You can begin to understand more about how much a particular action or goal costs on Facebook and will be recorded as an "Action
Facebook has released more details about its alpha conversion tracking program for advertisers which allow them to use a javascript tag to record successful conversions or actions on their website. This information is passed back into the Facebook Ad Manager so you can begin to understand more about how much a particular action or goal costs on Facebook and will be recorded as an “Action”.
The only way that a conversion could be tracked in the past was by using web analytics and adding unique campaign code to every single ad shown on Facebook. The example of campaign URL that is used with Google Analytics is shown below but meant a manual process to filter out your Facebook campaign and review what ad sent the visitor.
http://thelostagency.com/?utm_source=Facebook&utm_medium=CPC&utm_term=seo&utm_content=logo&utm_campaign=contact
We are yet to run any of our clients 2010 campaigns using the new conversion tracking, but we understand that it will use the now blank Actions column shown below. The action tracked can be a number of behaviours such as become a fan, perform an action on your website… and similar to conversion rate the ActionRate % will be an important KPI to watch.
MediaPost was one of the first blogs to write up a decent post about how it can benefit companies running Facebook Ad campaigns and how you can now get a clear ROI but also how this conversion metric may kill social media campaigns. The problem is that social media doesn’t always match perfectly with traditional paid metrics as your Fans may have significantly different levels of engagement with your brand, but you cannot segment that data that much yet.
The more important benefit is that companies can now see how much they are spending to grow their fan base and using different ad types and targeting how this can affect the ActionRate. Facebook Ads has made a big step forward to being a scalable Ad platform and the next steps they have planned make it seem a very viable platform for business.