Correct tagging in Facebook Ads ensures that any campaigns you run are correctly reported in both Facebook Analytics and Google Analytics.
Correct tagging in Facebook Ads ensures that any campaigns you run are correctly reported in both Facebook Analytics and Google Analytics.
Facebook recently announced the release of several new dynamic tracking parameters - See https://www.facebook.com/business/help/1016122818401732 for more details.
Although Facebook touches on the topic of UTM tags for Google Analytics, their explanation falls some way short of being effective.
This document aims to address that by showing the tags that you should use for different types of campaigns.
In a recent article published by Spades Media - https://drive.google.com/open?id=1DCW1oNf4rhWhvU_PXnmBeqYq-LnI-e6wHuQmDmQt4b4 we went over the creation of a number of audiences that can be used within Google Analytics and Google Adwords.
One of the sections in that document covered the Channel Remarketing Lists - http://bit.ly/2r1bgmK
Cross-Channel conversions account for a significant number of conversions for most companies, but due to poor tracking these normally get incorrectly attributed.
Using the tagging parameters in Facebook, combined with the Channel Remarketing Lists in Google Analytics gives you the best possible chance of understanding the user journey and how you can capitalise on the journeys and attribute any revenue correctly.
Spades Media considers the following to be our best practise. Others will have different views, and you are welcome to vary these suggestions to suit your own business requirements.
Campaign Types
There are three “types” of campaigns we would expect our advertisers to run.
These are :
- Paid Social campaigns
- Remarketing campaigns
- Video campaigns
Paid social encompasses many of the tactics you might run, but broadly speaking they cover advertisers looking for “conversions” whether those conversions are sales, leads, subscriptions, add to cart, initiate checkout.
Remarketing encompasses the tactics surrounding remarketing and could include traffic from other channels (e.g. Google Adwords), other Facebook campaigns, (e.g. remarketing to abandoned carts, remarketing to custom audiences created after seeing 50% of a video). This primarily is a warmer type, so the traffic volume would be expected to be less and the conversion rate would be expected to be higher.
Video encompasses the tactics where you are using video primarily for either conversion or for audience building. You will expect to get some conversions, but overall the CPA will be higher. Typically you look at results of video campaigns in conjunction with a remarketing audience that might be created on the back of the video views.
Parameter Types
The following are the dynamic parameters you may want to consider using.
site_source_name
values show the Facebook platform that the ad appeared on and will include Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, and Audience Network.
These parameter values will appear in Google Analytics (when you pass the parameter as follows:
- fb
- ig
- msg
- an
placement
values show where the ad appeared on the Facebook platform and will include Facebook desktop News Feed, Facebook mobile News Feed, Facebook right column, Messenger inbox, and Instagram Feed and Instagram Stories.
These parameter values will appear in Google Analytics (when you pass the parameter as follows:
- Facebook_Desktop_Feed
- Facebook_Mobile_Feed
- Facebook_Right_Column
- Messenger_Home
- Instagram_Feed
- Instagram_Stories
names and ID’s
for ad, ad set, and campaign the values will dynamically populate based on your ad setup information.
When you create an ad, you input a name and an ID is automatically assigned by Facebook. These are the values that will be used for the name and ID URL dynamic parameters.
These names and ID’s pass in the open when people hover over your URL’s so you may want to, either, give your campaigns non-descript names that don’t give up too much data about your strategies, or, pass the numeric campaign, ad set and ad ID’s and not the actual campaign names.
You can (if you wish) use a search and replace filter in Google Analytics, to find the campaign, adset or ad ID and replace it with the campaign name, adset or ad ID, but it can be time consuming to do so if you have a number of campaigns, ad sets and ads on the go.
You just need to do a Search and Replace, and find the string of the campaign.id or adset.id or ad.id and replace it with the names you want to use. We recommend you mirror what is in your Facebook account, so you are able to identify the assets in case you need to change anything.
