Facebook Conversions API: What Marketers Need to Know About it
Facebook Conversion API, formerly known as Facebook Server-Side API, is engineered to help businesses facilitate effective maintenance of privacy without compromising on delivering personalized advertisement experiences to target audiences and customers.
Advertising has evolved a lot from printing manual pamphlets to going digital over the years. Today, however, things are different! Currently, the advertising industry is entirely dependent on data, and the credit for it goes to the latest advancements in technology.
With more people accessing the internet for almost everything from shopping to consulting a doctor, advertising and digital marketing agencies now access valuable information from browsers.
This gives advertising agencies a better understanding of the needs and interests of people, allowing them to maximize their advertising efforts by facilitating effective digital marketing campaigns based on the requirements of customers.
The Evolving Game
Evolution is a part of development, and this is the case for these agencies. However, things are not always easy and breezy for them. For example, the privacy concerns raised by customers worldwide have forced search engines to regulate or restrict third parties from accessing search history and cookies.
As cookies are no longer the nucleus of digital marketing strategies, the recent measures to safeguard users' privacy include the Intelligent Tracking Prevention (ITP) systems which keep browsers data completely concealed from other third-party advertising agencies.
If that is the current situation, what is the solution to solve these complexities? Well, the solution is called Facebook Conversion API.
Facebook Conversion API: What is it all-About?
The best Facebook Conversion API is that it does all that without depending on any browser-based tools such as cookies. Facebook Conversion API is exhaustive as it provides businesses with meaningful insights and tools that help them facilitate effective, personalized advertising experiences for customers. Some of its offerings include:
Accurate Data Sharing
Businesses that share data with Facebook's Conversion API are not required to worry about the accuracy of the data. The data shared through Facebook Conversion API is far more accurate than any other methods included in the lower funnel or middle funnel. Therefore, businesses do not drop a sweat about data getting lost due to an ad blocker or an unprecedented browser crash.
Comprehensive Visibility of the Funnel
When businesses use Facebook Conversion API, it gives them the capability to share the exact data they want and nothing more than that. This is far better than the current offerings of Facebook Pixel. If a business can successfully bring together Facebook Conversion API and Pixel, they easily enjoy comprehensive funnel visibility.
How?
As we know, Pixel offers businesses an insight into the actions carried out on the website, and these actions could be anything from purchase to page view. Nonetheless, combining this with the conversion API provides us with genuine, extensive information about the customer journey.
Further, using this methodology, businesses can generate insights on actions such as if customers are making purchases offline and if a customer converts into a paying customer after their free trial is over.
Enhanced Authority over Data
Businesses using the Facebook Conversion API can enjoy enhanced control over the data shared by the business.
Therefore, businesses using the Facebook Conversion API can use the server to share data with Facebook instead of sharing data with the browser. This way, when someone uses any privacy tool for doing non-Facebook activities, their actions can be extended to the data sent through the Conversion API.
Facebook Conversion API: How Can it be Used?
The first myth that we need to clarify is that Facebook Conversion API is not a replacement or substitute for Facebook Pixel. In addition, businesses targeting iOS users must understand that Facebook Conversion API is not a way to keep things the way they were before the launch of iOS 14. But businesses can combine and use it with Facebook Pixel.
Facebook Pixel has two primary uses that include tracking and gathering insights on user behaviour and connecting this with the Facebook profile of the users. Secondly, it was used to measure conversions and events to monitor the success of the advertising campaign.
All of that was enough until iOS 14, when the only hurdle was ad blockers that caused issues leading to reporting inconsistencies from the data.
This is where Facebook Conversion API comes into action. As we know, Facebook can enhance conversion and reporting measurement events by leveraging the data from the server and Pixel.
What Makes Facebook Conversion APIs Different?
Assuming that a business is providing Facebook with the required information, that includes the event name and ID of Facebook Pixel, an automated duplication procedure built into the Facebook Conversion API ensures that any similar events gathered by Pixel are not reported more than once.
But then again, one might wonder if this creates a double conversion event where one comes from Facebook Conversion API's end and the other from Facebook Pixel's end. Nonetheless, there is no need to be concerned about that because Facebook already has a fix for it.
The Event Match Quality feature found in the event manager capacity can be used to set up and send out events with the help of Facebook Conversion API. In addition, this feature can be used for every feature, which enables businesses to generate scores based on the number of successful Facebook matches based on the information available on the Facebook account.
Facebook Conversion API leverages everything from the phone number, usernames, city, email address, state, IP address, and even browser type to access the user data key.
Unfortunately, these user data keys remain anonymous for visitors unless the customer or visitor decides to register using a certain entry field. This results in the Facebook Conversion API employing different data keys that are not very trustworthy for the browser ID or IP address.
Limitations of Facebook Conversion API
Nothing in this world is perfect, and similarly, there are certain limitations that businesses have to deal with while using the Facebook Conversion API. People often assume Facebook Conversion API to be a replacement for Facebook Pixel, but in reality, it cannot entirely replace Pixel for different reasons.
For instance, the conversion API can only collect data from the final part of the customer journey. It cannot provide businesses with a comprehensive view of the journey. Therefore, businesses will still need Facebook Pixel to track the lower and the middle layers of the advertising funnel.
Facebook Conversion API can only provide businesses with data provided by the customers and stored on the website’s server. Therefore, the Facebook Conversion API will always need contact details such as phone numbers or email addresses to connect different events such as Checkouts, Page Views, Add to Carts, and more.
Conclusion
All in all, Facebook Conversion API is a great tool used by marketers and advertisers worldwide. It enables businesses to achieve enhanced outcomes by providing them with valuable insights on the funnel journey of the customer. This allows businesses to personalize and customize the advertisement experiences without any additional complexities.