Are you looking for the best way to get, prove and understand the results from your social media campaign? The first step is making sure you are correctly tracking your campaigns and conversion events using the Facebook Pixel. After all, analytics is key to proving the success of your digital marketing efforts. To send conversion events from your website to the Facebook Pixel, you have a few options, including plugins, website code or Google Tag Manager. We’ll focus on the latter as it provides a more straightforward way to set everything up, once you’ve set up the basic tag manager code.
When set-up correctly, your Facebook Pixel can tell you what actions people complete on your site after clicking on your ads – and you can see these results alongside the standard stats in Facebook.
Let’s go through how to set up your Facebook Event Tracking properly, using Google Tag Manager, so that you can walk up to your boss with realistic, proven ROI on your digital marketing efforts. Not only that, you can use your insights to optimise your next social media campaign, so you get even better results.
Setting up Facebook Event Tracking with Google Tag Manager
To save time, we are assuming you already have Google Analytics set up and you’re ready to jump straight to the Tag Manager setup and integration with your Facebook Pixel.
To get started, you’ll need to install the Facebook Pixel base code through Google Tag Manager. It’s as simple as copying and pasting, with a few changes and a test to make sure it’s all working as it should. Once that’s out of the way we can start setting up events tracking and running through how the events are fired for each action you want to be tracked.
Open the Facebook Pixel screen again, select “Manually Install Pixel Code Yourself” and then select the second option to see a list of events you can choose from, depending on the goals of your business and what’s important to you.
From here you can select the event/s you want to track, click the drop-down and copy the code. At this stage, you don’t need to worry about the variables and parameters for the events; we will come back to that later. I’ve also included more detail on each of these events below, so keep reading!
Once you’ve copied your code, open up Google Tag Manager again so we can create your event tags. Click “Add a new tag” and give it a name based on your event. The name can be whatever you want, however, you will want to note the event and that it’s coming from Facebook, as it will keep all your digital marketing tracking clean and easy to interpret.
Select “Tag Configuration” and then “Custom HTML” as the tag type. Then paste the code you copied from Facebook into the ‘HTML’ assigned text box.
Next up? Let’s select the triggers that fire your events. You can do this by clicking ‘Triggering’.
Now you need to select the triggers that fire from your events. Do so by selecting “Triggering”. We’ve included an example below whereas if someone clicks a link which contains the text ‘Add to cart’, an event will fire. Make sure the trigger reflects the event you are setting up, then click save.
Depending on your digital advertising goals, you may also want to configure your variables based on specific actions to be tracked. The exact triggers you want recorded can be edited in the ‘Variables’ by going back on the homepage and clicking ‘Configure’.
If you’re still with me, congratulations; you’re almost done! Repeat for all events you’d like to track before proceeding to the next step – turning the events you created into custom conversion goals.
The final steps? Go to the Facebook pixel section of your business manager account, then select ‘Custom Conversions’.
Click ‘Create Custom Conversion’ and create your event-based conversions based on the event parameters you set up within tag manager, which are now firing through to your Facebook Pixel.
The Pixel will show you which custom conversions are active, which have not received any activity, and which have received activity but not recently.
If you can’t see any conversions coming through after a few days, you can jump back into the Facebook Pixel, go to the data source details & select ‘Test Events’. You can fire these in another browser tab on your website & see them coming through in real time – make sure your custom conversions match & you should be good to go. If you get stuck, check out the Facebook business ads help centre, in the Facebook Pixel section. If you would rather leave it to the professionals, give us a call at Chilli – your Sunshine Coast Digital Marketing specialists.
Extra Tip!
To make sure all your events are set up and tracking correctly, download the Pixel Helper Chrome extension. You can use this on your website to check your Pixel is installed correctly on your site & events are being sent through to the Facebook Pixel.
What Events Can I Track from Facebook Ads?
Now that we have gone through how to set up your tracked events let’s cover what actions you can follow on your website. It all comes down to what the most important goals are for your business and how your digital strategy aligns with these.
You can refer to this Facebook Business Help Centre page to find the current standard Facebook event types for tracking and tagging on Facebook.
In addition to these standard events, you can also create custom click events. You can learn more about those in Facebook’s Ads help centre, or give us a call at Chilli & we can help set this up for you.
Using your tags to better target your customers
The beauty of event tagging is that it lets you get granular with your Facebook data, segmenting traffic to create targeted audiences. For example, an e-commerce business may want to track conversion events based on customer actions. More advanced tag & Pixel integration allows you to breakdown customers based on the size of a shopping cart, products viewed and much more, allowing you to retarget those customers online and push them down the funnel with reminders, vouchers, and so on. We have said it before, but these analytics are key to successful digital advertising.
The more specific the data the more you can talk directly to your customers and build a strong, and often automated, sales funnel.
Using Google Tag Manager, you can also create custom lookalike remarketing audiences. This tactic allows you to uncover new ‘look-a-like’ customers based on your frequent buyers, high-spenders or just website visitors, all depending on what is important to your business.
What are you waiting for? Start tracking and tagging for your business.
Conversion tracking & the Facebook Pixel are vital to get the best results and ROI on your digital spending.
Of course, having a strategy in place for your digital advertising is vital, so if you haven’t developed one yet, that’s where you should start.
Need help? That’s where we come in. We know how hard it can be to run a business or organise your companies digital marketing efforts and often it’s best to leave it to the professionals. We’re experts at Facebook & Google advertising, goal tracking, custom conversions and all areas of digital advertising; getting the best results based on our client’s goals.
If you have any questions about getting the best results and proven ROI on your Facebook ad campaigns, please get in touch with Chilli today to see how we can help!
