What You Need To Know About Facebook Conversions API?

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As we move towards a cookieless world, the way that Facebook collects data is changing. Over the last few months, many brands have seen a significant decline in performance, and with more changes coming, things are only going to get worse.

Learning how to implement the Facebook Conversions API now will help your business continue to benefit from your investment in social advertising on both Facebook & Instagram. 

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Third Party Cookies Are On the Way Out

Within the next 6-18 months, third party cookies will be banned from internet browsers. That includes the Facebook Pixel, which we’ve relied on for key event data to inform our campaign optimisations.

Without the Facebook pixel in place, data will no longer be sent to Facebook for reporting in Ads Manager, and crucially, this will prevent conversion data from being collected to feed the optimisation algorithms. 

The pixel was essential to garner key information such as which people were most likely to convert, what times of the day, which formats and on which platforms, subgroups of your target audience converted most frequently. 

As a result, as soon as this implementation is made for all browsers, Facebook performance will dip significantly. 

What Can We Do To Maintain Our Performance?

Meta has offered a potential solution to this problem in the form of the Facebook Conversions API or “CAPI”. The CAPI is a gateway that allows data to be passed from your website to Facebook - once installed, the data passed to Facebook will  enable algorithm optimisations, ad personalization, and the measurement of performance. 

How Does It Differ From The Facebook Pixel? 

The Facebook Pixel retrieves all the data stored in a browser’s cookies and associates that data back to its individual users. With CAPI, Facebook is relying on its advertisers to tell it when an action has taken place, so that this action can be recorded.  

This means that users’ privacy can be honoured and businesses have greater control over the data that they share with Meta. 

Benefits of CAPI

1. Costs: Costs can be reduced by adequate event matching - the API feeds back key customer information to ensure event matching is fully optimised. Ultimately, you will get a much truer picture of Cost Per Acquisition. 
2. Optimisation: CAPI enables businesses to optimize for actions that typically happen later in the customer’s journey - such as subscriptions after a purchase. Critically, with  more conversion data, the algorithms can work a lot harder. 
3. Measurement: CAPI allows for better measurement of full funnel ad performance and the overall effect social has on your digital advertising.
4. Data Control: The Conversions API gives you more control of what you share and when you share it.
   

Setting Up CAPI For Your Business

At adaptive, we provide solutions to ensure your Facebook and Instagram (Meta) performance won’t dip and your business will continue to see value from Meta’s social platforms.   

We do this by:

1. Creating a routing server on a sub-domain, setting up the event data to match your campaign goals, and connecting your new server to Facebook’s ad servers through an API connection.  
2. This sets up tracking to run alongside the Facebook Pixel so that performance can be measured regardless of browser restrictions.
3. adaptive ensures that conversion data is deduplicated so that your reported results are accurate.

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If you would like to discuss how we can help your business set up Facebook Conversions API, please reach out to our Paid Social lead at lyle@adaptive.ie. 

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