Why You Should Be Using Facebook’s Conversions API

Facebook’s Conversions API can reveal much about your online customers, which products they prefer, and how they respond to different advertising messages and formats. The API, designed to answer the continual privacy and operating system challenges impacting digital advertisers, has a lot to offer when its best practices are properly observed.

Here’s how marketers seeking efficient ad delivery methods can get the most out of the Facebook Conversions API.

What Does the Facebook Conversions API Do?

Anytime your business utilizes an API (shorthand for “application programming interface”), you’re allowing a pair of applications to communicate freely with one another. With the Facebook Conversion API, branded websites can pass data back and forth with the Facebook platform to better understand how to optimize site conversions.

Facebook’s Conversion API is also what makes it possible to dive into the specifics behind ad performance and customer behavior. With the combined information gathered by Facebook’s servers and branded website tracking data, advertisers can capture an accurate snapshot of their efforts in every phase of the funnel — and identify potential chokepoints hindering further growth.

Benefits of Using the Facebook Conversions API

Understanding the full advantages of Facebook’s Conversions API begins with understanding Facebook’s current predicament. A combination of iOS updates, privacy regulations, and countless other changes governing digital data usage over the past few years has driven the social media giant to create a mutually beneficial API.

For its ad partners, the API leads to a more accurate customer profile thanks to Facebook’s ability to match buying activity with specific users found among its massive global network. In exchange, Facebook is able to overcome limited attribution windows and other regulatory obstacles with valuable user activity data, transferred directly from its ad partners’ websites to Facebook’s own servers.

The result is a relationship that optimizes ad performance by helping Facebook make “smarter” decisions based on the data you feed it; as third-party cookies continue their disappearing act and consumer privacy safeguards like VPNs and ad-blockers grow more commonplace, the API will become increasingly vital for digital marketers.

Facebook’s own business help center lists the following advantages for deploying the Conversions API:

-Reduced cost per action as a result of improved connectivity
-Optimized ads for actions that happen later in the customer’s journey
-Improved measurement
-Reduced cost per action as a result of increased event matching
-Increased data control

How to Add the Facebook Conversions API

Getting an API to “talk” to your website and vice versa is simple (and free!) for sites built on the extremely common Shopify, WooCommerce, Wix, or BigCommerce platforms. For those not working off of these ecommerce platforms, Facebook created an elegant solution via the Conversions API Gateway, which also calls for a code-free and relatively easy setup (one that won’t require a full-day visit from your IT team).

For new businesses or those not yet utilizing the Facebook platform, setting up Facebook Business Manager and the Facebook Pixel will serve as prerequisites to using the Conversions API.

How to Use the API

The folks over at Facebook are eager to help their ad partners see the benefits of the API, which is likely why it’s so easy to find best practices directly from the source when seeking tips on setup and ad optimization.

First, it’s recommended to draw data both from the API and the Meta Pixel, even if both tools often record the same events. Redundant setups keep important data from slipping through the cracks due to odd technical errors or page loading failures and act as a natural check on one another to highlight any irregularities.

Second, marketers should learn their way around Facebook’s event match grading scale. Event match quality is rated from “Poor” and “Okay” to “Good” or even “Great.” This is essentially Facebook’s confidence rating in how closely a user profile matches the activity of a live customer on your website. When the API is able to determine who your specific customers are, it can effectively target future campaigns and ads based on that user’s relevant interests — and without the need for cookies, or by violating any privacy mandates. As always, more data (ie. more tracked events) makes for a clearer image of your prospective shoppers.

Other factors, including timely communication with the API and regularly monitoring your data, can further streamline the API’s overall efficiency.

---

Ready to update your digital marketing strategy and build your business?
Our experts are here to help.

Contact Us Today!