As you may have heard, Apple is making significant changes to the way music, sports, and entertainment companies can use Facebook and Instagram ads. These changes for events, in particular, could mean millions and millions of dollars worth of lost ticket sales.
BEM’s President, Brian Bauer, is here to help explain these updates. He will also navigate you through a step-by-step guide to ensure your Facebook & Instagram ads can target the right people and you can properly measure your return on investment.
Part 1:
Apple’s update is going to have a MAJOR impact on the way you run your advertising campaigns. These changes allow users to decide how their data is tracked by apps.
Similar to granting an app access to your photos or permission to send you notifications, users will now receive a prompt about “App Tracking Transparency.” This prompt will be visible to Facebook app users on iOS 14 devices and it will ask them to either allow or deny the app’s ability to track their data. You may think giving people more control over their privacy sounds like a great idea, and there’s some truth to this. However, this choice is going to significantly impact how you can reach people through advertising. Specifically, it creates a problem regarding how Facebook receives and processes conversion events from Facebook’s advertising pixel.
In simple terms, conversion events are actions that occur on your website or mobile app and are most commonly known as purchases. A pixel is a piece of code installed on your website or app that tracks visitor engagement and sends the info back to Facebook.
If your business uses Facebook advertising to optimize, target, and report on conversions, it’s very likely that you’re going to start running into problems with your campaigns if you haven’t already.
One of the biggest changes is that you’re now only able to optimize and track conversions through verified website domains. For example, if you’re sending potential customers to a third-party site like Ticketmaster, Eventbrite, or other ticketing platforms using a domain you do not own, then your conversions may not track correctly. Unfortunately, the implications here for your business are massive.
Next, real-time reporting will no longer be supported by Facebook. Data may now be delayed up to three days. Also, for web conversion events, statistical modeling may be used to account for conversions from iOS 14 users. With less data available about iOS 14 users, Facebook will use benchmarks and probabilities to estimate conversions. Note that Facebook’s reporting dashboard will indicate when a metric is modeled as opposed to being exact.
Another big change to Facebook Ads reporting is that there will no longer be audience breakdowns. For both web and app conversions, breakdowns such as age, gender, region, and placement will no longer be supported.
Lastly, ad attribution settings are now significantly different. Before, you could attribute a conversion event to an ad based on as much as a 28-day click-through and 28-day view-through window. These are no longer available. Rather, the maximum is now 7-day click-through and 1-day view-through attribution.
Clearly, there’s quite a bit of change happening. Our team at Bauer Entertainment Marketing has been conducting extensive research ever since Apple first announced this update. Even though we’re at the forefront of this issue, things are still evolving. As we see it now, there are several steps you can take today to make sure your ads maintain proper targeting and tracking.
The next video will show you how to verify your domain, plus offer some potential solutions for tracking conversions occurring on third-party ticketing sites. If you have any questions about anything shared so far, please message us at info@bauerem.com.
Part 2:
In this next video, Brian will be presenting some technical steps you can take to help ensure your ad campaigns are served to target audiences with the highest propensity to buy from you and that your conversion events will be accurately tracked. As a reminder, conversion events are most commonly known as purchases, but can also include things like add to cart and submit a lead form.
The first step you need to take is verifying your website domain using one of the following options:
To start, go to your Facebook Business Manager settings, then click on Brand Safety, add your domain, and hit Refresh.
Once you refresh the page, you will see a set of instructions. Select the option, Meta-tag Verification, and copy the snippet of code provided. Then, add it to the <head> section of your home page. Finally, return to Business Manager and click Verify.
Alternatively, you can verify through your website’s Domain Name Server (DNS for short). Follow the instructions provided by Facebook, which will guide you through the process of adding a DNS TXT Record to your domain. Once you complete these steps, you can then click the green Verify button after the text is added to your site. This may take a few minutes or as long as 72 hours to verify.
There’s a third way to verify your domain, but you’ll need access to your site’s root directory. This option requires you to download an HTML-verification file. After downloading the file, you’ll be able to upload it to your site’s root directory. The root directory is the folder that’s accessed when Internet users type your domain name into the search bar of their browser. The easiest way to find where the root directory is located within your website is to search for “root directory” in the search function of your website host.
Once you’ve located the root directory, upload Facebook’s HTML file. The process to upload this file depends on your host, so you may need to contact customer support if you run into a roadblock.
After adding the file to your website, head back to Facebook and click the green Verify button. I recommend using this method if you do not have time for the 72-hour verification window using the DNS TXT Record.
