Let us start by understanding what conversion tracking means. In the simplest view, a conversion represents any action that user takes on your website. This action can refer to a wide range of activity, from the action of a user logging in to your website to the action of making a financial transaction, adding an item to a shopping cart to adding a comment on a blog; all such actions can be referred to as conversions.
With suitable software or scripted code all these conversions can be reported back to the administrator or owner of the concerned website. Facebook empowers its advertisers with the ability to create and modify a custom conversion tracking code for any page of their website. However, the code provided by Facebook will not track all of the universal conversions related to independent visitors to your site.
It is meant to track only those conversions which are a result of the actions taken by those visitors who were directed to your website by your Facebook ad campaign. In other words the actions of all those users of Facebook who saw and clicked your ad and got directed to your website, can be tracked.
In order to track the conversions that happen on your website as a result of the Facebook ad campaign, the first thing you will need is a Pixel. This conversion tracking pixel is generated by the Facebook’s application programming interface.
These pixels are then used by the advertisers to generate a java script snippet. It is quite common for advertisers and marketers to be unaware of latest IT terminology and technology. For those who are not familiar with the above specified term – a snippet is a small piece of computer language code (in this case it belongs to java script) that can be included or added in to the main program or code to add some extra functionality.
In our case it adds the conversion tracking facility. Don’t be afraid if you have never done programming before, it is fairly easy to add this java script snippet to your website. Just open the webpage in any Html editor and copy-paste it within the body tag.
One advantage of this snippet is that it is reusable. You can add the same java script snippet over and over again to any number of web pages on your website; the same code will provide conversion tracking on all of the associated web pages.
For example if you wish to track all the financial transactions on your website, then you would first get the pixel from Facebook, generate a java script snippet from this pixel and then add this snippet to the financial transaction confirmation page that your website’s visitors would see after completing a transaction.
At times when this confirmation page gets loaded in to the browser of your site’s visitor, the code will ping the Facebook’s servers informing them of the conversion. Facebook will then use the information and match it against the list of people who have clicked on your advertisement and will ultimately provide you with the information inferred. This information can be then used to track the returns on the expenditure of your advertising campaign through Facebook ads.
Matthew AntonAbout the Author:
Matthew Anton is a web developer and works at a leading firm that provides online marketing optimization services through Facebook ads. He has written a number of well received articles relating to the technicalities of Facebook ads.