Facebook Conversion Tracking: A Guide

Do you have an audience on Facebook? Most brands do, considering Facebook has over 3 billion monthly active users. Plus, 37% of those users will make a purchase on the platform in the next year. 

Your job as a brand marketer? Convince your audience to make a purchase or complete another action with stellar Facebook Ads — and track the ones that do. Enter Facebook conversion tracking, a necessary task for every marketer and affiliate marketer alike. Here at Tapfiliate, we know a thing or two about conversion tracking, as we track it for all our clients across millions of affiliates, ad assets, and channels alike. 

But back to Facebook conversion tracking. You need it to determine the effectiveness of your Facebook Ads, and we’ll walk you through with this detailed guide. 

How Does Facebook Conversion Tracking Work?

What do you do after you see a Facebook ad? Perhaps you scroll on by, which is a loss for the brand who published it. Or, you might visit their website—closer! And if you give your email address for a newsletter, begin content downloads, or even better, make a purchase? These are events that count as conversions worth tracking. 

Essentially, Facebook offers you a piece of code to attach to your website and track all the customer events relevant to your website.

Facebook Pixel:

The Facebook Pixel is a piece of JavaScript that brands can plug into their website code to track predetermined or custom conversions and access audience data. In other words, the code tracks the audience’s website behavior that occurs after they click on a Facebook Ad. 

You can track three different types of conversions with the Facebook Pixel: 

• Standard events: Actions defined by Facebook and reported with a Pixel function, like a purchase 
• Custom events: Conversions defined by you (the marketer or brand) that you report with a Pixel function, like a newsletter sign-up or upsell
• Custom conversions: Conversions tracked automatically with referrer URLs; for example, someone who completes an action with a specific phrase in their checkout page URLs

And if you want a bird’s eye view? Check out all of this data in Facebook Pixel reports. 

Facebook SDK for Apps

Say you own a SaaS app for business bookkeeping or a game like CandyCrush. Website conversions don’t mean as much in this business landscape — you need to know how your users interact and convert on your app after they click your ads! 

That’s where the Facebook Software Development Kit (FDK) comes in. 

You can find code for the SDK on Github. Then, you’ll need to integrate that snippet of code into your app’s codebase to have eyes on how your users interact with your app. 

PS: you can access the Facebook SDK for iOS and Android. 

The SDK tracks the following in-app events and conversions, then sends the data to Facebook: 

• App installs
• App launches
• In-app purchases

Conversions API

The Conversions API tracks your standard customer events but goes further to include offline conversions and visitor actions, as well as business messaging events. It connects to your company’s website server, app, or even CRM to optimize ad targeting and conversion tracking. Since the data comes from a brand’s internal sources, the Conversions API overcomes common barriers in browser-based tracking like ad blockers and privacy settings. 

The best part? All the above options are possible simultaneously, as the API helps you simplify your conversion tracking and connect multiple events in the same place. Plus, it’s a more privacy-focused way to share data since it happens via server-to server communication. 

What Types of Conversion Can I Track?

Conversions aren’t always about purchases. Any sort of action your audience takes after seeing your ad can count as a conversion. Here’s what we mean: 

• Website conversions: These are conversions that take place on your website. Your audience might submit personal information to learn more about your products, sign up for your newsletter, or, ideally, make a purchase. 

• App actions: New app download? That’s a conversion – so are specific actions within the app like making a purchase, completing a level, or achieving a certain score. 

• Engagement conversions: These refer to audience interaction with your Facebook content, including page likes and views, event responses, story replies, and more.

• Lead Generation: A middle-ground between browser and customer, a lead might be someone who signs up for your newsletter or fills in your lead form. 

• Custom Conversions: Custom actions and collections of actions relevant to your business and outside the standard events; for example, you can create a custom conversion for website visitors that click a specific ad, landing page button, who have particular demographic data on their Facebook profile.

• Catalog Sales: Ecommerce businesses can use the Advantage+ catalog to create ads that resemble an ecommerce show, while targeting visitors based on website behavior. 

How to Set Up Facebook Conversion Tracking

Your audience is buying your products left right, and center — but you won’t know how, which, or when until you set up Facebook conversion tracking. We’ll walk you through the steps. 

For Websites

Create a Facebook Pixel

Start at the Facebook Events Manager. You’ll click “Pixels” under “Data Sources.” Click “Add” to create a new Pixel. 

From there, you’ll need to add your website URL, name your Pixel, and click continue. 

