Have you ever been confused by the results of your Facebook campaign or frustrated by Facebook’s analytics dashboard? You’re not alone. Drew Tweito, CEO of FunnelBoom, joins the experts to offer clarity on how to get the real numbers of your Facebook ads so you can accurately judge the success of your campaigns.
IN THIS EPISODE YOU’LL LEARN:
- How Facebook tracking works, how accurate it is, and why you may have conflicting numbers (« Understanding this will help you better use the Facebook analytics dashboard to your advantage).
- The new Facebook feature that promises to solve tracking issues and offer insight into the data behind your campaigns.
- How to avoid and what to do about the Facebook analytics “wild goose chases” that suck up your time and other resources.
LINKS AND RESOURCES MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE:
Episode 47: Facebook’s New Conversion Pixel: What You Need to Know
Episode 63: How Ezra Firestone Sold 84,583 Jars of Face Cream Using Video Ads
Drew Tweito’s Facebook Ad Measurement and Mastery 2017
Episode 95 Transcript (swipe the PDF version here):
| Keith Krance: | Hello, and welcome back to Perpetual Traffic, Episode Number 95. We’ve got another great guest on today. All the gang is back, Ralph, Molly, myself and a special guest, Andrew Tweito. Andrew is the founder of FunnelBoom and Boombox Marketing Training, which is a course that he’s got around Facebook tracking. Funnel Boom is a marketing engineering outfit that specializes in funnel builds, integrations, ad management, tagging, and analytics. Andrew, he’s been on the podcast before, Episode Number 47, and he’s been a massive, massive help for the agency side of our business. It’s just been a game changer. Andrew is just one of those guys that when something is confusing, just see what Andrew says. He usually has the answer every single time. |
| There have been a lot of big, big changes lately. Facebook’s new analytic dashboard, this is a big deal that’s recently come out. If you haven’t checked that out we’re going to have a talk about that today. One of the biggest problems and frustrations that we hear all the time is the vast majority of Facebook marketers are confused by lack of clarity on the real results from their ads. If this is you then please pay close attention to this episode. I think you’re going to like it. | |
| Molly Pittman: | Yeah, I think we’re also going to talk about a new feature that Facebook added at the end of the episode that I wasn’t even aware was coming but it looks like it will solve a lot of our tracking issues and insight into data behind our campaigns, which is really exciting. But back to the broad topic of this, inside of our community at DigitalMarketer, one of the questions that I get the most is Facebook tracking is off or it’s not working. I think a lot of it comes down to people understanding how Facebook tracking actually works so that you can set your expectations and analyze the data, and why it might be different from Google Analytics tracking, and why it might be different from the numbers that you’re seeing inside of your CRM. I think this episode is great because it really addresses a big barrier that a lot of Facebook marketers have. It comes down to, what are the real numbers, right, and how can I get real numbers so that I can judge the success of my campaigns? |
| Ralph Burns: | Yeah, totally and I think the last time Andrew was on here we were talking about Facebook’s new Pixel and just at that point in time there was some confusion as to how that Pixel actually would work within the context of what we were talking about here on the show and how all you out there were tracking your conversions. I think at that point a lot of people had some trepidation over this new Pixel to rule them all, so to speak, and in getting rid of the traditional conversion pixel on a Thank You page kind of stuff. Since then it’s been 50 episodes or so since we really talked about it. |
| It’s emerged now that we use far more advanced tracking today inside the agency than we ever have. The reason is, is because this pixel is so dynamic and so malleable and it produces the ability to be able to very closely mimic what actually happens in the real world and eliminate issues like counting things twice and how view through conversions and click through conversions sort of compare, which we’ll talk about today on this episode. But it really has to do with the fact that Facebook’s tracking is more advanced than other platforms. I think because of that, it creates a lot of confusion. Hopefully in this episode here we can shed some light on it and no one better in the world to talk about this stuff than Andrew Tweito. | |
| Andrew, welcome to the podcast. | |
| Drew Tweito: | Hey guys, thanks for having me; good to be back. |
| Keith Krance: | Andrew, big, high level question is, how the heck does the Facebook tracking really work and how accurate is it? |
