Facebook is one of the most popular social networks worldwide, with roughly 2.85 billion monthly active users. With that figure in mind, it’s no surprise that marketers are leveraging the opportunities of Facebook advertising to increase exposure and drive qualified leads. As any marketer will tell you, it’s important to understand how your Facebook ads are impacting and influencing your customer acquisition and marketing ROI. By following this guide, you will learn how to track the performance of your Facebook ads and will become better equipped to attribute your sales revenue back to your most valuable campaigns. For this article, we’ll discuss:
💡 Pro Tip Is your Google Analytics and Facebook reporting different results? Download our guide to reveal the most common reasons that lead to data inconsistencies between Facebook and Google Analytics, plus gain techniques to help improve the quality of your reporting. How to solve the disconnect between Facebook and Google Analytics Tracking your Facebook campaigns in Google Analytics is essential as it shows you how users are interacting with your website and provides a bigger picture of your customer journeys. While you can get some basic information from Facebook about your website, it’s nowhere near as extensive as Google Analytics. Facebook attribution does a great job at telling you how many people saw and clicked on your ad but loses complete visibility of those individuals once they navigate away from the platform. With Google Analytics, however, you can gather valuable demographic data from your Facebook ad campaigns and track customer behaviour, device functionality and more once a user lands on your site. Also, with the latest iOS 14 update and the recent changes to the attribution settings, advertisers can now expect to see up to a 40% reduction of reported conversions in Facebook Ads Manager. Thankfully, Google Analytics can deliver a lot of information on conversions, clicks and sessions to help improve the performance of your campaigns. 💡 Pro Tip Marketers have struggled to match data in Google Analytics and Facebook Ad Manager long before iOS 14 update. Ruler acts as a bridge between Facebook and Analytics. It allows you to capture all interactions throughout a customer journey and provides a single source of truth about which ads, campaigns and landing are generating the most value. Book a demo a Ruler Analytics to learn more How to track Facebook ads in Google AnalyticsLet’s take a look at how to track Facebook ads in Google Analytics. Tracking your Facebook ads is straightforward. Get started with the step-by-step
guide below: Step 1: Create a trackable linkThe first step to tracking your Facebook activity in Google Analytics is to generate a URL parameter for your ads. Related: How to track links with Google Analytics (If you’re already aware of URL parameters, then you can jump on ahead to the next section.) In short, URL parameters provide more context and are the most useful method to measure and track your performance. The best way to build your URL parameter is with Google Campaign URL builder. We’ve decided not to go into too much detail on how to build the perfect URL parameters, as there are a lot of useful guides that do a great job of explaining the process already. Instead, we’ve added a couple of our favourite guides below so that you can optimise your URL parameters for better reporting:
Step 2: Create your Facebook adOnce you’ve built your trackable link, you’ll need to create your ad on Facebook so that you can start measuring your performance once a user clicks on your creative. Go to Ad Manager and create your ad. If you’re reading this article, it’s likely you know how to do this already. Although, just in case, I’ve added a few guides below which you can follow to set up an ad on Facebook:
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