Best Ways to Track Facebook Performance and Attributions in 2022 and a Post iOS 14.5 Environment

Eli Bar-Din

August 4, 2022

Best Ways to Track Facebook Performance and Attributions in 2022 and a Post iOS 14.5 Environment

Ah yes–another day, another app update. While digital marketers are no strangers to new rollouts and releases, one update in particular has caused quite a stir among online advertisers: iOS 14.

Originally announced back in late 2020, Apple unveiled news that its latest release would focus more around consumer data and privacy. So when iOS 14.5 was introduced later on in 2021, along with it came new privacy features that gave users control over how their data is shared. This update —which allows Facebook users to opt out of tracking – heightened tension among businesses who relied heavily on Facebook as a pivotal marketing channel. With a mere 10% of all users opting in to share data, tracking performance became increasingly difficult–especially for advertisers who spent thousands of dollars on campaigns with no way to measure how effective they are.

Prior to the IOS 14.5 release, marketers were able to track every event in Facebook campaigns with a near 100% coverage on all user behavior on their website. Now with such limited capabilities, how are you to manage your Facebook campaigns moving forward? Keep reading to learn how Evestar has navigated this update to continue delivering results.

1. Setting up Dynamic UTM Tracking

While this one might sound basic, it is often deeply overlooked. With the help of UTM links, eCommerce brands can more effectively measure traffic in Google analytics but also other tracking environments.

To get started, make sure all campaign links include relevant UTM codes. This will inject the Campaign ID and Particular Ad ID into your Google Analytics, ensuring that your Facebook ads are being tracked properly. By doing this, you can get a better understanding of where traffic is coming from, while also gaining insight into how audiences are engaging with your ads.

While Facebook doesn’t give us a final say on which works best, you can either add your UTMs to the “URL parameters” field in the Business Manager or directly into the URL field of your ad. The latter seems to work best for us.

2. Making sure you have Conversion API set (CAPI)

In an effort to maintain data privacy while also personalizing ads to users, Facebook launched CAPI, a conversions API that allows advertisers to send web events from their servers directly to Facebook. Server events are linked to a pixel and are processed like browser pixel events. Since most ecommerce stores operate using Shopify or WooCommerce, the platform has its own native CAPI integration with Facebook to help optimize campaigns and improve tracking capabilities.

When setting up campaigns, we implement Conversions API alongside the pixel to help fully optimize funnel tracking. WIth a more efficient algorithm, you can help to increase visibility and gain insight into the overall customer journey.

Another important setting: make sure you set your sharing to “maximum” in the CAPI settings in the Shopify backend.

3. Third-Party Attribution tools — Cometly and Triple Whale

If there’s one area that’s changed a lot since Facebook can no longer show 100% of user data, it’s our reliance on a range of new tools to track better. eCommerce companies, big and small, struggle with this regardless of size of their revenue and marketing department. After testing many tools, we’ve narrowed down the relevant tools to just two (for now).

At Evestar, we use two 3rd party tools: Cometly and Triple Whale. Both help us deliver better results for our clients in slightly different ways.

Image of Mobile devices with creative ads guide examples

Cometly

Specific to Facebook ads tracking, Cometly is the tool you’ll want to leverage. Their server-side tracking helps provide even greater visibility in our Facebook media buying by tracking users at a higher clip and providing a lot more clarity on which campaign, ad set or ad is actually performing. Our COO Jonathan Gosper and lead media buyer Eli Bar-Din discuss this further in this video and explain how this extra visibility has helped us scale a decade old eCom business 40% YoY.

Triple Whale

Triple Whale is what we like to consider our more macro attribution tool. Not only does it help quickly calculate key health metrics like MER, blended ROAS,and return percentage, it uses a server-side pixel that can showcase how Facebook ads, Google ads, TikTok ads, Email Marketing and SMS marketing all contribute to sales. Better understanding how to split your monthly media budget alongside having a better sense of how the overall eCommerce environment is trending makes Triple Whale one of the most important tools to leverage.

They work by aggregating metrics from all paid channels and brand’s ecommerce store data, as well as adding their own pixel to generate accurate conversions data.

Both Cometly and Triple Whale empower us with a better understanding of where revenue is coming from.

With this information, we can recognize what needs to be fixed faster, identify current trends and re-allocate budgets accordingly.

Here at Evestar, we’re all about blended ROAS; therefore if we see that one channel is performing better than the others, we’ll reallocate budget towards the stronger paid channel to increase general efficiencies. This is growingly important with the surge of contribution of Google Shopping in eCommerce businesses.

The short version of this is: with better tracking comes better (and quicker) decisions for the business. Trusting that Facebook will provide the best available data is long gone.

Eli Bar-Din

Senior eCommerce Strategist

Eli Bar-Din is a senior eCommerce Strategist at Evestar with a expert-level Facebook Media buying background. With 4 years of digital marketing experience and scaling eCommerce brands in 3 different markets, Eli currently manages over $750k spend per month in media spend and oversees the growth of several 7 and 8 figure eCommerce brands with his entrepreneurial mindset.