| Drew Tweito: | For 99% of advertisers out there, we’re talking about getting results back from the pixel. Someone clicks through your ad. They come to your site and then they opt in or they buy something. Then the pixel is what’s sending that data back to Facebook. Now, Facebook has an advantage over a lot of other advertising platforms in that they’re inherently cross device. They do people based measurement. To Facebook you are a user. You’re not a device or a browser. This is an important distinction. Facebook is monitoring for results based on people’s activity. If you’re on your cell phone and you’ve logged into your Facebook app, and then you’ve logged into Facebook on your desktop computer, Facebook sees that as one person. If you see an ad on one device and then convert on another, they’re still going to attribute that ad result back properly, which is a huge distinction versus other platforms that are out there. |
| While Facebook sees cross device, they don’t see other channels. Facebook is only trying to attribute your ad results to Facebook campaigns. If you have a display ad running on Google Display Network and a Facebook campaign, Facebook doesn’t know anything about you clicking on that Google Display Network banner and then converting. They’re going to attribute the results back to Facebook Campaigns and they’re not going to see that interaction with the Google Display Network Banner. | |
| Ralph Burns: | For example, let’s say I see a Facebook ad in my newsfeed on my mobile device today. |
| Drew Tweito: | Right. |
| Ralph Burns: | Then, three days from now, let’s say I click on it because it was a really good DigitalMarketer ad written by Molly Pittman. I’m clicking on it and reading it but then I forget about it. Then maybe I see one of those DigitalMarketer retargeting ads on the Google Display Network and then I click on that. Then I buy DM HQ but I’m seven days after I’d initially clicked on the Facebook ad. How would Facebook report that in their reporting so that I knew, maybe as an advertiser, what my ROI is based upon my ads that I’m running? |
| Drew Tweito: | Let’s assume you’re using Facebook’s default attribution window setting, which is 28-day click through or 1-day view through. Ralph has clicked the Facebook Ad on his phone. Again, Facebook only sees Facebook so in Facebook’s view that last click ad is going to get all the credit. Now, even if you convert 7 days later, that’s well within the 28-day click through window for Facebook, right? The last interacted with ad will get 100% of the credit for that conversion in Facebook Ads Manager. Even if Ralph had seen another Facebook ad but not clicked it, the click would get the credit because clicks override views in Facebook’s eyes. The result would come through in your ads manager reporting as Ralph converted and the purchase conversion value would get attributed to that campaign, that ad set, that ad where he clicked. |
| Now, from Google’s standpoint there was an intermediate action between the Facebook click and the conversion, which was the click on the Google Display Network banner. Facebook’s not going to see that at all. However, Google Analytics would see both things. They would see the click from Facebook, assuming you have your UTM parameter set up correctly and they would see the click on the Google Display Network banner as well. Google Analytics is also, by default, last interaction or last click attribution, right, so they would give the credit for that conversion to the GDN banner. Right there is an example of a situation where you have two sources of data, two sources of reporting and they’re going to report that interaction completely differently even though at its core their technologies are very similar. | |
| Ralph Burns: | This is very common so that second conversion, where I saw it on the Google Display Network in our hypothetical example here, let’s say I was on my desktop, which happens all the time. Even if I’m on my desktop or I’m on my MacBook Pro, as the case were, it would still show up the same way even though I’m going from a mobile device to a desktop device. In most cases people would say, “Well, that’s inaccurate because Facebook is taking credit for the final click,” which the argument could be made the final click would never happen if it weren’t for the first click. How would you explain that to people, sort of how that sort of passing off or assisting kind of works in the overall grand scheme of things? |
| Drew Tweito: | The cross device thing adds another layer. Like we mentioned earlier, Facebook is inherently cross device. Google Analytics is not. Google Analytics would actually see those two interactions, the Facebook ad click and the GDN ad click, assuming they occurred on different devices, they would see that as two different visitors, right? |
| Ralph Burns: | Oh, okay. |
| Drew Tweito: | This is another huge point where numbers get completely off kilter for people and they’re like, “Why aren’t the numbers lining up?” When you ask the question about who should get the credit for that conversion, right, now we’re starting to talk about attribution. The current state of digital attribution and how that relates to your Facebook results is we’re getting closer and closer with capabilities that are out there these days to do cross device measurement, getting to that utopia of knowing exactly what value to assign to each interaction throughout the Customer Journey. |
