How to Make the Most of the Facebook Attribution Tool
By David Reimherr
March 8, 2019
conversational marketing, conversion, data, Data Analysis, Digital Marketing, Facebook, Facebook Insight, Magnificent Marketing, marketing, marketing attribution, ROI, social media, Social Media Marketing
When it comes to social media marketing, you can take all the help you can get.
With all of the various platforms, each of which has its own way of calculating its data, attempting to juggle this dispersed information can become overwhelming. Plus, the more data you have to worry about, the more people you have to pay to analyze and decipher it.
Thankfully, Facebook offers something called the attribution tool, which goes a long way in making social media marketing more manageable. But what exactly is the Facebook attribution tool and how can you make the most of it?
Here’s everything you need to know.
What Exactly Is the Facebook Attribution Tool?
If you’re unfamiliar with the Facebook attribution tool, it’s understandable. It happens to be one of the newer features of Facebook’s social media marketing platform.
Its primary purpose is to give you the widest possible perspective for what your results and conversions are looking like across platforms, paid or organic. By using this information, you no longer have to manually gather data from the different platforms, which can simplify things considerably.
As an example of how the tool can help, you can use it to sift through your Facebook traffic and find exactly how much of that traffic resulted in a paid conversion or a website registration. Essentially, the tool tracks the entire trek that your consumer takes to your webpage, then gives you access to that information.
For instance, if a consumer were to access your Facebook page from an email and clicked on a post on your page that led them to your website, the attribution tool would credit the email as the consumer’s entryway.
Before, the data would only include the Facebook post as being the entryway for the consumer.
In the world that existed before the attribution tool, your Facebook posts would hog all the glory from something like your email campaign. And, in turn, your marketing strategies going forward would be misinformed.
Are There Any Attribution Tool Strategies That You Should Know About?
While the attribution tool can help your marketing intelligence in many ways, its basic purpose is to fill in all the gaps in your digital marketing data. It provides a more comprehensive view of the consumer’s behavior than was possible beforehand.
Now that this information is at your disposal, you can use it to fine-tune your marketing strategies going forward. For a real-world example, let’s say that you use the tool and find out that Google organic wasn’t just pulling consumers in, but resulting in revenue—something you wouldn’t know otherwise. With this information, you now know to invest more into Google AdWords, as opposed to using those ad dollars elsewhere.
Aside from smarter investing, the data from the Facebook attribution tool can also be used for other purposes, such as compiling a reliable consumer base and an email list. In other words, you can focus on established customers, rather than attempting to rope in new customers, which is more difficult.
Does it Take a Long Time to Get Useful Data From the Facebook Attribution Tool?
Before anything else, it’s important to know that the Facebook attribution tool won’t give you any information from before it was installed. It only begins compiling data from when it’s activated. After the tool is installed, the speed at which your data will come in is entirely reliant on the amount of data you’re pulling in.
If you’re a large company with millions of website users, the data is going to come in fast. If you’re just a start-up bringing in ten people a week, then your data is going to take a while to process. There also happens to be a Facebook attribution window. This means that Facebook will only register conversions that happen inside 28 days of an ad being clicked on. If an ad is seen, but not clicked on, the window is only one day.
While this is the default, Facebook does allow the attribution window to be customized. You can shorten or widen the window based on a number of metrics, whether it’s clicks or impressions. This is an extremely useful situation, as you can personalize the window based on the situation you find yourself in or the specific numbers you’re looking for.
For example, if put out a post that’s themed after Valentine’s Day, you may want to shorten the window to the week of the holiday, just to trim off the fat around the edges.
What Does a Beginner Need to Know About the Facebook Attribution Tool?
Before the attribution tool can work, you need to install a pixel on your website, as this will compile the tracking data. If you don’t like the idea of something taking up space on your website, the pixel takes up literally a pixel of space.
After you have the pixel on your website, then you’ll start getting all of the basic information you’ll need to get started. If you want, you can stop here, but you won’t be getting the full data-collecting experience. Now that you have the pixel, then you can install the Facebook attribution tool.
By working together, the pixel and the attribution tool can create the most textured picture of your digital marketing landscape. The pixel will give you the raw numbers, but the attribution tool will provide the context around the numbers.
Imagine all of the data you’ve collected in a pre-attribution tool world is like looking through a keyhole. In a post-attribution tool world, the picture opens up into a panoramic, three-dimensional landscape, where you can see the data from every imaginable angle.
Where Will Facebook Go From the Attribution Tool?
There’s no telling where exactly Facebook will go with regard to innovation. However, recent years have not been kind to Facebook with regard to publicity, which can have an impact on the directions that it chooses to go.
This is a relatively new thing for Facebook, as they’ve gone unscathed for most of their existence. But with the recent hearings on user privacy and whether or not government oversight is warranted, Facebook has lost a bit of its luster.
Bad press aside, Facebook probably isn’t going anywhere anytime soon, partially due to its size, reach, and how deeply rooted it is in the culture. Because of this, Facebook could lose a chunk of its user base, and it would still be a fruitful platform for getting the word out.
In fact, not only has the bad press not had much of an effect on Facebook, but it’s actually had the opposite effect. As of the fourth quarter of 2018, Facebook had more monthly active users than ever before, coming in at about 2.32 billion. It doesn’t sound like Facebook is going the way of Myspace anytime soon.
As far as the attribution tool specifically, we can only assume that it will become even more impressive with time. However, the privacy issue may be a wrench in the tool’s progression, depending on just how much of the consumer behavior the tool begins to track.
For example, if it comes out that the tool is invading a consumer’s privacy, it might not look good on the business and individuals that are utilizing the tool. However, this is a problem that’s still a ways off.
Don’t Miss Out On Facebook’s Attribution Tool
In the modern world, a business can’t forsake social media as a primary platform for their marketing purposes. As long as platforms like Facebook are where the people are, that’s where you should be. But simply being there isn’t enough anymore. There are tricks, strategies, and tools that can invigorate your advertising efforts beyond what they would normally be.
One of the most recent and useful tools is the Facebook attribution tool. It allows you to compile the most comprehensive set of data regarding the behavior of your consumers, all the way from their email inbox to your website’s check-out page, and everywhere in-between.
By utilizing this detailed information, you can custom-tailor your marketing efforts going forward to accentuate your strengths and prune your weaknesses. Knowing this, there’s no reason why Facebook’s attribution tool shouldn’t be a major player in your digital marketing playbook.
David Reimherr
David brings 20 years of sales, marketing, strategy & branding experience to the table. He is the founder of Magnificent Marketing which specializes in content marketing, video marketing & social media advertising (e-commerce, lead-gen, strategic content distribution) and is a lover of marketing, dogs and life!