We live and breathe data. Call us nerds, but our clients tend to appreciate the high value that we place on ROI. There is so much data that can be collected from your Facebook campaigns, however many users are limiting their tracking to the campaign that they are running right now (perhaps the only one instance that “living in the moment” is frowned upon).
I’m going to show you the step-by-step guide to tracking long-term sales and multiple conversion events across all your Facebook campaigns.
Step 1: Pixel Your Life
Every Facebook advertising account comes with a unique pixel, or piece of code, that can track when a person visits a specific page on your site. If you don’t have your pixel installed on your website – that will be your first step.
Instructions:
- Go to Ads Manager > Assets > Pixels > Actions > View Pixel Code
- Follow the instructions to installing the pixel on your site
- You can check to make sure your pixel is installed by downloading the Google Chrome Plugin called Facebook Pixel Helper
Step 2: Set Up Custom Conversions
A custom conversion allows you to track when an action has taken place on your website, for example, someone has downloaded a free report. Since you already have the pixel on your website, all you’ll need to do now is set up rules for your custom conversion.
This is where the long-term tracking comes into place. We are currently running a funnel for our financial advisor niche where we send Facebook traffic to a blog, then we invite them to sign up for a free webinar, and finally we offer a paid strategy session on the webinar. We have custom conversions set up for the free webinar and when someone purchases the strategy session.
Instructions:
- Ads Manager > Measure and Report > Custom Conversions
- Click Create Custom Conversion
- Plug in the URL parameters of the custom conversion. In the example of a free report you would put the URL of the thank you page into the “URL Equals” section, because we know if they saw the thank you page, they filled out the form for your free report.
- Choose the category of conversion – for a free report you could choose “complete registration” or “lead.”
Step 3: Track Results
One critical part to tracking your results is to make sure every campaign running has the option selected to “Track all conversions from my Facebook pixel.” This option is in the ad level and is not always selected. This is what allows your campaign to track multiple custom conversions.
To generate a report using all your custom conversions you just need to add them as custom columns in your Ads Manager basecamp. To do this you will select Custom Columns in the column dropdown, then type in the name of your custom conversion(s) into the search bar and hit Apply.
Below are some results from one of our financial planner funnels. In this example, we can see that 3 out the 18 people who requested our case study, also registered for our webinar:
In this example, we can see that 1 out of the 4 people who registered for the webinar, purchased a strategy session:
Over a period of time, you’ll be able to see how your long-term marketing efforts are all interconnected, what’s working, what’s not, and where you need to make changes to increase your ROI!