The Complete Guide to Integrating Facebook Ads with Wicked Reports

This document is for Facebook media buyers on how to integrate and track Facebook Ads with Wicked Reports

1. Common Scenarios

2. Step #1 Facebook Integration Wizard

   1. Decision #1 Auto-tagging of Facebook ad links

   2. Decision #2 Facebook Offline Conversion for View-Through Metrics

   3. Decision #3 Push lead ad contact info into your CRM

3. Step #2 Facebook Tracking Gotchas To Review

4. Step #3 - Wicked Reports tracking script on all forms and destination URLs of your Facebook Ads

5. What Happens Next

6. If you turned off Facebook Auto-Tagging

7. Troubleshooting

Common Facebook Wicked Reports Scenarios 

• Looking to get ROI on Facebook ad spend
• Leads take time to buy from Facebook ads and want to connect customer lifetime value back to ad spend
• High value subscription customers and you’d like the recurring purchase to track back to the top and middle of the funnel ad clicks
• Multiple Facebook ad accounts to connect to 1 Wicked Reports’ account
• Pixel conversion inaccurate, or missing key conversions, missing subscription conversions, inaccurate ROI, or taking credit for other channel’s conversions.

The Facebook integration process has 3 steps:

1. Run Wicked’s Facebook Integration Wizard
2. Assess any known tricky situations (many advertisers have none, but let’s be safe and do a quick review)
3. Install the Wicked Reports tracking code across your marketing stack

Step#1  Facebook Integration Wizard

The Facebook Ads setup process consists of running 1 integration wizard with a couple of customization options depending on your preferences and ad’s statuses.  The customization options can be changed at any time.

1. Go to your Wicked Reports account menu option Setup->Authorizations.

and click the Connect button under Facebook:

1. The Wicked Reports Integration Wizard launches for Facebook, click Yes:

The next step of the wizard has 4 customization options that you should give some thought to before making your selection.

3. Decision #1 - Turn on Auto-Tagging of Facebook Ads with WickedIDs

1. 1. We highly recommend turning on Auto-Tagging. This triggers Wicked Reports to automatically append the text “WickedSource=Facebook&WickedID={{ad.id}}” to the URL params field of your existing, and all future Facebook ads.  When this string is applied, you can rest easy knowing we will look up the correct Facebook campaigns, adsets, and ads from every Facebook ad click detected by our tracking code.

 

This setting will temporarily put your existing ads into review.  If you have long-running ads with tons of likes, comments, and shares, then read below the screenshot on step 3b on what to do. Otherwise, click “Yes” and scroll down to step #4.

 

3b. When you have a couple of ads with long-standing superior performance (as far as you can tell without having Wicked Reports) and tons of social proof you do not wish to risk the 1% chance of losing, select “No” for this section for now. Then go manually update those ads first using the instructions here:  https://help.wickedreports.com/update-a-facebook-ad-without-losing-social-proof

You can proceed with the rest of the setup.  Know that after you update these important ads, you can turn on auto-tagging for future ads without risk.

You can read more details about Facebook auto-tagging here: https://help.wickedreports.com/setting-up-facebook-auto-tracking

 

4. Decision #2 Facebook Offline Conversion sync on/off

Facebook has a more optimistic view of its last view conversion results than Wicked Reports is comfortable with.  So we've built a process (with Facebook’s help) to take any daily sales that do not have last-click attribution and then query Facebook for last view data.  We are able to do this using Facebook Offline Conversions.  Additionally, this allows you to create audiences based on actual customer lifetime value that has been uploaded from your shopping cart order systems, not the Facebook pixel.

 

Keep this checked if that sounds good. If you don’t wish for Facebook to have your data uploaded, uncheck it.  This means all Wicked Reports data will be click-based for last click.

You can read much more about this option in the help doc dedicated specifically to this feature:  https://help.wickedreports.com/facebook-offline-conversions

5. Decision #3 Push lead ad contact info into your CRM

Wicked Reports is able to attribute Facebook Lead Ads as part of the integration.  This additional bonus option allows you to push those leads into your CRM. 

Many advertisers using lead ads already have integrations that push their Facebook Lead Ads leads into their CRM.  If so, leave this unchecked. Otherwise, check it.

