Facebook Signals — A fuel to propel your customer journey

Do you rely on 3rd party cookies for customer data?

If yes, this shall certainly be a tough time as Google have announced their deprecation of third-party cookies and iOS imposing strict guidelines on tracking.

As technology keeps evolving so is data privacy. In today’s digital world, customers expect to merge marketing with privacy.

To overcome this, you as a marketer need to shift your approach to a straightforward perspective — collecting first-party data.

First-party data is the direct information collected from your customers. You can capture and understand all the intricate touchpoints in your customer journey.

So how is the concept of first-party data related to Facebook signals?

Facebook signals aid marketers in leveraging the 1P data collected from the website, CRM, app, etc to understand their customer behaviour.

For example, if a customer visits your site and adds a product to their cart, a signal is sent to Facebook. This action lets you track your customer behaviour and you can use this to personalize content and target ads more specifically.

Facebook signals store known users' data which includes your customer’s email, name, phone number, location and IP address — (known users refer to logged-in users).

For users who are not logged in, Facebook signals capture device ID, browser ID, etc to shape the anonymous user journey.

Now that you’ve got a clear idea of Facebook signals next we’ll step into its detailed aspect — how it plays a significant role in the growing ad system.

Evolving Ad Ecosystem

The concept of Facebook signals ventured when Google imposed a strict data collection policy — a nightmare which any marketer would have ever dreamt of — the ban on third-party cookies.

This data regulation by Google will impact advertisers’ way of processing customer data. The limitations of measuring customer data will cause marketers to run irrelevant ads and might fail to capture customers’ interests too.

Consequently, 40% of advertisers have experienced a drop in the average bid and 15% have witnessed a dip in their average revenue according to digiday sources.

Thus marketers will find it difficult to reach, interact, engage and convert customers. However, to overcome this Meta has introduced signals which act as a cornerstone for implementing successful marketing strategies.

Importance of Facebook Signals

For Meta to give you a 360-degree customer view, it requires every action that customers perform on your website.

Since Facebook signals transmit every user interaction to Meta, the platform’s built-in machine-learning algorithms will start processing your customer data and help you to -

• Forecast expected results
• Analyze market trends
• Uncover hidden customer behavioural pattern

This eventually frees your time to focus more on strategy as signals form the infrastructure in shaping your actionable customer funnels.

But keep in mind that, Meta needs at least a minimum of 50 signals to start processing customer behaviour. Ideally, there has to be a balance between quality and quantity of signals to create meaningful conversion journeys.

Delivering high-quality signals

To start getting expected performance you must understand the smart ways of using Facebook signals. This is done via 3 value-driven methods:

Optimal Event Setup:

The optimal event setup refers to how accurately you setup Facebook events to configure your customer’s actions.

For example, you must craft clear event names, parameters, select desirable action types and install relevant tracking codes.

The ultimate goal is to ensure your events are discoverable and effectively tracked to interpret the best outcome of your ad campaigns.

Advanced Matching — Automatic and Manual

Advanced matching is primarily used to identify and match customers with similar interests and behaviours. This is done by sending hashed customer data to Meta along with pixel events.

As a result, you can start witnessing more attributed conversions and reduced CPC costs as your ads get delivered to those customers whom you wish to perform the desired action.

In order to use advanced matching it has to be activated first. Once done you can choose between any of the two techniques based on your requirements — automatic and manual.

Automatic Advanced Matching

This method saves your time as it is simple, easy to use and quick to implement. As the name implies, it automatically hashes customer data to comply with GDPR.

But remember that it works only with pages that contain forms and not with image-only tags.

Manual Advanced Matching

As per Meta, manual advanced matching is best suggested as it results in improved match rate success for doubling your ROI.

This is because of the following reasons -

• You get the flexibility to customize by accessing your website codebase
• Unlike automatic matching, manual advanced matching allows for broadening implementation which improves compatibility

However, it’s upto you to decide the best strategy. But a good practice can involve using manual advanced matching as it accounts for a 31% increase in purchase profits while automatic advanced matching results in a 13% improvement.

Conversions API (CAPI)

The benefit that CAPI solves is incredible. Let me explain in the simplest way possible.

In a cookie-driven environment, usually, the customer’s actions are captured by the cookie events and then sent to Meta.

Since third-party cookies are being restricted, tracking this action is cumbersome. To combat this, CAPI comes into play by directly sending the customer data from client-server to Meta.

This means when a customer interacts with your website the data is automatically captured by the server and sent to Meta. As a result, you can overcome the loss of events due to ad blockers and remove the middleman process caused by cookies.

Last but not least, CAPI lets you find valuable audiences, strengthen web data and track deep funnel actions by recording events in the attribution path.

Conclusion

As we are progressively shifting to a cookie-less environment, it becomes challenging to deliver personalized user experience with enhanced privacy.

With the advent of Facebook signals, you can proactively track and unlock customer touchpoints and conversion attribution by making use of first-party data to deliver an impeccable customer journey that resonates and retains.