Everyone seems to want a return on their investment, to see what their hard work and often their monetary payments have given them or will give them. Now, if you find yourself using Facebook for marketing to help your clients get into your business funnels and to engage with your customers, you might want to figure out exactly how many customers are engaging with your work and making some money for you.
However, the best way to track these data points can be by using either the new Facebook Conversions APIs or Facebook Pixels. You have access to both of these, but which one should you use? Should you use both of them, or is one better than the other? What is the difference between Conversion APIs or Facebook Pixels?
It can be a bit confusing, but this article is going to give you everything you might need, and you’ll have knowledge about how to track everything Facebook does for your business. This will also ensure that your business is using Facebook as best as you can to get some customers and income rolling in because the information that either service gives you is going to help your business.
What Is A Facebook Pixel?
A Facebook Pixel focuses on tracking data through the user’s browser. It takes data from cookies and other online trackers to measure what the prospective customers are doing. For example, once someone clicks on a Facebook advertisement and goes to your website. Then you can see what pages that your prospective customer visited, if they made any downloads or interacted with anything from your website, and how much time they spent on the website.
So if you want to bring customers to a specific page on your website with your Facebook ads, then you can see how far down the funnel they have gone down. Useful if the entire point of the Facebook advertisements is to get your prospective customers to start taking action.
However, they do have a couple of problems. For one thing, they do rely on the data collected by web pages, and they can be blocked by various 3rd party applications as well as by the customers themselves if they don’t want to accept cookies or accept being tracked. And with more and more companies starting to cut down on data tracking, Facebook Pixels can’t give you all the data that you need as a business owner, which is where Conversion APIs come in.
What Are Facebook Conversion APIs?
A Facebook Conversion API (Application Programming Interface) is another great way to see the customer’s journey into your business. They show off the entire journey of your customer when they engage with your Facebook page, only by using it on Facebook’s server and not the customer’s browser. The main difference between all of this is that the tracking doesn’t care about anything that the customer does to avoid being tracked. It doesn’t rely on cookies, third party applications, and browser settings, giving you much more data than Facebook Pixels do, and for the business owners who like to have a ton of data, this can be good for you.
Rather than having to rely on Facebook to collect the data from the customer’s browser (and run into all of the browser settings that that customer might have enabled), then you are using your data and sending that to Facebook.
While Facebook conversion APIs might sound complicated, most platforms for your business have direct integration and can be connected to Facebook within a few clicks. Especially if you are a user of platforms such as Shopify.
Is One Better Than The Other?
Now, if you do any type of research into this topic, or are a Facebook Pixel or Facebook Conversion API user yourself, then you know that neither one is a replacement for the other. Facebook pixels have some benefits, such as showing your customer’s entire journey to your website, while the Conversion APIs are able to only show the end but with more information and details.
The best thing for you to do if you want to get all the information and have everything you need for effective data analysis of your Facebook advertisements as well as what they are doing for your business, then you need to use both in conjunction with one another. Both of them know how to fully work together and will give you all the information that you need.
One of them isn’t better or isn’t a replacement for the other, but you need to make sure that you are using both to get the most effective marketing for your needs. After that, you will be able to tweak your advertisements based on the data for your needs and for your customers.
