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Send Purchases and other conversions attributed by Able to Facebook Conversions API.

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Send Purchases to Facebook Conversions API

Attributing conversions to Facebook Ads is a common task, however doing it with sufficient precision is hard. Sales might happen in CRM, or, when they happen online, customer might not come back to the website, so tracking with Facebook Pixel JS produces substandard results. Able solves this problem with its Facebook Conversions API integration.

You can't use Facebook Conversions API by utilizing only back-end data (such as customer name, phone and e-mail) or front-end data (such as browser id) efficiently. It'll work, but it'd only be able to match about 30% of transactions. In addition to very low percentage of the purchases being shown in the reports, it'll be affecting Facebook Ads learning capabilities, making it think that the customers who bought didn't convert. This happens because Facebook won't have full visibility of the customer path that is available when using Able Customer Data Platform first-party tracking.

Able solves this problem by introducing first-party tracking and first-touch attribution based on the concept of a CustomerCustomer associates Events that happen on website, in CRM or offline by associating these Events using Customer KeysCustomer Keys are Customer attributes that uniquely identify a customer across events and devices. The most common ones are email and phone.

In a typical integration scenario, fbclid parameter of initial hit is first associated with website-specific visitor identifier, the default being Google Analytics visitor id, and then, once a lead is submitted, associates a lead parameter such as e-mail with visitor id, and, by inference, with original fbclid and FB browser id (fbp).

All of this happens in Able Customer Data Platform automatically, provided Able is used to track Facebook ad click conversions to leads.

Once a purchase is attributed to the visitor, Able sends the following data to the Facebook Conversions API:

  1. Facebook Customer Identifiers. This includes the original ad click id (fbclid), when available, as well as browser id (fbp).
  2. Advanced Match Parameters. Customer email, phone, name and address help Facebook to attribute sales when a click id parameter isn't available or inconclusive.

It's important to note that when both Facebook Pixel and Facebook Conversions API are used to send events to Facebook, then if deduplication is used, Facebook always removes the second event sent via the Conversions API and only uses Facebook Pixel data to attribute event. Able Conversions API improves it by sending both Facebook Pixel data and additional customer details for matching in the same Conversions API event, allowing Facebook to use all available details to attribute event correctly. This allows Able to significantly improve percentage of attributed conversions, compared to standard Facebook Pixel installation and Conversions API integration used together with deduplications. Therefore, when using Able, same events should only be sent to Facebook using Able Conversions API integration to prevent duplicates from appearing in Ads Manager.

In case of sending conversions that originate from IOS traffic, appropriate attribution settings should be set in Facebook Ads Manager to allow Facebook to attribute IOS traffic correctly using modelled conversions based on Conversions API events sent by Able.

  1. Set up Facebook Events Manager


    1. Open Facebook Events Manager.
    2. If you have an existing Pixel of a Dataset that you'd like to use, open it. Click the green plus sign in the left menu to add a new one, selecting either Web or Offline otherwise.
    3. Go to the Settings tab and click Generate access token.


    For more granular permissions setup, you could also create System Users and Tokens in Facebook Business Settings manually.

  2. Add Access Token to Able

    Paste the access token you've created in the previous step and save it. Leave refresh token empty.

    Open Able Dashboard and press ⊕ Add Service Integration button to do the action.
  3. Enable Outbound Integration

    Select the credential you've just created and Purchase event type.

    If the token you're using has 'Manage Ad account' permission, Able will display list of Ad Account, which allows to select ad account and pixel you'd like to use from the list.

    Otherwise, copy a Pixel ID or Dataset ID from Facebook Events Manager and paste the value into the Adspixel field below (use Offline Event Set only for legacy Offline Event Sets):

    Open Able Dashboard and press ⊕ Add Service Integration button to do the action.