To start off if you have a busy website a lot of visitors will be interacting with it. Now the question is are you making the best of the digital marketing campaigns and everything else that is going on with your website? You can make use of every interaction, a pageview or a click can be useful for understanding your audience.
Once you understand your audience, it becomes easier to target them in a much better and smarter way. If you want to make more profit from your paid campaigns on Google and Facebook, you should start using Events. It helps you in tracking the interactions by installing a tracking code on your website.
The best example of an event is the ‘Add to Cart’ option. Another event is filling out of one or more fields in a form and not submitting it. This is also recorded as an event. In simple terms, you can record or track any action that the user makes through Events. It could be as simple as watching a video, clicking a link, or downloading a simple PDF.
How to set up Events on the website
With both Google and Facebook, you will need a code to set up Events on the website.
Firstly, you have to verify that you already have a Facebook Pixel code within the header code of the pages of your website. If you don’t you have to enter the base pixel code before anything.
Now, you have to choose the event that you want to track for a certain page from the event list of Facebook. for instance, if you want to track the “Add to Cart” event, you have to copy the Add to Cart event code.
It looks like this “fbq{‘track’,’AddToCart’}. Copy it and paste it above the </script> tag. You have to repeat this process on multiple if you want to track multiple events.
How to set up Event tracking using Google Analytics?
If you want to get more insights, then you can also use Events in Google Analytics. You have to create custom code snippets for all the events.
The code is added to the link code of every action that you want to track. When you click on it, the item gets displayed on Google Analytics. The event code is made up of four elements. They are as follows:
- Category – it defines the group of action you want to track
- Action – The type of action you want to track
- Label – it helps in monitoring and states what the event is all about
- Value – This is just assigning a simple numeric value to the event. It can be a monetary value or a scale.
The basic structure will look like:
onclick=”ga(‘send’, ‘event’, ‘Category’, ‘Action’, ‘Label’, ‘Value’);”
The code needs to be added within the href link code before the link text, which looks like this:
<a href=”www.examplewebsite.co.uk/pdf/company_brochure.pdf” onclick=”ga(‘send’, ‘event’, ‘PDF’, ‘Download’, ‘Company Brochure – PDF Download’);“>Download Our Brochure</a>
There is no value assigned to the event. Now, is there a better way to do this? Yes, there is. you can use tools like Oribi that tracks every interaction of a website.
It will collect all the data and present it to you. Even if you make certain changes like adding pages or changing buttons, the events get updated. The best part is, all this is done without any coding.
How to use Event data for optimizing paid campaigns?
You can use all the data to optimize the paid campaigns. There are two objectives of tracking event data. They are:
- Internal – where you can analyze how the visitors are interacting with the website
- External – where you export the data to the paid campaigns to categorize them in a better way
Consider the “Add to Cart” event. The visitors didn’t buy, however, they showed interest. this is worth the effort. Every user is different. Now, to make sure they purchase in the future, you can, for instance, create a category for the visitors who added a shirt and a category for visitors who added a shoe. This categorical customized will help you in your paid campaigns.
Both Google and Facebook offer strong optimization features for the paid ad campaigns. The reasons behind this are:
- It helps to segment your audience and deliver a relevant message
- It helps in reaching new audiences that are related to your offers
Google’s Remarketing and Facebook’s Retargeting
The objective of both of them is the same. In layman’s terms, when you visit a website, a tracking cookie gets installed on the browser when you accept the cookie message. When you leave the website, you get to see the display ads from the website. This is what Google remarketing is.
This is very effective because it compels you to stop scrolling and think about the website or the product once again. If you click on the ad, it will take you back to the website and the product once again.
Google’s Similar Audience and Facebook’s Lookalike
Based on the characteristics of your audience, Google and Facebook can target similar people and show your ads to them. But how do Google and Facebook do that? The algorithm locates their interests, location, demography, and professional background.
For instance, your audience takes action; it is recorded as an event. Now, once you define the visitors, the algorithm finds similar visitors who took similar action and shows your ads to them. This is a great tool to expand the potential audience and reach more people.
The complete process includes three steps:
- Identify the events and insert proper codes for all pages and event types.
- The way you define an event is important for the success of the ad campaign.
- When you set up the event you have to enable Facebook and Google to use the data collected from Event tracking.
Using Facebook Event tracking for ad optimization
Once you insert the event tracking code to different pages of the website, the event data becomes available to the Ads Manager.
- Now, to locate the data, log in to the Ads Manager, click on the Pixels tab
- Choose the ‘data sources’ on the left
- It will take you to Pixel and you will see the generic breakdown of events
- Now, click on the ‘details’ tab
- Here you can see the breakdown of events by date and volume.
Now you can categorize the visitors by their actions.
Using Event tracking for Google Analytics and AdSense
The first step is to define the events in Google Analytics.
- Click on the ‘Admin’ tab and then click on the ‘goals’ tab.
- Choose the ‘new goal’ option
- Now, click on the ‘custom’ option
- Name your goal
- Select ‘event’
- Now, you have to refer to the four elements that you defined in the event code “onclick=”ga(‘send’, ‘event’, ‘Category’, ‘Action’, ‘Label’, ‘Value’);”. There will be a specific box of each value.
- Remember that the text you enter should be identical to the text in the code. If it is not, the event will not be recorded.
Repeat this process for every event tracking.
Now, you have to import the event in Google Ads.
- Click on the ‘tools’ tab present at the top navigation bar and choose ‘conversions’ from the dropdown menu.
- On the left side, click on ‘Google Analytics’
- There is a list of existing goals in Analytics.
- Choose the ones that you want to import
That’s it. The events you track will be available for segmenting.
In conclusion, it can be said that the Event tracking helps you with valuable data on the website visitors like specific interests, level of intent, and place in the funnel. Using this data, when you optimize your paid ad campaigns, you can better engage your audience, increase conversion, and generate more ROI.