| Let me give you an example or kind of an analogy of how attribution can be viewed. Let’s say that you’re the manager or the owner of a professional basketball team, right? Your job is to figure out how much to pay the players based on the results that they contribute to the team. Now, in this really simple example we’re going to assume that if we allocate our money to the right players our results will improve and thus the team will improve and so forth. Now, in basketball there are a series of events that occur before a basket is scored. There is someone who ends up taking the shot and scores the basket. There’s also the guys that are passing the ball. There’s usually a series of passes. There’s a guy that inbounds the ball to start the play, right? When we talk about attribution it’s very similar to this basketball analogy in that what Facebook and Google Analytics are doing by default is basically giving 100% of the credit for the result to the guy that took the shot, right, the last touch before the conversion. | |
| However, there’s other viewpoints that say, “Well, why shouldn’t everyone get equal credit,” right? Everyone who touched the ball in that play should get a fractional amount of that two points or three points. If all five guys touched the ball everybody should get credit for one-fifth of those points. There’s just some people that say, “Well, what about the guy that inbounded the ball? He should get all the credit because if he wouldn’t have inbounded the ball correctly the play would have never happened in the first place.” You can see how there’s like a disconnect there and there’s also kind of like a rudimentary conversation about who should get results. | |
| What we’re really after here is causality, right? We want the truth about what caused someone to take action. This is a very important distinction versus traditional measurement technique. Causality is not easy to infer even if you have perfect data, right? We’re talking about digital marketing. The data here is not going to be perfect. We don’t know everything about what Ralph saw before he clicked on that first Facebook ad but we’re getting closer. What I’m talking about in that analogy is what’s called rule-based attribution, right? I’m going to say, based on my worldview, I’m going to pick kind of an arbitrary set of rules in which I’m going to assign value. Facebook is doing fully last interaction attribution so they’re saying the person who makes the conversion gets all the credit. | |
| Now, there’s another way to do this that doesn’t use rules at all and this is more around multi-touch attribution or algorithmic attribution, which Facebook has announced they actually have something big coming in that space soon. But going back to our basketball example, right, and how Facebook counts results, let’s say that you have a simple example of one cold campaign where you’re targeting cold audiences. This might be your lookalikes, your interests. You’re trying to get them to the site to a blog post. Then you have a retargeting campaign that’s taking them to a landing page where they can buy a trip wire. Now, what’s important to remember is that if anyone who has clicked through the first ad to get to your site clicks through that second ad from the retargeting campaign, the retargeting campaign’s going to get all the credit for that conversion value. | |
| Ralph Burns: | Right. |
| Drew Tweito: | Now this is a really common issue or problem for e-commerce folks who are writing dynamic product ads or a lot of retargeting to try to get people to complete their purchases because I’m going to naturally siphon almost all of the ROI, all of the value from my account down into that DPA campaign because Facebook is giving all the credit to the last interaction. Is that realistic? Probably not and you’re going to be devaluing the top of your funnel. |
| Molly Pittman: | Andrew, that’s why we’ve always taught people because the attribution has been set up that way and because there haven’t been advancements in technology like we’re talking about in this episode, the way that we track most of our media buys here at DigitalMarketer, they’re campaign specific so I do know the ROI per campaign. But I realize that the cold traffic campaigns, about 60% of our overall budget, I realize that without them we wouldn’t have the ROI on the other campaigns. If you looked at a spreadsheet and you said, “Oh, well these are the lowest ROI campaigns; turn them off,” no that’s the campaign that’s generating the awareness. That’s the first touch. |
| We’ve always looked at things in aggregate. We’re spending X amount on Facebook this month. What is our 30 day ROI? Cool! Our total spend, our ROI is positive after 30 days based off of our total spend, awesome! Can you get more granular that that? Of course and we do look at specific campaigns but it’s important, especially with your cold traffic campaigns, that you aren’t expecting them to generate awareness, lead sales, and make you a million dollars. I’m glad you touched on that. Facebook’s attribution is kind of set up to make those campaigns look even worse. | |