For event producers, there are some extra, crucial, and required considerations when it comes to domain verification. Marketing websites for most events link out their prospective buyers to third-party ticketing sites to complete their ticket purchase. Previously, an advertising pixel could track a ticket buyer’s journey across multiple domains by placing a pixel on both the “marketing site” and “ticketing site.” Now, with the requirement of domain verification, this becomes more challenging. Without a verified domain on your ticketing platform, you will not be able to track purchases, retarget potential buyers who’ve abandoned their cart, segment out buyers from receiving future ads, and more.
There is, however, a solution to fix this. Ask your ticketing software provider to add your business as a Partner in their Facebook Business Manager. This will require you to send your ticketing provider your Facebook Business ID, which can be found by going into your Business Manager settings and clicking Business Info.
Next, your ticketing company can grant you Partner access by going to Business Settings, selecting Partners under the Users section, and then choosing Add. From there, they’ll need to select “Give a partner access to your assets” and then enter your Business ID.
Once they grant you Partner access to their domain, and they’ve gone through the steps to verify their domain with Facebook, you should then be able to create ads that successfully target high-value audiences and track conversions.
If you cannot gain Partner access to your ticketing site’s domain, you should establish a private purchase confirmation page on your own website, if possible. This page should not be accessible to anyone who has not already purchased a ticket from you. So, to hide this page from Google searches, work with your web developer to add a “No Follow” HTML tag to that page. A basic online search will reveal all you need to know about No Follow tags, so we won’t dig into that during this video. Once your private confirmation page is set up, work with your ticketing provider to enable a way to auto-redirect ticket purchasers back to this new confirmation page on your verified domain. Doing this will allow purchase conversions to be tracked.
Some ticketing platforms allow you to white-label their site by using your domain to establish a subdomain. For example, a prospective ticket buyer on “festival.com” will click a Buy Tickets button and be sent to “tickets.festival.com.” The purpose of the “tickets.festival.com” subdomain is to provide a more seamless, trustworthy, and branded experience for potential buyers. In the case of this recent iOS update, it becomes simpler to verify your ticketing site’s domain with Facebook since you also own the subdomain. We encourage ticketing platform providers who do not already offer this option to consider establishing it for their clients.
In the next video, we’ll be exploring important Facebook campaign measurement changes you need to know about it. If you have any questions about anything shared so far, please message info@bauerem.com.
Part 3:
Now that you’ve verified your domain and established a solution for your ticketing site, Brian will explore a couple more important changes to Facebook’s tracking functionality in response to Apple’s iOS 14 update.
First, Facebook’s attribution is much more restrictive. Facebook is limiting how it credits conversions to ads with a 7-day click-through window by default. You’ll need to manually update this setting in your ad sets to 7-day click-through plus 1-day view-through to maximize attribution.
Additionally, there will be reduced effectiveness for Audience Network campaigns, which rely on in-app tracking to present relevant ads to users. If you’re unfamiliar with the Audience Network, it is a network of third-party apps outside of Facebook that you can leverage to serve your ads.
Next, Facebook will now start reporting pixel-conversion events from iOS 14 devices using a brand new framework called “Aggregated Event Measurement” (AEM for short). AEM allows Facebook to track conversion events triggered by iOS 14 users who opted out of being tracked, while also respecting Apple’s desire to preserve user privacy.
Because of AEM, advertisers will now be limited to 8 conversion events per verified domain. The 8 conversion events you select will be prioritized in order of value for reporting purposes. For instance, if a fan completes multiple conversion events— such as clicking on an ad before adding a ticket to their cart and then making a purchase— only the higher prioritized conversion event will be reported in Facebook’s Ads Manager.
To optimize campaign performance, order your conversion events within Events Manager to rank from the highest level of importance to the lowest level of importance. When a user opts out of iOS tracking, Aggregated Event Measurement comes into play allowing only the highest-ranked event to be reported. The order of the ranking is up to you, but we recommend having your “Purchase” event as the highest on the list. You can then continue ranking with conversion events like “Add Payment Info,” “Add to Cart,” “Registration,” “Lead,” and so on and so forth. This will be the last step you need to take in order to successfully deliver and optimize your ads. If you have existing ad sets optimized for events that are not among your primary 8, the ad sets will be paused.
We hope these videos have given you a helpful guide for navigating Facebook’s new advertising updates. While we have this first set of steps to follow, we anticipate there will be more updates and requirements in the coming weeks and months. In the meantime, if you have any questions, please contact us by clicking HERE.