Facebook advertisers are always looking for ways to improve their campaign efficiency. One way they do this is by enhancing conversion tracking, which has not been an easy task in recent years.
Since the rise of tracking restrictions, implementing Facebook Conversion API (which sends data to FB servers from your server) is the most popular way of improving FB tracking. We already have a detailed blog post on how to set up FB CAPI.
You can also use Facebook’s older way of sending server events, the offline conversions. This solution relies on first-party data that cannot be affected by tracking restrictions or short-lived cookies.
This blog post will discuss the recent tag for the server Google Tag Manager container - Facebook offline conversion tag. It allows sending data to FB offline conversion using the server Google Tag Manager container.
Facebook offline conversions is a great way to track actions that people take off your site, such as in-store purchases or by phone.
You can upload offline event data to Facebook, which will match events to people who saw or clicked FB ads. If FB can identify a person and match them with the ad, it will count the event as a conversion towards the ad campaign.
Nowadays, the conversion funnel is complicated and includes many touchpoints (both click-through and view-through). For this reason, some marketers choose offline conversions as their second angle of analysis when evaluating results from Facebook campaigns, both offline and online.
There are several ways how advertises approach setting up FB offline conversions:
Each of these methods has its disadvantages. To implement custom integration, you need to hire developers who will create a connector for your CRM (or POS, etc.) and FB offline conversion. With tools like Zapier, it might be easy to set up, but the price will be high, especially if there are many events. With manual upload, a lot of work must be done when preparing a CSV file.
Setting up FB offline conversions using the sGTM tag might be the best solution for those already familiar with server-side tagging. Setting up won’t take long, and you can save money by not using connectors or hiring developers.
If you are unfamiliar with server-side tagging, I highly suggest starting to implement this new technology sooner than later. The idea of server-side tagging has been around for some time, but it's only recently becoming more popular. This technology is designed for tracking that relies on first-party cookies and first-party data, making it more secure for your and your customers.
Two essential things that need to be done before setting up ss tagging using sGTM are creating a server GTM container and delivering data to sGTM (there are several ways of sending data, the most popular are GA4, DataTag/DataClient, Webhooks, etc.).
There might be multiple reasons to use Facebook offline conversions.
But if you have already implemented FB CAPI? Should you consider implementing FB offline conversions using sGTM?
I would suggest doing so. The main reason is that the more data about customers you send to Facebook, the more information is fed to FB machine learning algorithms that select who should see your FB ads. This may have a positive effect on the results of FB ads.
What about FB offline conversions and iOS tracking restrictions? There is no official documentation on how FB offline conversion affects those who opted out of tracking on their mobile phones. Below I will describe my opinion on how FB processes such data.
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