Facebook Ups Their Attribution Modeling Game

Recently, I noticed Facebook has updated the Facebook Business Manager interface with additional functionality. One area that caught my interest was the Attribution section as you can see below:

Facebook Attribution Reporting

Settings

I went ahead and configured the settings for one of our clients. Facebook’s Attribution tool set up has four components:

  • Diagnostics – shows you any errors with your Facebook pixel, lets you know if data is being received correctly or not.
  • Data Sources – displays your pixels and events.
  • Referring Domains – similar to Google Analytics, you can exclude referring domains from reporting (such as paypal or other payment processing third-party domains).
  • Ad Platforms – this is where you can connect other ad platforms and pull in their data for a fuller picture of how your advertising is doing across all the publishers.

As you can see in the snapshot below, Facebook has a decent number of connectors to various ad platforms.

Adding Tags and Import Mapping Data

In order to see the click and impression data from your Bing or Google ads, you need to copy and paste what are called ‘Click Tags’. These tags send data back to Facebook when someone clicks on your Bing or Google ads, giving Facebook a better picture of your advertising not just on Facebook but Bing and Google as well.

As you see below, this process is not very user friendly and the click tags are very confusing:

The final step involves ‘mapping’ your Bing data and sending that data to Facebook via a somewhat confusing set of steps that basically have you set up, within Bing reporting,  a daily report (csv format) that is emailed to Facebook daily!

I guess this is a first iteration of this Facebook Attribution tool but I would have rather seen this integration be done via a more seamless api integration between the two systems rather than a daily csv email!

Facebook Attribution Reporting Results

Well, we are still waiting for the BingAds data to be imported into the Facebook attribution tool. As of this post, we haven’t seen any BingAds data. I will update this post with more information as we continue to test this new, exciting feature.

Have you tried the Facebook Attribution report? What sort of results have you received? Would love to hear from you!

It’s all about Objective-Based Advertising

When you create a new campaign on any of the major digital ad platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Bing and Google, you will be taken through a guided series of screens, the first of which is to select the objective of your campaign.

The most common objective types I see are:

  • Awareness – you want brand new eyes on your products
  • Traffic – increase site visitors
  • Engagement – get users engaging with your content (social engagement)
  • Conversions – bottom of the marketing funnel users who want to purchase

The current Google Ads screen is shown below:

Google Ads objectives

You can see the Facebook ads screen is quite similar:

Facebook Ads Objective Screen

When this type of “objective-based” guided approach started appearing a few years ago, I didn’t like being forced to go through these steps, telling myself: “How dare Facebook and Google put these road blocks up! I know what I am doing!”  But over time, I have grown to like the discipline these tools force on you. I am even using that type of approach when reporting and planning digital media ad campaigns.

Objectives and the Marketing Funnel

I’ve been putting on this “objectives-based” hat more often now when budgeting client media spend across the marketing funnel. This helps me figure out the right ratio of spending across those objectives based on where we are in the shopping season. For example, you may want to ‘heavy up’ (increase spend) the budget at the bottom of the funnel (‘conversion’ objective) during the Christmas season to maximize revenue when people are ready to buy. However, if we didn’t allocate budget to the top of the funnel early on in the year, we wouldn’t have enough users in that ‘conversion’ bucket to even target.

By segmenting an annual media budget by objective type, you can quickly see if your spend is too much on the conversion end or awareness end of the funnel.  I typically try to maintain a 65% prospecting/35% conversion budget ratio most of the year and then heavy up on the conversion objective spend at that high season mark.

Here’s an example of a Facebook account analysis of the ad budget by objective, you can see the conversions objectives has about 35% of the spend while the rest is distributed across middle and top of the funnel campaign objectives.

 

So, what are you doing with your digital advertising spend across your company’s marketing funnel? Are you always spending some money on prospecting or are you focused mainly on the bottom of the funnel converters?  Let us know!

Have you started using the new campaign level conversion tracking feature for GoogleAds?

This campaign level conversion tracking functionality finally brings Google Ads to the same conversion tracking capabilities as Facebook Ads has had for years.

Now you will be able to turn on Google’s machine learning optimization tools to drive more events that have meaning for your business. Prior to this release, if you wanted to set up a campaign to drive more newsletter sign ups, you had to turn on that particular google conversion in your account. That would inflate your other purchase conversion numbers.