Imagine making decisions in your business without being guided by data. That will likely yield results that are less than stellar, correct?
It’s like getting plain vanilla ice cream when you could be having vanilla ice cream with chocolate syrup and sprinkles. You get the idea.
When it comes to running a Facebook ad campaign, it’s crucial to track the results of your Facebook ad - because that’s how you’ll know whether the ad was effective or not. Pretty intuitive.
The last thing you want is to blindly waste money on ad campaigns! Knowing what works doesn’t just allow you to maximize your ROI, but it also helps you make smarter business decisions.
Enter Facebook’s custom conversions.
What Are Custom Conversions?
Before I explain what Facebook’s custom conversions are, let’s define what “conversion” means. A conversion is any action that people take on your website. It could be a purchase, a subscription, or a download - basically, any action that you deem to be desirable.
There are 2 ways to track conversions on your website that result from your Facebook ads:
Standard events
Custom conversions
By tracking your website conversions that took place after people clicked through your FB ad, you’ll be able to use data you gain to do the following:
Target Facebook ads to site visitors (a.k.a. “remarketing”) based on their previous actions
Target Facebook ads to cold audiences that are likely to become your customers (using Lookalike Audiences)
So, since custom conversions are similar to standard events in such a way that they track what people do on your website, what makes custom conversions different?
Custom conversions is a lot easier and convenient because you don’t need to install anything into your website to track conversions except the Facebook pixel base code. It’s all that you need to install.
(It’s more complex with standard events because aside from the base code, you also need to add a standard event code for each web page. One can easily tell that it’s for techies)
Another important thing to remember is that you cannot use custom conversions for dynamic product ads.
How to Set Up Custom Conversions
Before you get started, install the Facebook pixel base code across your website. This pixel will fire each time a person takes action and report this action to Events Manager.
To set up your custom conversions, head over to your Facebook Ads Events Manager > Custom Conversions:
Next, you’ll arrive in this section (see screenshot below).
This is where you’ll be setting rules for your custom conversion. It’s basically you giving Facebook a set of instructions to track the landing pages of your website where your conversions take place.
That said, you’ll need to recall all the pages (or URLs) of your website that matter to you.
As you can see, you’ll need to choose between contains, doesn’t contain, and equals.
Here’s what each of these rules means:
Contains - It’s best to use URL contains if your web page has a dynamic URL. This usually applies to order confirmation pages where a unique customer ID is attached to the page. For example, yourwebsite.com/order-confirmed?id=12345678. In this case, you’ll want to tell Facebook that you want to track /order-confirmed that’s contained in the URL regardless of the customer ID.
Doesn’t contain - Let’s assume that you sell 3 different products on your website: shoes, clothing, and bags. However, you only want Facebook to track people who visit your shoes and clothing web pages but not your bags web pages. In this case, Facebook will exclude the audience that has checked your bags.
Equals - If you’re using URL equals, make sure that you add the full URL of the web page. For example, if you want to track the thank you page of your site after a person has downloaded your free ebook (to signify that a download occurred), specify your URL www.yourwebsite.com/free-ebook-download-thank-you. Note that there’s no need to add http or https.
Note: You’re free to add more than 1 rule to your custom conversions.
When you’re done creating your rules, type in the name and description of your custom conversion. Next, choose a category that would best represent the custom conversion. For example, if you’re tracking a wishlist page of your website, your category would be “Add to Wishlist.”
While not required, you can indicate the dollar value of your conversion. If you’re selling something, say a $97 tool, you’ll want to indicate $97. By doing this, you will know your return on ad spend.
Here’s how your reporting will look like:
After setting up custom conversions, all that’s left is to check the insights you gather and use them to improve your future Facebook ads.
As long as you’ve properly set up your custom conversions, Facebook will be able to automatically optimize for these conversions. Also, you can use the information you collect to run retargeting campaigns, find new audiences who are likely to convert, and more.
Using ConnectAutomate for Custom Conversions
All the custom conversions you’ve created in your FB Events Manager will automatically show up in ConnectAutomate’s Campaign Settings when you click CONVERSIONS as the campaign objective you want Facebook to optimize for.
Now all you need to do is select your custom conversion of choice:
With that, Facebook will be able to show your ad (which was previously your best performing post) to your target audience and track results based on the custom conversion you selected.
Final Thoughts
Hopefully, you now have a better idea of what custom conversions are and that you’ll be able to set them up successfully.
Custom conversions are easier to work with as you only need to install the base pixel across your web pages where conversions take place and specify their URLs in Events Manager. ConnectAutomate turns your best post into a Facebook ad, and you can optimize that ad for a custom conversion. That said, good luck!
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