Install the Pixel Code on Your Website

Remember the JavaScript we mentioned that you need to plug into your website code? Once you create your new Pixel, the page will generate that code for you. You’ll have to include this code on every single one of your web pages so that you can track conversions accurately. 

An easy way to implement the code is to add it to every header of every web page. Or, you could use one of Facebook’s partner integrations like Shopify or WordPress to automatically upload the code. 

Set up Conversion Events

Consider the most valuable conversions to your business. This might look like upsells, add to carts, or purchases in general. You can create these in the Facebook Events Manager, where you’ll have options to add standard events like “lead” or “purchase.” You can also expand to custom conversions and include rules based on URL keywords or demographic data. 

As for dynamic actions like button clicks that don’t lead to new pages? You’ll need additional code or a tool like Google Tag Manager.  

For Mobile Apps:

Integrate the Facebook SDK

This is a pretty straightforward process. You can download and integrate the Facebook SDK for iOS or Android directly onto your app. Then, the platform will guide you through a step-by-step installation process. 

Set Up App Events

What user actions are meaningful on your app? Log these as standard or custom events on your app with code that reflects rules about required user interactions with your app.

Register Your App with Facebook

Now it’s time to link your Facebook Ads with your app data. Start at Facebook’s Developers’ website to get started. Once you register with basic information, you can configure add settings with business information, bundle ID, and platform details. 

Test Your Events

How do you know if you’re actually tracking conversions? It’s easy enough to miss a couple, especially with such a busy schedule. 

Instead, use the Facebook Events Manager for their “Test events” tool to make sure every click, conversion, purchase, or date request doesn’t make it to your DMs. 

How Can I Track Affiliate Conversions on Facebook?

You can track conversions from Facebook Ads right on the platform. But if you have tens or even hundreds of affiliates publishing ads and promoting your products? Whether you have your network on Facebook alone or across other ad channels, Tapfiliate is a better solution. 

Our affiliate marketing platform helps you visualize not just conversions by number or dollar amount — it also shows you affiliate performance stats based on historical performance, channel, and other custom filters in robust reporting dashboards. 

Here’s a quick walkthrough of Facebook conversion tracking with Tapfiliate: 

Choose a Software

Choosing a software to track your affiliate conversions. Ensure that the software fits with your business and you can easily track Facebook sales. With Tapfiliate, you can also share Facebook posts your affiliates can use, plus you can track affiliate sales with links or coupons depending on how you want to approach social media sales.

Get Integrated

Can’t live without HubSpot as your CRM? Or Mailchimp for your email campaigns? Inspire your conversion tracking with even more customer data from your favorite software. Tapfiliate has over 34 integrations with various software solutions, including WooCommerce, Teachable, PayPal, Stripe, and more. 

Complete a Test Transaction

Whether it’s a website click, landing pageview event, or customer purchase, Tapfiliate tracks the who, what, and when in real-time. See for yourself and recruit an internal affiliate to test things out. Purchase a product on their behalf and watch how quickly their historical specs, channel, order value, and other metrics appear on our dashboard. 

Get Your Affiliates to Sign Up

Tapfiliate lets you automate affiliate approval to your program with custom lead form criteria that you choose. Otherwise, you can still choose to manually approve affiliates to your program one by one. Tapfiliate’s affiliate portal also makes it easy to share notifications, creative assets, and other details to affiliates to get them onboarded. 

Get Your Affiliates to Publish Their Content on Facebook

Affiliates might work with a variety of affiliate types — but if you want to leverage the large subset of your audience on Facebook? You could tell your affiliates. 

Still, we’d take things further and invite them to post content on Facebook instead. It’s a worthy marketing channel that can take startups and mom-and-pops to revenue-rich operations. 

Track the Results

Your tracked conversions will show up on the dashboard and detailed reports. Just check the reporting dashboards and enter the filters you deem most important to your business. Notice how many conversions come in over time, how the value fluctuates, and most importantly? Your highest-performing affiliates. 

Key Takeaways

Bottom line? Facebook knows what they’re doing when it comes to conversion tracking. The tech is there, but you can expand your radar and strategy with affiliate marketing through Tapfiliate. Access flexible commissions, cross-channel conversion tracking, and historical affiliate performance.

Chrissy Kapralos

Chrissy Kapralos runs a Toronto-based writing agency called No Worries Writing Co. She’s passionate about helping businesses communicate and share their stories. When she isn’t writing about the latest tech and marketing content, you’ll find her traveling, cooking, or watching horror movies.