions they take on your site and then you can track them across their various devices, gathering vital information about their purchasing behaviors.
But before we get into the nitty gritty of conversion tracking, you first must ensure you have set up, and are using the Facebook pixel. You’ll find this piece of exceptional code in your Facebook Ads Manager. Just click the (≡) icon and select Pixels to reveal your unique piece of code for use on your website.
Insight into Your Customer’s Behaviors
The biggest bonus of conversion tracking is that you get to understand your visitor’s actions to be able to refine your Facebook ad strategy. There should be a significant return on investment on your ad campaigns, and conversion tracking is going to tell you exactly what is working and what is not.
There are currently two ways to track your conversions:
- Custom Events
- Standard Events
Custom Events is the most basic form of conversion tracking. You don’t have to modify the Facebook pixel code on your e-commerce site. You can just use the urls or URL keywords of your chosen e-commerce pages that you wish to track. The Facebook pixel can, for example, follow the views received for a particular merchandise category in your e-commerce store.
You need to give Facebook a few details about your desired custom conversions:
- Go to Custom Conversions
- Select Create Custom Conversions
Define Your Chosen Custom Conversion Event using the URL rules
Nothing Standard About This Event
Standard Events is the second option and is a more advanced method of tracking your e-commerce site conversions. You have nine options for tracking standard events, but it requires that you modify your Facebook pixel on your website. Your Facebook pixel must be installed on every page of your e-commerce site to be able to gather measurable data.
Standard events let you track actions on View Cart, Search, Add To Cart, Add To Wishlist, Initiate Checkout, Add Payment Info, Purchase, Lead and Complete Registration. Your selection of standard events will be based on your overall marketing strategy and the specific goal you have chosen for your Facebook ad campaign. As an e-commerce store, you’re likely to track how your Facebook Ads have generated sales. Typical e-commerce tracking actions also include Search, the number of views on your product pages (View Content) and of course –Add to Cart, Initiate Checkout, as well as all Purchase actions.
Nuts and Bolts of Conversion Tracking with Standard Events
To start your tracking activities, go to Facebook Ads Manager:
- Click on the Menu button
- Click All Tools(bottom of the menu)
- Under Assets column click Pixels to open the pixel dashboard
- Under conversion tracking click Create Conversion
- You will see two options. Select Track conversions with standard events.
- A pop-up box opens with the nine standard event actions in a list
- Next to each event will be a description and code.
- Choose the event and add the modified Facebook pixel to your e-commerce website page that you want to track.
You can manually add the code by copying and pasting the Facebook pixel to your site, or if it seems too complicated, you can get your web developer to do it for you. You can also use a free plugin like PixelYourSite to install your Facebook Pixel across your entire e-commerce site if coding eludes you.
After the Fact
The Facebook Pixel is usually added to the page after a conversion has taken place to be able to track it accurately. For example, if you require people to sign up for a newsletter, you would enter the URL of the confirmation page, once people have signed up.
Defining the Parameters
You also have the opportunity to include more information to customize your tracking efforts. These additional fields include purchase values, currency, order IDs, the status of the action being tracked and content categories. When you have completed filling in the extra parameters, you can click Add. You will have to repeat this process for each of the events you track on your e-commerce site. After you have selected each of your actions to track:
- check the Activate Events box
- click Save Settings.
How Can You Be Sure It’s Working?
Now before you break out the champagne in expectation of the data rolling in, you need to make sure that your tracking is working. You can download the Facebook Pixel Helper. You simply load one of the pages you created in standard events and click the Pixel Helper button at the top right of your chrome browser. A drop-down menu will immediately appear and will show the status of each of your e-commerce pages you are attempting to track. A green circle means that everything is hunky dory. Otherwise, you might have to go back to the drawing board.
One Step Further
If you want to further customize your conversions for your e-commerce site, you might need to split standard events so you can see individual results for each page you are tracking. If you don’t separate the two different pages, that both use the Complete Registration standard event, you will get an aggregate instead of the desired individual results.
To be able to create this custom conversion:
- Go to the Ads Manager Menu
- Under the Measure & Report column select Custom Conversions
- Click Create Custom Conversion
- Choose Event from the drop-down menu under Rule
- Choose the event you want to track and enter the three parameters associated with the events
- Choose the categoryassociated with the conversion and click Next
- Check that the conversion is working
- When you refresh the conversions page, the status column should read Active
Report Card
You can now add your conversions columns to your Facebook Ad Manager Reporting dashboard. This allows you to measure the exact number of conversions as well as various other metrics like cost per conversion and conversion values for purchases.
To create a reporting column:
- Go to Ads Manager Dashboard
- Click on the Columns Button
- Select Customize Columns
- Click Website under Conversions in the pop-up box
- Check the box of the standard event actions you will be adding to the report dashboard.
- Save as Preset (check box in bottom-left corner)
- Type in a name for your conversion column
- Click Apply
Conversion Tracking – Marketing’s Best Friend
Using the Facebook Ad pixel ensures that you can track all conversions on your e-commerce website to see whether your advertising efforts are yielding profits and a high ROI. By continuously measuring the efficacy of your Facebook Ad campaign, you can start to get a clearer picture of what marketing content is working best with your target audience, and what actions people take on your site, based on the adverts they saw.
These tools are invaluable for understanding your customers and their purchasing behaviors. Conversion tracking is one of the most powerful features in your marketing arsenal. Be sure that you are using the Facebook pixel to maximum effect.