| Drew Tweito: | Yeah. You have to look at in aggregate. I mean, you can’t pull out. Typically we’ll do cold traffic and then we’ll have a retargeting campaign. Then we might have some other campaigns that are in it but we don’t really look at it as two separate or three separate campaigns. We aggregate them all together and say, “What is our overall ROI,” knowing full well that the last click wins on Facebook and there might have been other things that have influenced it along the way. The first click to the ad, that they didn’t buy, you paid for that traffic already. You might have paid for that 27 days ago. Then the three video view ads that you did but nobody clicked. They just watched the video as it played in the newsfeed, which they were consuming the content but they didn’t click on anything. That doesn’t get any credit either. |
| We look at everything in aggregate and then figure out what the total CPA is, including the deep seeded retargeting stuff that I think Ezra did an awesome job on Episode 63 and which is like deep, deep funnel retargeting including dynamic product ads. You don’t need to have an e-commerce store to be able to do it. But I know for a fact that he looks at everything as an aggregate even in his business and not necessarily just one campaign, or one ad, or one ad set because it all works together in synergy. | |
| Molly Pittman: | Yeah, so Andrew, it sounds like a lot of the feedback that we get is, “Facebook tracking is broken,” especially when comparing it to Google Analytics but it sounds more like you’re comparing apples to oranges. It’s not that one is broken. They’re just very different. |
| Drew Tweito: | Yeah, absolutely. Let’s talk about the reconciliation process and how to avoid going on these wild goose chases that suck up your team’s resources. This is where you’re going to run into a lot of issues and we’ll explain why that happens and how to avoid it. The first thing and the most important thing here is when things get reported. |
| One thing that’s really important and maybe this might be the biggest takeaway for people that single-handedly could change how you view your results and save you a ton of time and money is, Facebook reports conversions based on the time of the ad interaction, not the time of the conversion event. Your database, or your CRM, or wherever you’re looking at your orders and Google Analytics or any other analytics platform for that matter, they’re all going to report your conversions, and the value, and all that good stuff at the time of the conversion. If you have that situation where someone’s sending you a breakdown of daily results and they’re saying, “Well, on the 15th Facebook said four purchases but look, our database said we had 15. That right there in and of itself is an explanation of exactly why. Facebook is going to back propagate that conversion to the date of the last interaction. | |
| Molly Pittman: | Wow. |
| Ralph Burns: | That is huge. |
| Molly Pittman: | Wow. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. |
| Ralph Burns: | Not a lot of people understand. Can you just say that once again? |
| Drew Tweito: | Going back to Ralph’s example earlier, he clicked on the Facebook ad and converted seven days later. That conversion would show up in the ads manager reporting as a conversion on the day of the click, not on the day of the purchase. |
| Ralph Burns: | Big deal. |
| Drew Tweito: | Right and in Google Analytics it would show up on the day of the purchase. In your database it would show up, obviously, on the day of the purchase. |
| Ralph Burns: | Yep. |
| Drew Tweito: | I can’t tell you how many times people raise these issues about daily breakdowns and reconciling. I’m not telling you that you shouldn’t be reconciling and looking into your data but at the same time we have to separate signal from noise, right? Some of these things that we can spend an inordinate amount of time on, trying to go back and reconcile that is a waste of time. |
| Molly Pittman: | Of time, yeah. |
| Ralph Burns: | Yes, that’s a big, big discovery for anybody that’s listened to this podcast for a while because even though you may not understand that fundamentally as to why it occurs, it’s just that’s the way that it occurs but you’ll never be able to match up what you see in Facebook to where you collect the money. I mean unless you have a very small business or unless you’re looking at it in the right sort of timing commence but it’s never going to match 100%. |
| Drew Tweito: | But you’re exactly right. The numbers are not going to line up and it’s an exercise in futility to try to make them line up. |
| Molly Pittman: | What can people do, Andrew? How do you fix it? |
| Drew Tweito: | Well, I would say the first thing is, if you’re the person driving the race car, right, it helps to know a little bit about how the engine runs so understanding these underlying principles is just going to give you a little bit of clarity as to, well, now I know, based on this time difference thing, I have an idea. This gives you at least some information that you can use to make better decisions and avoid these things. |
| Now, there’s a couple other reasons why the reconciliation doesn’t line up that I’ll give you really quickly and then I’ll give you what I would recommend. What should you do then, if these are the things you shouldn’t do? Google Analytics, again, they report based on last touch by default and you can use other rule-based models in Google Analytics but I’m talking about in their campaign report view or kind of a traditional conversion view most people use in Google Analytics. They’re looking at last touch by default but they see all channels, right? | |
