Fix Bad Facebook Ads Reporting

Are you using Facebook Ads Manager to track your return on ad spend?

POST iOS 14 FACEBOOK ADS REPORTING ISSUE

If so there's a good chance that you could be missing out on a lot of potential sales and wasting your hard earned dollars on poor performing ads.

Since the rollout of Apple's iOS 14 last year, Facebook has struggled to report conversions with the accuracy that it had in the past. While it still does a great job of reporting how many people clicked on your ad, it loses visibility once those people navigate to your website. This means that critical metrics like Add-To-Cart, Purchase, and Return On Ad Spend (ROAS) are being highly under reported by Facebook.

As a result, many advertisers are turning off strong performing ads because Facebook Ads Manager is incorrectly reporting them as having a low return on ad spend. By turning off these ads you could be missing out on a ton of sales.

FIX FOR BAD FACEBOOK ADS REPORTING

The solution is Google Analytics and Facebook URL Builder. Google Analytics, the undisputed champion for analytics, is a FREE tool that plugs into your website, allowing you to monitor and analyze all traffic activity (i.e. Add-To-Cart, Purchase, Pages Visited, and everything else you can think of). Facebook URL builder is a FREE built-in tool located within the ad settings (i.e. FB ads manager > Campaign > Ad Set > Ad) and used to create custom links to identify traffic coming from each ad you run. The solution is to use the Facebook URL Builder to uniquely tag each of your ads and then use Google Analytics to monitor, track and report on performance for each of those ads. The benefit of the unique links is that you can now track exactly what ad the user came from (specifically using Google Analytics). The key to using Google Analytics is twofold: one, being connected to Google, it has significantly more resources to make sense of traffic data than Facebook; two, it will attribute sales to only one source (i.e. sale came from either FB, IG, Adwords, Organic, or etc) so you don't have to worry about double attribution.

Using these two tools in conjunction is a must have for Facebook ads performance measurement post iOS 14. This solution can help you better understand the effectiveness of your Facebook ads by identifying where your website visitors are coming from, what they are doing and which of your ads are really driving sales. And best of all, it's free!

With better reporting my t-shirt brand was able to make better decisions on which ads to cut and which to keep, which resulted in much higher sales and profit. Given how much of a game-changer this tool has been for my business, it's surprising that more people aren't talking about it.

If you're running Facebook ads, you should absolutely be using this. While it might all sound a bit intimidating, this solution is actually very simple to use once set up properly and could help you improve your sales and save you money. Who doesn't like that!

SUMMARY

If you're using Facebook Ads Manager to track your return on ad spend. Stop and reevaluate NOW. They lost a lot of data post iOS 14, which means you're not seeing the accuracy you once saw... meaning you could be cutting high performing ads unknowingly. There's a much better solution: connecting Google Analytics to your website and then building unique ad links using the built-in Facebook URL builder. It may sound difficult, but once you have this process setup it is super easy and could have a significant impact for your true Return On Ad Spend (ROAS).

OPTIONS FOR HELP SETTING THIS UP

If you think you'll need full service support to do the one-time setup for this then feel free to reach out to us at [email protected]. You can also check out our Google Analytics Bootcamp which hand holds you through every step of the setup process both in Google and Facebook. 

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