Facebook Conversion Tracking And Attribution – How To Set Up

Attributing conversions to Meta (Facebook) Ads is a common task, however doing it with sufficient precision is hard. Sales might happen in a payment system or  a CRM, or, when they happen online, customer might not come back to the website, so tracking with Meta Pixel or GTM JavaScript produces substandard results. Able solves this problem with its server-side conversion tracking and Meta (Facebook) Conversions API integration.

You can't use Meta (Facebook) Conversions API efficiently by utilizing only back-end data (such as customer name, phone and e-mail) or only front-end data (such as browser id). 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 Meta (Facebook) Ads learning capabilities, making it think that the customers who bought didn't convert. This happens because Meta (Facebook) won't have full visibility of the customer path that is available when using Able Customer Data Platform first-party server-side tracking.

Able solves this problem by introducing first-party tracking and first-touch attribution based on the concept of a Customer. Customer associates Events that happen on website, in CRM or offline by associating these Events using Customer Keys. Customer 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 Meta (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 Meta (Facebook) Pixel and Meta (Facebook) Conversions API are used to send events to Facebook, then if deduplication is used, Facebook may ignore additional data sent via the Conversions API and only use Meta (Facebook) Pixel data to attribute event. Able improves Meta server-side tracking by sending both Meta (Facebook) Pixel browser data, click identifier determined from first-party data, as well as additional customer details for matching in the same Conversions API event, allowing Meta (Facebook) to use all available details to attribute event correctly. This allows Able to significantly improve percentage of attributed conversions, compared to standard Meta (Facebook) Pixel installation and Conversions API integration used together with deduplications.

When using Able, events that are already sent to Meta (Facebook) using Able Conversions API integration shouldn't be sent from Pixel to ensure Meta (Facebook) always uses the most complete version of the event for attribution, as well as to prevent a risk of duplicates appearing in Ads Manager.