How to Track Facebook Ads in Google Analytics (+ Attribute Sales Revenue)

Do you use Facebook ads to drive more traffic and conversions? For this article, we show you how to track Facebook ads more effectively in Google Analytics, and as a bonus, help you attribute your sales revenue to your campaigns, both online and offline.

With roughly 2.85 billion monthly active users, Facebook is one of the most popular social networks worldwide. With that figure in mind, it’s no surprise that marketers are leveraging the opportunities of Facebook advertising to increase exposure and drive qualified leads.

Like any other marketing channel, it’s important to understand how your Facebook ads impact your performance so that you can improve marketing strategies, customer acquisition, and more importantly, increase ROI.

By following this guide, you will learn how to track the performance of your Facebook ads within minutes and will become better equipped to attribute your sales revenue back to your most valuable campaigns.

For this article, we’ll discuss:

Why you should track Facebook ads in Google Analytics
How to track your Facebook Ads in Google Analytics
How to attribute sales revenue to your Facebook Ads
Importance of measuring revenue, and not just conversions

Without further ado, let’s jump right into.

Editor’s Note: Ever noticed that the data in your Facebook ad account doesn’t match the numbers you see in Google Analytics? We reveal the most common reasons that lead to data inconsistencies between Facebook Ads and Google Analytics and provide recommendations to help make your reporting more accurate. Download your guide here.

Why track your Facebook ads in Google Analytics?

Tracking your Facebook campaigns in Google Analytics is essential as it provides you with a bigger picture of your customer journey and shows you how customers are interacting with your website.

Although you can get some basic information from Facebook about your website, it’s nowhere near as extensive as Google Analytics.

Facebook does a great job at telling you how many people saw and clicked on your ad but loses complete visibility of those individuals once they navigate away from the platform.

With Google Analytics, however, you can gather valuable demographic data from your Facebook ad campaigns and track customer behaviour, device functionality and more once a user lands on your site.

Also, with the latest iOS 14 update and the recent changes to the attribution settings, advertisers can now expect to see up to a 40% reduction of reported conversions in Facebook Ads Manager.

Thankfully, Google Analytics can deliver a lot of information on conversions, clicks and sessions to help improve the performance of your advertising campaigns.

Editor’s Note: Marketers have long struggled to match data in Google Analytics and Facebook Ad Manager long before IOS14. Understanding how users move across channels throughout the customer journey is essential when determining which ads are driving the most conversions and sales. Download our guide on Facebook Attribution and gain a more unified view of your marketing performance.

How to track Facebook ads in Google Analytics

Let’s take a look at how to track Facebook ads in Google Analytics. Tracking your Facebook ads is straightforward. Get started with the step-by-step guide below:

Step 1: Create a trackable link

The first step to tracking your Facebook activity in Google Analytics is to generate a URL parameter for your ads.

(If you’re already aware of URL parameters, then you can jump on ahead to the next section.)

In short, URL parameters provide more context and are the most useful method to measure and track your performance.

The best way to build your URL parameter is with Google Campaign URL builder.

We’ve decided not to go into too much detail on how to build the perfect URL parameters, as there are a lot of useful guides that do a great job of explaining the process already.

Instead, we’ve added a couple of our favourite guides below so that you can optimise your URL parameters for better reporting:

Step 2: Create your Facebook ad

Once you’ve built your trackable link, you’ll need to create your ad on Facebook so that you can start measuring your performance once a user clicks on your creative.

Go to Ad Manager and create your ad. If you’re reading this article, it’s likely you know how to do this already.

Although, just in case, I’ve added a few guides below which you can follow to set up an ad on Facebook:

Step 3: Add trackable link to your Facebook ad

Once you’ve created your Facebook campaign and set the targeting for your ad set, you’ll be asked to create your ad.

