Using Facebook Custom Conversions to Improve Customer Acquisition

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Often, it can be a challenge for our clients to understand how their advertising dollars impact new customer growth. Because there are so many ways to analyze campaign performance and so many data sources to sift through, it’s not always easy to determine the truly compelling new customer data. We use Facebook Custom Conversions to break through these uncertainties. So, we’ll share a Custom Conversion methodology to help you find compelling data to support your high-impact customer acquisition decisions.

What are Facebook Custom Conversions?

Facebook Custom Conversions provide a flexible tool for marketers searching for unique data points. Unfortunately, many marketers don’t realize how useful Facebook Custom Conversions can be, and they miss a golden opportunity right in front of them. When onboarding new advertising accounts at Adlucent, we notice that Facebook Custom Conversions are frequently underutilized. By illuminating the details and opportunities of Facebook Custom Conversions, we can guide performance marketers to make better use of this tool.

The name Custom Conversions tells us about the product’s function:

1. The first part, “Custom,” tells us that we have the ability to choose which actions we find useful.
2. The second part, “Conversions,” means our action choices can function as trackable and optimizable conversion outcomes in Facebook.

In essence, Custom Conversions allow marketers to tell Facebook, “Hey, this unique user action is meaningful to me. I’d like to track instances of this action, and I’d like to optimize so that my campaigns produce more of this action.”

How do I set up Facebook Custom Conversions to help my program scale?

Let’s talk about an example in which your company sells running shoes and wants to acquire more NEW purchasers to scale your business. Facebook Custom Conversions can help with this goal!

First, you need the Facebook pixel base code installed on your website. After that is set up, you can use URL rules or parameter-based filters to get the unique data you desire. Since your company wants to report on and optimize for new customer purchases, your Custom Conversion will tell Facebook which customers are returning and which customers are new as each Purchase Event fires.

Since Custom Conversions are flexible, the technical setup can be achieved in many ways. But, ultimately, a clever Account Management team should be able to help your site development team find the right data layer variables and pass them through the Facebook Pixel to achieve the desired outcome.

What do I do with this data?

Having a Facebook Custom Conversion reporting your new customer purchases is valuable and opens the door to many exciting follow-ups!

For example, you may find that one campaign drives the majority of your new customers or has a particularly high new customer rate. In this case, the Facebook Custom Conversion data has just provided a great data point to justify increased investment in this campaign.

You could go even further and create a Facebook Lookalike audience seeded from this “new customer purchases” custom conversion. With this approach, you could create an exciting, self-sustaining system in which each new customer provides a new data point that improves Facebook’s ability to find more customers that look like them.

Has this worked well for Adlucent?

It’s worked very well! A large health retailer with over 700 stores nationwide leaned on Adlucent’s expertise to acquire new customer purchases through Facebook. We used the Custom Conversion approach outlined above, which helped the client drive +20.3% in new customer lift. The Custom Conversions also showed us that our Dynamic Product Ads drove a higher percentage of new customers compared to our other ad types. Our Custom Conversions helped our client justify their Facebook investment and led us to allocate more budget to the Dynamic Product Ad campaigns that performed so well for new customer acquisition.

What are my next steps?

We’ve covered the most important basics about the Facebook Custom Conversions product. We hope you now have a better understanding of why we recommend using Custom Conversions to deliver the new customer acquisition data you need to scale your social advertising program. If you’re interested in diving deeper into this strategy or need help with your performance marketing program, please reach out for a free consultation.

Steve Bonino

Steve Bonino has over 9+ years experience marketing across a wide spectrum of business objectives and verticals. He pushes his team of paid social media planning and buying experts to Make Breakthroughs, Not Bets. Outside of work, Steve loves college football, creative writing projects, and long walks under the blazing Texas sun.