Do You Even Need a Tracker for FB Campaigns?

Personally I’m finding that FB’s pixel and reporting already gives me all the stats I need.

And I’m not testing so many landing pages and offers that using a tracker would make the testing more convenient.

As for conversion postback: I’ve mostly been promoting offers that are either exclusive or are restricted to only a few affiliates, so having my FB pixel embedded on the offer page wouldn’t be a big risk (for getting account bans by association – when other affiliates running the same offer get the hammer).

However, that’s just me. There are reasons why you may want to use a tracker for your FB campaigns, and below are some of them.

You can go through them and decide whether you need to subscribe to a tracker or not.



Reasons to Use a Tracker


1)To Post Conversions to FB

Some trackers can post conversions to FB, including Prosper202 and Voluum:

http://prosper.tracking202.com/blog/…-s2s-postbacks

https://Voluum.com/blog/how-to-setup…-ads-tracking/

However, there are other ways to post conversions back to FB, without using a tracker. For details please see the section “How to Track Affiliate Offer Conversions” in this post:

https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea…Your-FB-Pixels

Still, for people that are not very technical and don’t want to mess around with code and scripts, using a tracker to post conversions to FB may be the easiest method.


2)To Split-test Landing Pages and/or Offers

Trackers can allow you to generate a single campaign link to use with an ad, that will automatically rotate landing pages and/or offers to split-test them.

However, here’s my concern with such an arrangement: A single url leading to different landing pages may tip off FB’s radar.

The disclaimer here of course is that I haven’t actually used a tracker to split-test landing pages, so don’t know whether that can get an account banned faster.

So – feel free to experiment by using a tracker to split-test lander and offers! But if you share my concern above, here’s how you can split-test without a tracker:

To split-test 2 landing pages LanderA and LanderB: Set up two ABO adsets AdsetA and AdsetB, each containing the same ad (3 copies). Have the ads in AdsetA go to LanderA and the ads in AdsetB go to LanderB.

To split-test 2 offers OfferA and OfferB: Set up two ABO adsets AdsetA and AdsetB, each containing the same ad (3 copies). Create two copies of the same landing page and put them on 2 separate URLs, URLA and URLB. Have the ads in AdsetA go to URLA and the ads in AdsetB go to URLB.

And of course if you’re wanting to test more landers or offers, just set up more adsets than just two.

Then, use the following methods to decide on a winning lander/offer:

https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea…Banners-Part-1

https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea…ferent-Payouts

The obvious disadvantage to this split-testing method is that each adset would be targeting a different audience pool within your defined target audience, so that you’re not entirely comparing apples to apples.

Here are my thoughts regarding this: Even if you use a tracker to do the split-testing, where you’re targeting only one audience pool with one ad, the winning lander/offer would only apply to that particular audience pool. So if you start a new adset to test a different ad, or start a new campaign (to scale for example), you’d be targeting different audience pools anyway – which may render your split-test results inaccurate anyways.

If you want to do more testing to get better results, instead of setting up one adset per landing page, or one adset per offer, set up multiple adsets per landing page/offer to hit different audience pools, and just keep running the adset(s) that is/are the most profitable.

Always be reminded that ultimately, we’re after maximizing profits, NOT maximizing split-test accuracy.

Lastly – members have suggested using Google Optimize to split-test landers. I haven’t had a chance to check out how it works, but here’s a link to more information:

https://marketingplatform.google.com/about/optimize/


3)To Avoid Triggering Affiliate Networks’ Geo-Redirection

If you have experience running affiliate offers, you’ll know that many affiliate networks have what is called “geo-redirection” in place.

What it does is, if you send traffic to an offer that is not accepted by the offer (e.g. sending US traffic to a CA offer), the affiliate network would automatically redirect that traffic to another suitable offer (e.g. redirecting the US traffic to an offer that accepts US traffic).

And the “suitable offer” often has nothing to do with the original offer you’re promoting. Worse, it could even be a crypto offer, or *gasp* an adult offer (which are against FB’s advertising policies).

Trouble happens when for example you’re running a CA offer, and an FB reviewer located in the US decides to do a manual inspection, goes to your lander, clicks on an offer link, and promptly gets redirected to an offer that’s completely irrelevant to your lander.

So what you can do to avoid this, if you’re using a tracker, is to set a condition to check for the country the visitor is from. If country = CA, go to affiliate link. If country = another country, go directly to the destination offer page.

But you don’t need to get a tracker just to deal with geo-redirection: Simply ask your affiliate manager to turn off geo-redirection for your affiliate account.


4)To Cloak

Some people use trackers as cloakers by setting up conditions to redirect FB reviewers to a different lander and/or offer than what they’re showing to the actual audience. This is blackhat practice that I won’t go into detail on.



Tracker Safe Practices

If you DO decide to use a tracker, go with a tracker that allows you to set up redirectless tracking.

It’s common knowledge that FB doesn’t like redirect links – the destination link you put in ad settings should be the same as your lander url.

Some trackers provide redirectless tracking, including Voluum, Binom, and Funnelflux. These links will provide details:

https://doc.voluum.com/en/redirectle…20redirectless

https://docs.binom.org/lp-pixel.php

http://docs.funnelflux.com/en/articl…redirect-links



***************

This is all I have on trackers for now! When I get a chance to do some actual testing with trackers (for FB camps) I’ll come back to add more details. In the meantime, please feel free to ask any questions!



Amy