There are two ways you can go about this:

a. The most common option is to copy and paste your whole URL in the “Website URL field”

b. Or, you can copy and paste into “URL Parameters”

c. If you want to include your link in your ad copy then you can convert your URL into a short link using a tool like Bitly.

Once you’ve shortened your link, it should look something like this:

Before you move onto the next stage, open a new tab and ensure that there are no errors when your webpage loads.

Step 4: Track performance in Google Analytics

Acquisition Report > All Traffic > Source/Medium.

If you’ve set up your UTMs correctly, then you should see that Google Analytics has attributed traffic and conversions to your Facebook channel and medium that you used when you set up your UTM parameter.

To drill down into your campaign and content performance, click on “Other” and select the parameter you want to analyse in the Acquisition report.

Editor’s Note: While we’re on the topic, don’t forget to download our guide on how to track customer journeys and unlock valuable data across the entire buying cycle to significantly increase your ROI.

How to attribute sales revenue to your Facebook Ads with Ruler Analytics

Now, you’ll need to start thinking about how you’re going to evidence the ROI of your advertising campaigns.

If you run an eCommerce business, then Google Analytics does a great job of correlating your sales data with website activity. With the use of code embedded within your shopping cart, you can understand which of your marketing initiatives are driving the most sales.

However, when it comes to the B2B sector, most buyers yearn for that personal touch and will often call to enquire or complete a purchase.

And, this is where Google Analytics falls short.

Google Analytics doesn’t provide call tracking. So, if you have a number on your website, and use Google Analytics exclusively, then you have no way to collect data about your offline conversions.

Ruler Analytics is a marketing attribution solution that aligns revenue from your CRM with Facebook conversion data. It’s closed loop functionality tracks your visitor’s multiple touchpoints and page journey to measure and attribute value accurately across the entire sales cycle.

How it works:

An anonymous visitor clicks an ad and lands on your website. Ruler captures the FBCLID and GCLID via Javascript.
The user enquiries via form fill, live chat or phone call. Ruler pushes lead data to Facebook and Analytics.
User converts to a lead and the details are passed to the CRM. Ruler enriches CRM entry with marketing variables.
The lead works through the CRM pipeline. Ruler pulls opportunity data, including stage and forecasted value, and sends it to Facebook and Google Analytics.
Lead converts as a customer. Ruler pulls the revenue value from your CRM and sends it to Facebook and Analytics.

Editor’s note: Want to learn more about Ruler Analytics but not ready to book a demo? Download this guide on why you need Ruler and see how it can help boost the quality of your marketing reports.

Importance of measuring revenue, and not just conversions

Below is a use case to demonstrate just how important it is to feed sales revenue into your Google Analytics dashboard. In the screenshot below, you can see that Ruler Analytics has fed online and offline revenue data into the acquisition report and Google Analytics has attributed it accordingly.

Note: By default, Google Analytics uses non-direct last-click attribution. You can easily change this, and we have a guide on Google Attribution which can help you get started.

As you can see in the screenshot above, Facebook drove the most conversions and revenue. Although, if you compare Instagram and Twitter, you can see that Twitter had significantly fewer conversions but drove 6x more revenue than Instagram.

Without that revenue data, you’d likely invest more time and resources into Instagram, but it’s pretty evident that Twitter is more valuable.

If you want to learn more, then we have a guide dedicated on how to integrate CRM data with Google Analytics for closed-loop reporting.

Start tracking your Facebook ads the right way

To get the best results, you need to ensure that your Google Analytics and Facebook accounts work together so that you can gain a better understanding of your marketing and advertising campaigns.

And, with a tool like Ruler Analytics, you can go beyond goal tracking in Google Analytics and attribute revenue directly to your Facebook ads.

Which, in turn, will help you prove–and improve–marketing’s impact on business and will allow you to manage and scale budget into the areas that have the potential to drive more revenue.

Download our handbook on closed-loop marketing attribution or book a call with one of our sales representatives and start focusing on the revenue impact of your marketing initiatives today.