| If you click a Facebook ad and then you go search for the name of the company, like if I click DigitalMarketer’s ad, then I go to Google and I search DigitalMarketer training, Google Analytics would attribute that sale to the organic search. Facebook would attribute it to Facebook obviously. Google Analytics doesn’t see any view through Facebook conversions unless you have a really sophisticated setup with view-through tags, which not many people do. If you’re in Facebook Ads Manager and you’re in the default attribution window of 28-day click through, 1-day view through, you’re getting some view through conversions in there undoubtedly, especially if you’re looking at a retargeting campaign. That’s going to cause a big difference. | |
| The last thing, and this is really important, going back to our episode on the Facebook pixel is, Google Analytics and Facebook are both reliant on client side tracking. When I say client side tracking what I mean is they’re reliant on Java script that’s inserted into the browser to send data to their servers so that they can collect data about what happens on your website. Now, if you’ve used Google Analytics or Facebook Pixel you’re familiar with this, right? | |
| Ralph Burns: | Yep. |
| Drew Tweito: | They give you a snippet of code. They say, “Hey, go put this in the header of all the pages on your site and magically we can track everything that happens.” But this isn’t really what is going to happen. First of all, with clients I track, and there’s a lot of limitations mostly due to the fact that you’re dealing with people and the client, right, their device, a lot of different situations. People have ad blockers, right, so this is a huge one, especially with if you’re targeting younger demographics, right? I heard recently about a college class where they asked how many people had Ad Blocker on their laptop and this wasn’t even really a thing when I was that age but 90% of the class raised their hand. It’s almost like for that age group if you don’t have an ad blocker it’s weird. But ad blockers will block a lot of these requests, right, so the data being sent back and forth. Anyone who’s using that ad blocker software, they’re not going to be able to be tracked. |
| Molly Pittman: | Absolutely and I think that’s huge and it’s something that, you know, it’s hard to account for, right? How many people have ad blockers that are visiting my site? But just to give more context here, when we look at data inside of Facebook we usually almost assume that it’s under reporting even inside of Google too because of ad blockers. Keep that in mind. It’s literally something that you cannot track, invisible humans online. |
| Drew Tweito: | Exactly and we’re actually going to give you the solution to this at the end here. We’re going to give you a little bit of a cliffhanger. Now, the other things that impact these client side tracking and probably the biggest one is people that have pixel setups that aren’t optimal. Even if you have the most sophisticated pixel setup, right, you’re still going to miss on a lot of these. But now add to that the fact that most marketers or most organizations, even the big ones, even the biggest out there, they don’t have the pixel setup in the optimal way, right, where we’re tracking a purchase when the order’s submitted, not on the Thank You page. Ideally, we want to track the purchase, or the lead, or whatever when that even occurs. The event doesn’t occur when the next page loads. It occurs when the form is submitted, right? |
| For example, this happens all the time if I have a Lead Magnet, right, and then I have an upsell on the Thank You page, someone comes in, they opt in for the Lead Magnet and then I’m on this Thank You page. It’s got a video and it’s got a bunch of sales material, sales content. I’m looking through this. I’m reading through it trying to decide if I’m going to buy this next offer. Well, a lot of people might not buy right now but they’ll come back to that page later. If you’re firing your lead event on that next page view, when they come back it’s going to count as another lead because Facebook will reduplicate the same event for the same user but only in the course of, I think the window is three minutes. | |
| This is really important, right, because if you have a long sales page with a lot of content and people are coming back to watch the video again, blah, blah, blah, they might come back five times before they buy. Well, that’s going to count five leads. Whereas in your database, it’s one lead. That’s another huge thing that’s just kind of like the accuracy of how you’re setting up your Facebook Pixel and the events. | |
