Facebook is now offering a BETA version of a new tracking tool that will help Facebook Advertisers easily understand and evaluate their ads' conversion rates. Click here to download the official guide to this BETA product. For the last year my Marketing Team have been using Google Analytics tracking to understand out Facebook ads conversion rates. As a result our PPC specialist spends a lot of her time setting up Google tracking links, adding these links to our Facebook ads and then crunching both Google Analytics data and Facebook ads data to determine which Facebook ads are converting at a reasonable cost. The introduction of an integrated conversion tracking tool for all our Facebook ads will streamline the process of evaluating Facebook ad conversions and save my team a lot of time.
But there is a challenge. Facebook's conversion tracking tool only provides javascript code that can be embedded at the bottom of a web page, meaning that we can only track a user action that results in the load of a web page. Here is an example of the code that Facebook provides:
<!-- Paste this code just above the closing </body> to record every pageload as a conversion. --> <script src="//ah8.facebook.com/js/conversions/tracking.js"></script><script type="text/javascript"> try { FB.Insights.impression({ 'id' : xxx, 'h' : 'xx' }); } catch (e) {} </script>
My challenge is that the user event that we want to track is the download of a PDF document. My business, GetSmarter, offers online training courses, and once a potential students has landed on our website, we want them to download an Information Pack about one of our courses by clicking on a "Download an Information Pack" link. Now, I know that we could change the way our website initiates the download of the PDF document... but I don't want to. I want to find a way that I can format the tracking code included above to be part of a Javascript "onclick" event.
I have made this request for new functionality with Facebook via their suggestion form. If you have any suggestions for them, log into your Facebook account and do the same.