Facebook Ads, Google Ads, and Analytics Conversion and Event Tracking

The proof is in the tracking

Photo by Rodion Kutsaev on Unsplash

• Overview of Events
• Facebook Conversions and Events
• Google Analytics Events and Goal Completions
• Google Ads Conversions

Overview of Events

Events are actions people take on your website. Some everyday events are making a purchase, downloading a PDF, becoming a lead, or adding an item to their cart. You can create an event from any action a user takes online. For example, you can create an event that “fires” when a user watches a specified length of a video.

The primary usage of events is to create conversions. Conversions are the most valuable actions a person takes on your website, making them fundamental in measuring digital marketing performance.

Only the most critical events are used for conversions, while secondary events are often used as reference points for auxiliary analysis.

Events are important because they give you a clear picture or piece of the puzzle as to the user’s intent and purpose in visiting your website.

Even if the user doesn’t take the most valuable action, creating a conversion, more minor actions can give you an idea of why they visited your site in the first place.

Another example of the valuable data you can retrieve from an event is when a visitor visits your ecommerce site, places something in the cart, but does not complete a purchase. We commonly referred to this action as the user “abandoning the cart.” A cart abandonment let you know there was practical purchase intent with this individual even though they stopped short of making a purchase, making this event worth your attention.

With events, you can:

• Improve the user-friendliness of a website.
• Inform the website’s design so that you can be adapt the website to the needs of the user.
• Inform algorithms and automated systems which actions are essential to your business.
• Trigger automated processes.
• Inform optimization decisions for your website as well as digital marketing campaigns.

Also worth mentioning is recording specially defined events, so-called custom events. They can be used for unique widgets such as price queries or weather queries and provide insight into interaction with website elements that provide additional functionality but are not integral to the HTML file.

Therefore, event tracking is essential for a comprehensive picture of user interaction and a user-friendly website design.

Facebook Conversions and Events

Managing custom conversions, custom events, and standard events can get tricky. The question arises, “In what scenario should you use which?” Below is a comparison of each.

Standard Events

Facebook Ads Standard events are events with predefined names that Facebook’s systems recognize and support across its optimization, audience, reporting, and analytics features. Standard events are the best option for most scenarios since they give you the most stable, long-term conversion tracking solution for your campaigns. They are more accurate, offer better reporting data, and leave less room for errors than custom conversions.

Although custom conversions offer more nuance as far as the complexity of your conversions, standard events serve as the foundation for your campaign tracking needs. In other words, when you take the time to set up your standard events correctly, you make your life easier down the line since you take those standard events and detailed audiences, reports, and custom conversions.

Here’s a list of standard conversions currently available:

• add payment info
• add to cart
• add to wishlist
• contact
• customize product
• donate
• find location
• initiate checkout
• lead
• purchase
• schedule,
• search
• start trial
• submit application
• subscribe
• view content
• complete registration

Custom conversions

Custom conversions should be named “conversions” since there are no “standard conversions” for Facebook Ads. The truth is, Facebook Ads treats standard events as standard conversions, leaving the rare dirty work to custom conversions. Custom conversions come in handy when you have an advanced conversion you would like to track that needs rules to specify a particular action or set of actions.

Let’s say you’re a marketer at Nike and you have a new shoe, “GalaxyAir” you would like to advertise. You know people usually visit your “NEW Products” page to check out new shoes. Therefore, you want to track sales of the new shoe. However, you specifically want to track GalaxyAir sales from visitors of your NEW Products page who click on the GalaxyAir link, land on the GalaxyAir page, and proceed to make a purchase. You want to gauge the effectiveness of this funnel. Maybe this customer journey isn’t the best way to drive sales, and you need to test a new customer journey.

Custom conversions allow you to use custom or standard events, URLs, and rules to create conversions. You can create the conversion from an event and specify a URL-based, referring domain, or event parameter rule. You can also use all website traffic and create a rule based on a URL on your site or a referring domain. Think of rules as filtering mechanisms.

You can only use “event parameters” as a rule if the event you’re referencing was set up the event with parameters.

Custom Events

Custom events come in handy for odd or secondary actions that fall outside Facebook’s standard set of events. I avoid setting up custom events since custom conversions usually pick up where standard events leave off. Remember, when you use standard events, you can use those events to create custom conversions.

Custom events are not currently available with Facebook’s Aggregate Measurement Protocol.

Google Analytics Events and Goal Completions

Google Analytics Events

Events are getting a promotion with Google Analytics 4. They use to serve a role similar to the role they play in Facebook, as a conduit for conversions (called goal completions in GA) and other important actions on your website or app. Not any more. Instead of using the old dichotomy of users, sessions, and hits, broken down into pageviews, shares, transactions, etc.

