If you’re one of the ten million businesses advertising on Facebook, you may be wondering how all those clicks and impressions translate to your website KPIs.
Sure, Facebook’s analytics will tell you how many people are seeing your ads, clicking through to your website, and buying something — but what does their journey look like once they arrive on site? Are your Facebook ads visitors clicking through to multiple pages, or converting immediately? What pages are they viewing?
For a full picture of your Facebook advertising performance, you need to be tracking your ads in Google Analytics as well.
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How to track Facebook Ads in Google Analytics in 3 steps
You can find your Facebook traffic in Google Analytics by navigating to Acquisition > All Traffic > Source/Medium and typing “facebook” into the search box. But this only tells you how many people are coming to your website from Facebook in general.
It does not separate your organic Facebook traffic from your paid campaigns, or break down the traffic at an individual ad level.
To see that, you’ll need to add URL parameters to the website URL you use in your Facebook ad campaigns.
Here’s how to set those up.
Step #1: Create your trackable URL with URLparameters.
You can add URL parameters in either Facebook Ads Manager or Google Analytics.
- In Facebook Ads Manager, click “URL Parameters” when creating or editing an ad. Then click “Build a URL Parameter.”
- In Google, click this link to access their URL Builder.
Both URL builders function the same way. You don’t have to fill out every field. Here’s what we recommend:
- Website URL: Enter the URL for your campaign.
- Campaign source: Type in “facebook” (without the quotation marks around it).
- Campaign medium: Type in “ppc” or “paid” (again, without the quotation marks around it). This way, you can easily separate the traffic from your organic Facebook traffic.
- Campaign name: Enter the name of your campaign. If you’re using the Facebook URL builder, you can save yourself the trouble of typing by selecting {{campaign.name}} in the drop-down menu.
- Additional parameters: In Facebook Ads Manager, you can add additional parameters. You can add one for the “adset” (select {{adset.name}} from the drop-down menu) and one for each individual “ad” (select {{ad.name}} from the drop-down menu).
When you choose options from the drop-down menu for your campaign name, ad set, and ad, Facebook will populate those fields with the data you’re using for your Facebook campaign structure. Pretty handy!
Step #2: Add your trackable URL to your Facebook campaigns.
Once you’ve filled everything out, Facebook or Google will create the URL for you, with the parameters tacked on to the end. All you have to do is add it to your campaign. If you created the URL on Facebook, Facebook will add it for you. If you created it in Google, simply copy and paste it into your Facebook ad.
Step #3: Check out the data in Google Analytics.
Once your Facebook campaign is up and running, you can track its performance in Google Analytics. Again, navigate to Acquisition > All Traffic > Source/Medium.
Under Source/Medium, you’ll see a drop-down menu for Secondary dimension. Select Campaign.
This will add a second column to your Google Analytics view that shows you the traffic and conversion data for each Facebook campaign in an individual row.
Get more ROI from your Facebook Ads campaigns
Setting up tracking is step one. Then comes the tough part: analyzing the data. If you’re wondering why your campaigns just aren’t performing as well as they think they could, or why there’s a discrepancy between your Facebook Ads and Google Analytics data, call in the pros. At Your Marketing People, our ads experts can develop custom reporting for you, identify additional campaign opportunities, and squeeze more ROI from your campaigns. Contact us today.
