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What’s conversion tracking?

Conversion tracking means getting the data about how many conversions your advertisements are driving for you and which advertisements work the best. It’s an essential tool for you to understand your marketing.

This ability to track conversions is a big part of what makes digital marketing so efficient compared to offline marketing.

What good comes from the Facebook conversion tracking?

Let’s look at what does Facebook conversion tracking does in practice.

First, you acquire users to your website.

After that, you send Facebook data about what these users are doing on your website.

What they are clicking and how far in the funnel they have reached. You can then use this data for retargeting your users or in building other audiences for targeting on Facebook.

The conversion data can also make your existing campaigns more efficient. There’s a lot of automation behind Facebook advertising and having better data can help that automation do its job even better.

And let’s think about what you can do, even without automation.

With conversion data, you can see what campaigns are not working at all. Based on this data, you can save a lot of money by killing underperforming campaigns. On the other hand, you can double down on the most successful campaigns and scale your best-performing campaigns aggressively, since you know that they are working.

All this can lead to much more conversions and a lower customer acquisition cost.

How does conversion tracking work in practice?

Facebook can most of the time match the actions on your website to the specific person on Facebook.

Some variables like your conversion tracking set up, what device and software your visitors are using, and their prior behavior impact on how precise Facebook can be with that matching.

With the Conversion API, many times Facebook can match the user only by looking at the IP address and browser information, even though Apple has tried to make conversion tracking more difficult.

And if that fails there are a lot of other parameters Facebook can use for matching the person on the website to their Facebook profile.

So in the end, there’s a good chance that Facebook knows who’s doing what on your site.

Why Facebook conversion tracking is bad?

Have you ever googled a product and after looking it up once, the same product pops up in your Facebook feed?

The page that you’ve visited has used some sort of conversion tracking and sent data to Facebook. If you didn’t complete the purchase, the business can now target you in their Facebook retargeting campaign.

But usually this doese’t end there. Facebook is also building a profile of you. Let’s say that you were looking for a new car. After checking that one car website, Facebook knows that you are now in the market for a car.

After that data is added to your profile, all the other businesses that are selling cars will also start to target you as their customer. It’s not that they specifically know that you would be the person to target. They might just target generally people that are interested in buying a car and after you’ve visited their competitor's website, you pop up in their target audience.

They might not even have any precise targeting. Having a broad targeting and using the Facebook algorithm to optimize the delivery of the ads is many times the most effective way to use Facebook ads these days.

You just tell Facebook to get as many conversions that’s possible and maybe at what cost. Facebook will then find them for you, using thousands of parameters like data from your competitor’s websites.

So many times you might end up buying from the competition and not from the company that first got you thinking the category.

It might actually be ok for the customer since they are seeing more relevant ads. Also, it’s good for the company that gets poach the conversion based on data from their competitor’s website.

But how about the company that has invested in bringing you to the category in the first place, but ended up just helping the competition?

Why you shouldn’t use Facebook conversion tracking

So having conversion tracking on, you get the benefit of improved targeting but you end up giving that also to your competitors.

Question is that do you have more to gain from this than lose.

One thing that impacts this is how long people typically consider the purchase from your store. If you have a product that is an easy impulse buy and most of the people buy quickly after seeing your advertisements, sending the data to Facebook doesn’t hurt that much. If the person has already purchased, it doesn’t matter that much that your competitor can target them.

But on the other hand, if you are selling cars or some other product that requires longer consideration time, giving that data to Facebook gives time for your competition to try to target the potential customer using data from your website.

Another thing is to understand what kind of marketing you are doing. If you don’t invest in brand building and bringing people into your category, having conversion tracking on doesn’t hurt you that much. You can focus on bidding for conversions with rather narrow targeting and utilizing the data from other people’s websites.

So if you don’t try to scale aggressively, focusing on poaching other people’s conversions might be a good strategy for you.

And without a doubt, not having any conversion tracking will hinder your ability to optimize your Facebook ads. I just bring the point that in some cases you still might want to reconsider it.

I would argue that especially if you are building a new brand for long consideration time and using Facebook for it, treating Facebook like one of the offline channels might be the way to go.

If you can model the performance using the same tools that you are using for your offline advertising, you might give your competition less edge while still being able to optimize your marketing sufficiently.

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