G4 unifies Google Analytics data under event tracking. If any action on a website can be an “event,” why not do just that, make all interactions “events”? This is what G4 has done. Every interaction is automatically tracked as an event by Google Analytics and it’s up to you to segment, create and modify events that G4 automatically tracks, as well as the option to make new events.

G4 is relatively new, so chances are you’ll still be using Google Analytic’s current setup, Universal Analytics. Under UA, your event is implemented by placing an event tracking code on your website. The event tracking code is separate from the UA Google Analytics tag. It’s kind of sad that’ll it’ll be a thing of the past in a few years because I love the logic. The basic structure of a javascript event code is below and you can easily place it with the “<a” tag of your links.

onclick=” ga(‘send’, ‘event’, ‘Category’, ‘Action’, ‘Label’, ‘Value’);”

As you can see, the event code is composed of four data points to send back to Google Analytics once the code is fired, two required and two optional data points:

• Category (required) — category of actions
• Action (required) — a type of action
• Label (optional) — a specific action
• Value (optional) — numeric value to the event being tracked

Here’s what the code looks like on The Solar Republic:

<a href=”www.thesolarrepublic.com/Solar_System_Guide.xlsx” onclick=”ga(‘send’, ‘event’, ‘Excel’, ‘Download’, ‘SS_Guide’);“>The Solar System Guide </a>

The most common uses of GA event tracking are button clicks, video play a video, form submissions, and downloading files.

Google Analytics Goal Completions

Google Analytics Goals completions are the conversions of GA. Like conversions, they measure how effective your site or app is at driving actions that contribute to the success of your business. They can also be shared with your Google Ads account to be used as conversions.

There are three levels of the Google Analytics account, the account, view, and property. Goal completions are set at the view level. There are 5 types of goals that cover the interactions you want to track as conversions on your website.

• Destination — a destination URL that serves as a goal
• Duration — an amount of time that serves as a goal
• Pages/Screens per session — a number of pages or screens that serves as a goal.
• Event — An event that serves as a goal.
• Smart Goals — A goal determined by GA consisting of high-quality site visits.

Google Ads Conversions

Google Ads conversions work a little differently than Facebook conversions. First, Google Ads doesn't house its own events. However, there is a little more flexibility in how conversions are created with its “imported conversions” feature. Technically, you can import conversions into Facebook Ads, but that process is not as straightforward as importing conversions to Google Ads.

There are four types of Google Ads conversions, website conversions, app conversions, phone calls, and imported conversions. For the most part, most people use website conversions and imported conversions. Of course, if you’re driving app downloads or phone calls, you’ll want to use the other two.

Every conversion has four essential components: goal and action optimization, a value, a count, a conversion window, and an attribution model.

Goal and action optimization — Google Ads groups conversions into three categories: sales, leads, and “other”. These categories are there to help you organize your conversions in the conversion interface and segment your reports. The action optimization feature is essential to helping Google prioritize conversions when optimizing your campaigns.

Values — sets the numerical value of a conversion. Most people only think of values in terms of eccomerce. However, the value of a conversion has an unexpected value, it can inform Google as to how you value leads. Let’s say you have three conversions you want to track or optimize too, however they need to be prioritized to let Google know the importance of each conversion. Setting a value informs Google that in any given circumstance, prioritize traffic that is more likely to convert using your highest priority conversion. You can use this technique by selecting maximize conversion value as a bidding strategy. Also, keep in mind that you’ll need historical conversion and conversion value data for this strategy to be effective.

Count — This feature determines how many conversions are counted per click or interaction. The two choices are “every” and “one.” It’s essential to count multiple or “every” conversion when it comes to ecommerce since one customer can make multiple purchases. Without this setting, only one Purchase would be counted per website visit.

Conversion Window — Your conversion window is the period between users’ first interaction with an ad and when they converted. There are three conversion windows, click-through conversion, engaged-view conversion, and a view-through conversion.

Most conversion windows are pretty small, consisting of a day or two; however, some businesses that sell high-ticket items have a larger conversion window. These businesses will most likely need to increase their conversion window to see which keywords drive conversions or conversion value.

Attribution model — An attribution model is a set of rules that determine how to attribute, or credit, sales, and conversions back to clicks, ads, and marketing channels as the user sometimes travels complex conversion paths. Many users click ads or travel to a site many times for actually making a purchase.

With the Last Click attribution model, when the user finally makes a purchase, that sale is attributed to the last ad the user clicked on. The first ad the user clicks on will get credit for that sale with the first click attribution model. Other models will divide the attribution between ads or attribute a little more to the last ad clicked.