Your Guide To Facebook Event Tracking

Facebook has become more than just a social media site and internet giant, it has also become a powerful marketing platform for social media marketers to showcase their value in terms of ROI. Facebook's has progressed far beyond simply posting pretty pictures, text updates or videos but has transformed into a channel that values effort when combined advertising spend. 

Building targetted campaigns on Facebook

The days of merely selecting a specific target market for your Facebook campaign and hoping users will flock to your site to complete the required user interactions is slowly starting to become a thing of the past. While these campaigns do work, they are often costly and hardly provide the turns on ad spend. If you after brand exposure then the broad range approach should work for you.

But if you're business is aiming to make Facebook ads a conversion orientated approach you need to start finding more accurate ways of targeted users. One of the more effective Facebook tracking methods is based on event tracking. Event tracking allows you to set specific user interactions as goals and feed this back into Facebook to help optimise your campaign reach.

For example, if you're an eCommerce site and a user added a product to their basket but did not check out you could fire add to basket events back to Facebook and serve ads to all users who did so and appeal to them with a message that encourages them to convert.

Running event tracking with Facebook

To build out a successful marketing funnel where you can reach out to specific Facebook users and pull them back into your conversion funnel, you need to know precisely where in the conversion cycle the customer stopped. That way you can not only reach these users but also target them with specific messaging to encourage them to complete their conversion.

This sort of granular targeting is what helps create a successful churn rate of users who return to complete conversions. Over time this churn rate can build a massive return on investment, mainly when used in combination with other channels.

Selecting the events you want to track

Facebook has been kind enough to offer marketers a range of event tracking options which you can easily choose from and add to your website to synchronise data between your site and your Facebook ad campaigns.

Check the table below and pick the events you feel apply to your site or how granular you would like to get with your tracking. 

How to set up Facebook Event tracking

Now once you've selected the events, you would like to track, its time to set it up.

Note: You will need your Facebook Pixel installed and firing on all pages in order for event tracking to work.

Standard setup

If your site fires a page view for each event implementation will be simple. All you will need to do is grab the event code you need.

• For example, if you would like to track a lead and you send users to a thank you page
•  Add the following fbq('track', 'Lead'); to the head tag of your site.
• The tracking code will fire as soon as the page loads and will indicate to Facebook that a lead has occurred. 

If however, you're user action fires on one page you will need to only fire this tag once the thank you message element is displayed on your site and can be added to the div of that message display. If you're unsure on how to do this, I recommend contacting your developer or asking a marketing and webmaster professional.

GTM setup

If you're running GTM on your site and already have the Facebook pixel running on all pages you can add event tracking by doing the following.

• Login to GTM
• Click Add New Tag
• Provide a name for your tag - IE - Facebook Lead Tag
• Select custom HTML tag
• Add the following code  fbq('track', 'Lead');
• Select your trigger to fire on your thank you page or thank you element ID
• Click save and submit

Tell us your Facebook story

Have you started to set up Facebook event tracking? How has it improved your campaigns? Let us know in the comments below, we would love to hear from you.

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Contact us

If you want to know more about social media marketing for your business or would like us to set up your Facebook event tracking, don’t be shy we’re happy to assist. Simply contact us

Recommended reading

If you found this post helpful and have time to spare and would like to learn more about Facebook marketing then check out the following articles.

• How To Use Facebook Dynamic URL Parameters
• Facebook To Block Ads From Businesses With Poor Reviews
• How To Build A Facebook Audience With The Free Invite To Like Feature
• How To List Your Services on Facebook
• How To Build A Facebook Shop
• Facebook Allows Admins To Monetise Their Groups

Tags: facebook, social media