| Ralph Burns: | This is a very big deal and this is something that really has changed how we view our data inside the agency because I think in previous episodes we have talked about the value of custom conversions so that page view, that page loading on the Thank You page, which is fine to start with, but once you get really granular and you’re running a lot of traffic and every conversion really counts, you’re going to want a better solution to this, which Drew was going to talk about next, but this is a big, big deal. In fact, this actually happened this past week. We have a new customer. I bought their product and without even thinking, I went to her Thank You page and then I clicked back. Then I went, because I had clicked through on a Facebook ad, and I saw there was two conversions and it was me because I did it within the three minute window. |
| Molly Pittman: | Darn it Ralph! |
| Ralph Burns: | Like, damn it, you know, I’m screwing up the tracking already but this is a big deal so it is something that you have to keep an eye on, especially if you’re running large volumes of traffic. |
| Molly Pittman: | Right, and none of it is wrong, right? Like Andrew, you said earlier, none of this is a negative thing. It’s more so just helping everyone to understand how this works so that you can properly measure. |
| Drew Tweito: | It’s a tradeoff, right, kind of like we talked about in the Facebook Pixel episode. If your internal resources are kind of like the access that you have there to install the pixel and set it up is, “Well, I just kind of want to get the quickest thing to get me up and running. I know it’s not going to be right. I’m going to be using page view based conversions,” that’s okay. You just have to look at the data directionally, right, that you’re comparing campaigns. This goes to the question about, “Well, what do you do?” I’m not saying abandon your pixel. I’m not saying if you’re using page view based tracking you’re just completely doomed. What I’m saying is that it’s a tradeoff. The best pixel set ups that we’ve done and the most iron-clad, sophisticated ones, they take a lot of time, and planning, and cost to set up, right? These are not things that you just kind of fly by the seat of your pants and set up. There’s a tradeoff. You’re going to either get more accurate or you’re going to get it quicker. |
| Molly Pittman: | What is the solution? What is it? |
| Ralph Burns: | What could it be? |
| Drew Tweito: | I’m going to give you three solutions, two of which are out today, one of which will be coming soon. What we really need here, like after we talk through all of these problems and issues with pixels and how these platforms collect results is, what do we really need? We need cross channel, cross device, people based analytics. Now, that’s very difficult to build internally. You can do it but not to the scale at which there’s other companies out there who are better equipped. Who are the people that have access to cross device, a lot of cross device data? Who would you guess? There’s two big companies. Who would you guess they would be? |
| Molly Pittman: | Facebook. |
| Drew Tweito: | Yep, so Facebook. |
| Molly Pittman: | Google. |
| Drew Tweito: | Yep, exactly, right? Yep, Facebook, right, because you’ve got the app on your device and on your desktop. Google because it’s email typically, you know, or logging into Chrome. Those are two parties that are kind of set up to do this kind of stuff. Now, the other thing that we were going to do, right, is we don’t really want to sync events. We don’t really want to track results based on pixel buyers because of all the things we talked about. We want to track it based on what’s occurring in our database. We want to be able to sync our database, whatever events we track, back to Facebook. The answer is, number one, offline events. Now, if you have Business Manager you already have access to this. It’s in Business Manager’s settings. It’s like one of those things that Facebook put in there and- |
| Molly Pittman: | Didn’t tell anyone. |
| Drew Tweito: | I saw it like a hundred times and it was like, “Whatever, like I don’t know what that is. I don’t have time to look at it right now.” Then finally, like we got into a situation where we needed to help someone with major pixel issues. I started looking into it. What offline events are, is syncing data and events from your database back to Facebook. Now, what Facebook does is, you send them the person’s email, the phone number, the first name and last name, pretty much as much information as you can get similar to how you would onboard a custom audience from your CRM or whatnot. You’re going to upload that information in a row along with the event that occurred, is it a purchase, is it a lead, what is it and the value, right? |
| At a high level the offline event, and uploading offline events can be done through a spread sheet and it’s just basically a CSV of all your orders. You can do this today. You can go in there, you can export your orders from Shopify or whomever, Stripe, and you can upload them. Now, it’s manual and it kind of stinks because you have to transform the data a little bit but any event with a timestamp, the customer information, the type of event, and the value can be uploaded. Now, this is huge for everyone because of the pixel issues we talked about earlier but especially for brick and mortar/online hybrids or someone who’s just brick and mortar. You can imagine how important this is because what happens is after you upload that offline event data or that order data, Facebook then matches it back to the ads that person saw or clicked. | |
