Successful Media Doubled its ROAS with the Facebook Conversion API and AnyTrack

how successful media increased facebook ads ROAS by 115% with AnyTrack and facebook conversion api

Facebook is probably the best possible traffic for marketers. There’s no shortage of inventory, a myriad of targeting options, ad formats, and potential customers can be reached across web, mobile, Messenger, Whatsapp, and Instagram. 

Yet, in order to leverage the Facebook ad platform, and get a fair chance to reach the right audiences, marketers must feed their Facebook Pixel with quality conversion and audience data.

For this specific purpose, Facebook provides its advertisers with tools that enable marketers to match, track and attribute users actions with their Facebook Ads. The “Backbone” of the Facebook business tools is what they call the Facebook Pixel. 

What is the Facebook Pixel?

The Facebook Pixel is like a giant iceberg. It appears to marketers as a small JavaScript tag, when in fact it’s a huge infrastructure that instruments and processes billions of user actions in real time.

Yet, until early 2020, the only way for advertisers to interact with the Facebook Pixel was to place it across their website. This was a big downside for performance marketers since purchase conversions could be triggered on systems where the Facebook Pixel could not be placed. For example, payment gateways like Stripe or Paypal, ecommerce platforms like Shopify, or even affiliate networks like Commission Junction or Partnerize.

As performance marketers, working with various partners, we often bump on attribution challenges due cross domain tracking limitations, and lack of server-side integrations.

James Mills

In fact, when direct advertisers enjoy plenty of “off the shelf” software to track and interact with the Facebook Pixel, performance marketing agencies, are often forced to either compromise on the types of events they send to Facebook, or hire teams of developers to build, or maintain complex systems.

What are the Facebook Pixel limitations?

Adding to the technical limitations, the advertising ecosystem has been disrupted by many “privacy first” initiatives, such as Apple Intelligent Tracking Protection. These privacy initiatives have led major ad networks and ad technologies to adapt to this new era by developing tools and methodologies that would enable marketers to track and attribute conversions whether the Facebook Pixel was placed on the “thank you page” or not.

Facebook calls it: The Facebook Conversions API (initially called the server-side API).

What is the Facebook Conversions API

The Facebook Conversions API is a tool that enables facebook advertiser to send conversions from their server to the Facebook Pixel infrastructure. The data sent to the Facebook Conversion API can be used to measure ads performances, build custom audiences and lookalike audiences. 

Yet, while the Conversions API opens the doors to new optimization opportunities, it comes with a high technical barrier to entry. In fact, without a highly skilled developer, or the help of a software that integrates directly with the Facebook API, chances are that marketers won’t be able to use it.

AnyTrack Integration with Facebook Conversions API

AnyTrack is a Facebook Business Partner specializing for conversion data. It enables performance marketers to track and attribute online and offline conversions across marketing tools, ad networks, and analytics platforms. 

The AnyTrack App has been approved by Facebook, and directly integrates with both the standard Facebook Pixel, and the Conversions API.

How to increase Facebook Ads ROAS using the Facebook Conversion API and AnyTrack

Successful Media runs lead generation campaigns in the insurance vertical. The insurance vertical is the most expensive vertical on Facebook – costing advertisers an average $3.87 cost per click (according to Wordstream). 

As lead generation marketers know too well: Leads are not born equal.

How leads are funneled from Facebook Ads to the insurance company?

As explained earlier, leads are not born equal. This is particularly true when the average cost per click is over $3.5. Therefore, from the moment the potential lead enters your funnel, until it is actually bought by the insurance company, there are several touch points that must be measured to give Facebook AI optimization engine the data needed to fulfill its targeting promises.

Facebook Lead Generation Campaigns Key Touch Points

  1. Ad View
  2. Ad Click
  3. PageView Event – when the visitor hits the landing page
  4. Lead Event – When the user submits the form through a standard form or a smart form like TypeForm.
  5. Complete Registration Event – When the lead data sent to the lead management system via API – For example to LeadByte
  6. Purchase Event – When a lead buyer has acquired the lead.

As in any sales funnel, the marketer’s goal is to have the highest ratio of users that successfully complete the flow. And because leads are not born equal, if you only give Facebook the initial lead collected touch point, you simply send the wrong signals to Facebook. 

If instead you were sending all touch points, including the “Lead Bought” – you would allow Facebook to distinguish the leads, according to the hundreds of data points Facebook holds on each user.

“AnyTrack was the solution we needed to connect the dots, streamline our conversion data across our marketing stack, and the Facebook Conversion API. We were quickly able to achieve tremendous growth, by leveraging every possible data point available through Facebook Ads.”

James mills

Key Takeaways:

Feeding Facebook with offline “Purchase” conversions and just telling it to “go do its thing” enabled us to quickly lower our CPA and increase spend.

Using AnyTrack just takes away the pain of setup and removes the need for multiple integrations including custom integrations and just using one tool allows me to launch campaigns faster, and focus on marketing rather than the tech stuff. Eventually, it allows me to sleep better at night.

James Mills
  1. Facebook highest and most precious tracking data point is the user. Since they hold thousands of data-points on each user, when you enrich Facebook data with your conversion data, you give Facebook more relevant data-point to optimize your campaigns.
  2. Performance marketing is about delivering ROAS. Therefore, sending tracked revenues to the Facebook Conversion API is key to optimize your ads toward ROAS.
  3. Being able to instrument client side and server side events give you 100% flexibility to attribute every single interaction starting from ad view to purchase events.
  4. Your audience data is your most precious asset that needs to be filled with as many touch points as possible. Leveraging both client side data and server side data, guarantees that your audience data can be used to achieve long term goals.
  5. The Facebook Conversions API guarantees that your data collection, tracking and attribution isn’t being affected by browser privacy limitations.

Laurent Malka

Laurent Malka is the Co-Founder of Anytrack. He was born and raised in Switzerland, and now lives and works in Israel. He is a serial entrepreneur with over 15 years of experience in marketing and business development. Laurent has been a panelist and speaker at numerous digital marketing events including SEMrush and IG Affiliates. He prides himself on his ability to connect the dots across disciplines, industries, and technologies to solve unique challenges.

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Successful Media

Successful media is a PPC Performance performance marketing agency running lead generation campaigns on Facebook Ads, Google Ads and other top tier ad networks.

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