1. After your 3 decisions have been made, click the Authorize button:
2. Facebook’s OAuth wizard will take over from Facebook.com, just follow the prompts. Assuming you have the necessary Facebook permissions, it will be a few simple clicks and then you will be redirected to Wicked Reports with a screen giving you a list of ad accounts to choose from. 

Yes, you can select multiple Facebook ad accounts.

Make sure all the accounts are for the advertiser related to your Wicked Reports account.   

Then click Assign.

1. Success will show a screen similar to this:

 

Step #2 Facebook Tracking Gotchas To Review

1. Link Shortener URLs in your ad copy or Website URL field.
   
   Make sure that you append the text “ ?WickedSource=Facebook&WickedID={{ad.id}} ” to the link and confirm that the link passes the parameters through to a page with our tracking script on it.
2. Link redirects
   1. Your links can redirect all they want, they just have to preserve and pass the WickedID to a page with our tracking script when all the redirection is completed. 
   2. If you are using link redirects, test this out by adding “?utm_source=quick-test” to the end of your redirecting link. 
   3. When redirection is complete, the website address box in your browser should still have “?utm_source=quick-test”, else you need to adjust your redirect settings to allow pass-through parameters (most popular redirect services have this option).
3. Boosted Posts - they track, if you read and follow this: https://help.wickedreports.com/tracking-facebook-boosted-posts
4. ManyChat / messenger ads - they might track, if you do either of these strategies:
   1. https://help.wickedreports.com/tracking-facebook-messenger-ads-to-manychat-bots-to-external-website-urls
   2. https://help.wickedreports.com/tracking-facebook-ads-to-manychat-bots-that-capture-email-addresses
5. Facebook Ads to "Like Your Page" are not tracked
6. Does updating ads with Wicked source and ID for a Facebook Ad reset the learning phase of the Ad?
   1. No. Every edit you make (during the learning phase or after it) has some effect on delivery, but not every edit causes the ad set to reenter the learning phase. Only a significant edit causes an ad set to reenter the learning phase. Updating the Wicked ID manually is not considered a significant edit. 
      1. See this article by Facebook, "Significant Edits and Learning Phase", for more information.

Step #3 - Wicked Reports tracking script on all forms and destination URLs of your Facebook Ads

Now that we have the ad click info being sent to your pages, we need to have our tracking script on the pages ready to detect the clicks.

If you have Google Tag Manager deployed throughout your marketing stack, great news, follow these simple instructions here: https://help.wickedreports.com/wicked-tracking-code-with-google-tag-manager

Those of you without Google Tag Manager can find instructions in this section: https://help.wickedreports.com/setup#utm-and-tracking-setup

Step #3 Tips:

• Any page can be tested for Wicked tracking scripts using the tracking page validator https://help.wickedreports.com/tracking-validation
• When a page has embedded form or order form technology, we need the tracking script in that tech also, or you need to use the thank you page hack https://help.wickedreports.com/using-the-thank-you-page-hack-to-capture-optin-and-order-actions
• Reach out to your onboarding specialist if you have a tricky tech stack - we’ve seen it all and can set things up for you when it’s challenging - just ask.

That’s it - you are now set up for success tracking Facebook clicks and ROI. 

What Happens Next

Wicked Reports will start retrieving ad costs at the campaign, adset, and ad level.

Wicked Reports will start appending wickedIDs on newly created ads (assuming auto-tagging was enabled).

Wicked Reports will start tracking Facebook clicks, comparing these clicks against incoming clicks, detecting conversions from your CRM and shopping cart order systems, and attributing revenue based on all our various models.

You will see the results in the ROI report.

If You Turned Off Facebook Auto-Tagging

Virtually all of our clients rely on Facebook Auto-Tagging - either immediately turning it on during the integration process, or after manually updating a few critical, high-performing ads so that the 1% risk of losing social proof does not occur.

If you had to manually update a few key ads, after doing so, you can come back to the integration screen and update the setting specifically related to auto-tagging. To do so, click on the gear icon in your Facebook integration box to bring up the settings sub-menu option.

Then update your auto-tagging selection to “Yes”

All un-tagged Facebook ads will receive the WickedID tagging, and all future ads will get the tag within 2 hours of creation.

Troubleshooting

https://help.wickedreports.com/troubleshooting-facebook-ad-tracking