| Ralph Burns: | Ooh! |
| Molly Pittman: | Yeah and Andrew, this is also big. We have a sales team that’s making sales over the phone or via email so this huge for us because this is the way we sort of unveil the black hole that is, which ads are actually performing well? |
| Drew Tweito: | Absolutely and if you have an offline sales team, exactly, perfect use case because those sales are pretty big, right? You’re making sales that aren’t a couple bucks. We’re talking- |
| Molly Pittman: | Right. |
| Drew Tweito: | B2B sales, these are huge contracts in your situation, right? You go back to the point of where the systems unite, which would be, where’s the payment getting processed? Maybe you use Stripe. Maybe you use Braintree, whoever. You can get the data from there. Then I have all my transaction data. Now, one thing I’ll say about this, right, you don’t want to just throw your pixel out. What’ll happen when you onboard the offline event data is you’ll be able to pull it up in Ads Manager just like you do your pixel events. If you go under Customize Columns you’ll see Offline Events or you can click Customize Columns and pick what kind of offline events you want to see. |
| But as of today that I’ve seen, I have not seen the ability to optimize to offline event, right? You’re still going to need that pixel for the quick views, not click view but quick view and the optimization, right? Facebook needs that pixel data to optimize the ad spin but at least if you’re trying to reconcile results or you’re trying to have a secondary view, you don’t believe the numbers that you’re getting from the pixel, this will give it to you plus all the events that Facebook can’t see that might happen offline. | |
| Molly Pittman: | Awesome! |
| Ralph Burns: | That’s killer. |
| Molly Pittman: | Pretty mind blowing. |
| Ralph Burns: | Instead of it attributing that sale, that offline event, just to summarize, from the time of the ad interaction it will actually be the real time of the real conversion inside Facebook Ads Manager with offline events is what you’re saying. Would it override it, I guess is my question. |
| Drew Tweito: | It doesn’t override it because like Facebook is still going to see them as separate things right. The pixel events are in some columns and then the offline events are in other columns. |
| Ralph Burns: | Got it. |
| Drew Tweito: | Ideally the purchase value should match up 100% in a perfect world, right, but we know that’s not going to happen. We did this for a business Shopify store. We found that when we did the offline event connection that it attributed purchases at about 85% of what we were reporting through the pixel. It took about 15% haircut on overall conversion value but we were okay with that because we knew it’s closer to the truth. |
| Ralph Burns: | Right. |
| Drew Tweito: | We want the real results. We don’t really care to goose numbers. It’s not doing anyone any favors. |
| Molly Pittman: | Andrew, I think the biggest exciting thing here in terms of new stuff on Facebook is Facebook Analytics, right, which if you have access to this it’ll be in your Business Manager Menu, the navigation there at the top. If you do have access to offline events there will be an Offline Events button under the Assets tab. What we’re about to talk about is an Analytics button under the Measure and Report Tab. Andrew, do you want to tell us what this is because it’s pretty freaking cool? |
| Drew Tweito: | Facebook Analytics, right, so when we talked about earlier that we need cross channel, cross device analytic solutions, well, those are really expensive in the past or not even possible to get. But Facebook Analytics is kind of that, right? Facebook Analytics is this new tool. It’s almost like an analytics dashboard similar to Google Analytics where you can go in and you can pull in data from your pixel. They just launched support for Facebook Pages, which is incredible. I’ll give you an example in a second of why this is so important but what it does is it does people based measurement for your business, right? If you already have the Facebook Pixel setup on your site with all of these standard events, you’re already like primed and ready to go. You can go into Analytics and you can look at, where’s my revenue coming from? What are the demographics of those folks? You can create funnel reports like given a new website user, what percent are a lead, what percent at the cart purchase, and create segments just like Google Analytics for different traffic sources and all that good stuff. |
| Molly Pittman: | Right, so you could essentially track that someone liked a particular post, then saw your ad and maybe purchased. |
| Drew Tweito: | Exactly, yes. |
| Molly Pittman: | Your Customer Journey inside the Facebook platform, which is something we’ve never had insight into. Yeah, there are cool things like demographic information, and how many people are reacting to your post and sharing but the real cool thing is under funnels, and retention, and breakdowns. There’s so much to see here. |
