How to Track Conversions via Facebook Ads

Imagine that you own an air conditioning company. Every summer, you promote your company through TV commercial and/or put up an advert in the newspaper. Simple, traditional. When the campaign ends, you divide the budget invested in it, by the number of purchases (conversions), and there you have it. Your Cost per Conversion.

But let’s say you have a webshop and you want to track more than just a purchase. You want to know how many people have added items to the basket and compare that to the number of people who purchased those items. Or you don’t even have a webshop and a purchase to track. You want to track the number of downloads, the number of completed registrations, or else? This is where Facebook steps in.

Why are conversions important?

Tracking events of your website gives you an idea of your campaign and, also, your website performance. Clicks and engagement are not everything. What this means is that clicks and engagement say a lot about the quality of your ads, but your campaign doesn’t stop with Facebook. Low cost per click or low cost per post engagement means that you did a good job attracting your audience to your website, but that doesn’t mean that they will do what you want them to do – convert. Low cost per conversion means the better performance of your overall campaign. Get it?

Also, if you have a webshop, every purchase has multiple steps. And you can track every single one of them. First, a customer must visit your shop, then add a product to the basket, initiate check out and finally, complete the purchase. Of course, this is a simple example, if you have some other stages, you can track them also.

Tracking all of these and comparing the numbers gives you an idea which stage of the process needs improvement.

How do I create a conversion?

In Facebook Business Manager’s drop-down menu (top left corner), under „Measure & Report“, you’ll see „Custom Conversions“. When you click on that, you will have an option of creating your custom conversions.

When you start creating one, you will see this window:

The conversion will be triggered based on what you choose under „Rule“.

Choose your rule in the way it will be easier for you to differ the conversion aside from other events that could happen. For „Event“, you have to have „Event code“ installed, based on what you want to track. Remember that from the blog post How to install and use Facebook Pixel?

Choosing the conversion’s category gives Facebook a better description of your conversion, so it can be optimized better. These are the categories you can choose from:

This is very important for optimization. Don’t just click anything. After that, name your conversion and if you want, you can add your conversion a value. This is not appropriate for any conversion, but if you think you can give it a value, do it. This way, you can track your campaign’s success in revenue.

Now it’s time to create your first conversion optimized campaign. How do you do that? Start by creating a new campaign. The first thing you should do is choose „Conversions“ as your marketing objective.

While creating your ad set, everything stays the same except this time, you will have to choose your custom conversion (which you created before). You can also choose your conversion window. 1 day or 7 days, it’s on you. Choose the option which is best for your campaign. Ad creation and the rest of the process stays the same.

Launch the campaign and you can start to track the number of your conversions.

The smart thing to do here (and everywhere :D) is to have at least two different ad sets. Differ them by the audience, ads, placement, whatever. Just have something to compare. Remember the Golden rule; „Test, test, test.“

Conversions can also be tracked in other types of campaigns, just remember to click on „Track all conversions from my Facebook pixel“, while creating your ad. But if you are interested in a lower Cost per Conversion, a conversion optimized campaign is a better option.

Conclusion

Just as I mentioned before, conversion is a great tool if you want to know the results and performance of your campaign overall. Not just the Facebook advertising part. It tells how your landing page, web shop, product, service etc. is doing.
Also, tracking your conversions tells you if some campaign is actually profitable. Remember, people can click on your ad, but that doesn’t mean that they will buy your product.