Reliable Facebook Ad tracking possible?

Jason Thomas

Hi All,


We've been struggling to reliably track Facebook ad conversions for our Teamraiser events. Anyone else run into this problem?


We run Facebook ads to encourage folks to register or to donate to an event. The URLs we typically use on Facebook ads look like something this:


Registration:

http://orgname.convio.net/site/TR?fr_id=0000&pg=entry&s_src=XXXXX-2018-XX-5K-Aug-Facebook-Ad-Past-Participants&s_subsrc=XXXXX


When we go around to reviewing reports in LO, and inspect the SOURCE_CODE column, we get empty cells for most of our registrations. We expect see the highlighted string on text in the report -- since we're using the s_src parameter in the URL. **We use a similar URL structure for both our emails and our facebook ads. Email source code tracking is spotty-at-best. Facebook src tracking is not at all.


I remember speaking with a Blackbaud dev earlier this year who seemed to think the issue might be that we're not using an SSL certificate (HTTPS) on our teamraiser site. And that when folks click from FB back to our TR site, the URL string gets broken do this fact.


So, we thought I reach out to the community before potentially exploring this costly potential fix.


So, to wrap things up? Do you run Facebook Ads to promote your teamraiser events? If so, what do your URLs look like? And can you share an example screenshot of how your LO reports track those ads?


Thanks!

Jason

 

Erik Leaver

Hi Jason,


Have you tried replacing the first part of the url http://orgname.convio.net/site/... with the secure prefix: https://secure2.convio.net/SHORTNAME/site/... (note depending on your site this might be secure2 or secure3)? That might help with any issues with the redirect.


You might revisit the custom SSL certificate. The pricing structure changed this year and it's much more affordable.


Best,

Erik

Jeremy Reynolds

Jason,


You'll be better off setting up a facebook pixel (https://business.facebook.com/ads/manager/pixel/facebook_pixel) and installing that into your site. It's good to include s_src/subsrc on your ad itself (along with UTM tags for google analytics), but in my experience it doesn't always pass through. Plus, you won't be able to tell who converted a couple days later. I like to put the code for the pixel into pagebuilder, then include it in several page wrappers using S51.


Much more importantly, a pixel will let you re-target your visitors with follow up ads. I cannot stress enough just how important that is for maximizing your ad budget. We get 4x-5x return on ad spend with pixel-targeted audiences, as opposed to something more like a 0.08% return on geo-targeted/interest/lookalike audiences on Facebook.


As for the SSL, you might want to double-check...BB recently changed their system for setting up custom domains, and they now have a much better way of going about it. Might have changed the price in the process; not sure on that front. The SSL is definitely worth doing, for many reasons.