| Drew Tweito: | It’s exciting because again they got it right. All this work they’ve been doing with building out this incredible ad tech and the way that they’ve built this ad system, it’s all people based. They got it right from day one and now this is like the pay-off pitch, right? This is where they have Facebook Analytics. This is the ability to see. On your website you can get your offline events we just talked about. You can get those in there. You can get page so I can say, “Tell me people who reacted to a certain post id. Give me their conversion rate through my funnel.” |
| Molly Pittman: | Wow! |
| Ralph Burns: | Awesome. |
| Drew Tweito: | Yep, so this is game changing kind of stuff. Then the other thing is, I know this is, I think available now and I’d be interested to talk to ManyChat about this is, you’ll also be able to pull in your Messenger Bot interactions as a source. |
| Molly Pittman: | Wow! |
| Drew Tweito: | Really gaining insane data and visual visibility. I think Facebook, you know, they’ve probably had this in the works for a long time but I do think that they probably felt a little heat from advertisers because of all the people saying, “Well, hey look, I just don’t believe what Facebook says. I don’t believe the results.” |
| Molly Pittman: | Right, Bot traffic. |
| Drew Tweito: | Yeah, exactly. The more clarity they give to people and the more they give these tools out, it’s almost like their way of giving the free content, right. They must have spent millions of dollars to aggregate all these systems and build something like this but in their eyes they’re like, “Well, we just want to help you find the truth.” |
| Molly Pittman: | Yeah, and Andrew, you’re so right. I’ve been talking to our partner manager about the offline events and this analytics dashboard and you know, of course they’re going to produce more information on it and we’ll be testing it. But I think the key here is that number one, you have to understand why numbers are different between your systems and Andrew explained it so well. The first step here is just understanding how things work, right? It’s not necessarily that something’s broken. It’s just the way that you look at the data in the different platforms. That’s the number one key here. |
| Then the next thing is that Facebook is wanting the tracking to be better, right? It is beneficial for their tracking and then now this analytics dashboard to be on point because the better the data, the better you can understand the data, the more that you’re going to trust Facebook and the more money you’re going to spend on the platform. I forecast that you will only see more and more advanced tracking options, more and more data and analytics that you can dive into inside of the platform because like you said, it’s better for the advertiser and we’re the ones that are spending the money. | |
| Ralph Burns: | I think they have so much data too. They probably just don’t know how to present it so that it makes it simple. I mean, we’re a fair bit into the explanation of all this stuff and I think this might be new news to a lot of people but I think there is going to be a platform or an update inside the Ads Manager that will help get to the bottom of this whole thing because the data’s there. It’s just a matter of being able to show it to the user in a usable way so they understand it. They can get value out of it. Then ultimately, they’ll spend more with Facebook because they realize that their ads are actually performing better than they probably thought that they were. Yeah, this is really important stuff here so it’s awesome to have you on the show here today. |
| Drew Tweito: | Thank you guys so much for having me. I think it’s important information and I hope folks get some value out of it. Maybe the last thing I’ll say about, I said there was three solutions, there’s a rumor. I’m not going to confirm nor deny this information but I have heard that the analytics platform is kind of the baby step and then the next big thing would be what we talked about earlier with the basketball analogy would be the multi-touch attribution solution. |
| Molly Pittman: | Yeah, which would be amazing. Well, thank you so much Andrew. Where can they learn more about you? I heard you had a little course that explains more about all of this fun analytics stuff. |
| Drew Tweito: | Yeah, absolutely. FunnelBoom.com is our main website. You can get in touch with us there. I have a short mini course that covers some of this same content and a lot more at pro.funnelboom.com/famm so Facebook Add Measurement and Mastery is the name of the mini course. I have it up there for pay what you want for now maybe for like the next seven days and then I’ll start charging for it. But I want to give the audience here a chance to go get it. You can pay whatever you want for it. It’s a Gumroad kind of deal. I don’t know if you guys are familiar with Gumroad products but go to pro.funnelboom.com/famm and then you can get your access there. |
| Keith Krance: | This has been epic, epic and once again you can check out anything that Andrew referenced on the episode at the Show Notes at digitalmarketer.com/podcast. This is Episode 95. |
| Molly Pittman: | Thanks, Andrew. |
| Ralph Burns: | Thanks, Andrew. |
| Drew Tweito: | Thank you. |
| Keith Krance: | Hopefully you enjoyed it you listener and we will talk to you on the next one. |
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