Why track facebook ads in google analytics?
Facebook ads can be very powerful. For both B2B and B2C companies, Facebook offers robust targeting options, and if done correctly you can attain new customers at a very reasonable cost. E-commerce in particular can see huge ROI from Facebook campaigns. Based on our tests, it’s one of the best performing social media ad platforms.
Google Analytics is the most popular web analytics tool. It’s free, feature-packed and easy to use. It should be the first marketing tool you add to any website or app.
While these tools are both great in themselves, tracking facebook conversions in google analytics is a little trickier. Google doesn’t offer auto-tagging like it does for Google Ads campaigns, meaning without a little customization, you won’t be able to easily measure the performance of your facebook campaigns in Google Analytics.
With this in mind, we’ve put together a quick, easy-to-follow example for adding UTM tracking parameters to your facebook ads. With this process you can get all of your data in one place. And quickly understand what works, and why.
What are UTM parameters?
UTM stands for Urchin Tracking Module, but you don’t need to know that!
Put simply UTM parameters are pieces of text that you add to a landing page URL to allow you to track the effectiveness of your online marketing campaigns. Simply add these parameters using ‘?’ after the URL ends and use the ‘&’ symbol to add multiple ones.
There are 5 different parameters, listed below:
| Parameter | Purpose | Examples |
| utm_source (required)[6] | Identifies which site sent the traffic, and is a required parameter. | utm_source=Google |
| utm_medium | Identifies what type of link was used, such as cost per click or email. | utm_medium=cpc |
| utm_campaign | Identifies a specific product promotion or strategic campaign. | utm_campaign=spring_sale |
| utm_term | Identifies search terms. | utm_term=running+shoes |
| utm_content | Identifies what specifically was clicked to bring the user to the site, such as a banner ad or a text link. It is often used for A/B testing and content-targeted ads. | utm_content=logolink or utm_content=textlink |
Via Wikipedia.
A typical UTM parameter would look like:
https://www.agilemarketers.com/example?utm_content=experiment1ad&utm_medium=organicsocial&utm_source=facebook&utm_campaign=experiment1
The above example shows us the content that led to the click, the medium of the link (e.g. is it from a paid campaign, email or organic click) the source or site/channel that sent the click and the specifc campaign.
How to track facebook ads in google analytics
It’s actually very simple to track facebook ads in google analytics. All you have to do is create some simple parameters to add to your URLs using the UTMs from the above example.
From there, any clicks to these URLs will be reflected in your Google Analytics account. No code or integrations needed!
Follow these steps to make sure everything gets set up correctly:
Define your UTM parameters
Decide what your UTM parameters are going to be before creating your URL. If we’re doing a facebook campaign our utm_source will be facebook, but you should create a naming convention for additional parameters like utm_campaign and utm_content so you can easily measure performance over time.
Build your URL with Google UTM builder
Google has create an awesome Campaign URL builder that allows marketers to quickly create URLs with the appropriate UTM tags.
Simply add the UTM parameter you want for each tag:
The campaign URL builder will spit out a fully formed URL to add to your facebook campaigns!
How to add to Facebook campaigns
The next step is to add your shiny new URL to your facebook campaign.
- Log in to your facebook ads manager account,
- Navigate to the campaign/adset and ad you want to add Google Analytics tracking to
- Paste your new URL into the ‘Website URL’ field, make sure the display link displays a clean URL as displaying the UTM parameters looks a little ugly.
Check performance in Google analytics
Once your new URLs are live in your Facebook campaigns, you should be able to see data in Google analytics right away.
- Navigate to the ‘Acquisition’ section of Google analytics
- Click on ‘All traffic’
- Click on ‘Source/medium’
- Analyze performance using the ‘Source’, ‘Medium’, and ‘Keyword’ tabs. Clicking on ‘Other’ will give you access to further parameters like ‘Ad content’.
Conclusion
Tracking facebook ads in google analytics is really simple. Follow the above steps, using a simple naming convention for your UTM parameters. You’ll be able to quickly and accurately measure facebook campaign performance, and optimize for better performance.