Navigating Facebook’s New Ads Changes

We reported back in February that the squabble between Apple and Facebook over user privacy was probably going to result in changes to the Facebook Ads platform.  Here is the latest update on how Facebook is changing their ad system and what you need to do to prepare for the change.

What Sites are Impacted by the Changes?

Everyone who uses Facebook Ads should become familiar with your Facebook Business Manager settings and review them as Facebook begins to roll out changes. You will definitely need to take action if you optimize your Facebook ads based on conversion metrics on web events from Facebook Pixel.

Facebook is changing how they work with websites like GiveSignup | RunSignup (and similar sites like Eventbrite, Etsy, Shopify, Active, Classy, etc.) so that they only trust domain owners. Facebook limits a domain (like GiveSignup.org) to only 8 web events, which is obviously not enough for the tens of thousands of websites using our platform.

If you have your own domain (like MyNonprofit.org), you will be limited to choosing 8 web events (Facebook will actually auto-assign your events). If you use GiveSignup.org as your domain, you will not be permitted to trigger Facebook Pixel on web events because GiveSignup hosts thousands of customers on the domain.

The good news is that we have two solutions to this problem!

Use RaceInsights and Custom Source Tracking to Insulate Your Business from Ad Platform Changes

GiveSignup | RunSignup makes it easy to completely avoid being impacted by Facebook’s changes (as well as any future changes) by basing your ad decisions on RunSignup’s Race Insights with Custom Source Tracking.

RaceInsights is a custom-built analytics engine that provides real-time insights to event directors on the progress of your event. We track every click and conversion from each of your Facebook ads, including total $Transactions per ad.

With real-time referral sources on a single dashboard, you can see how your Facebook referral activity stacks up to other campaigns or referral sources you may have in place. In addition, RunSignup is counting direct links from the last site users visited before they arrived at your event or donation page. In contrast, Facebook holds a referral source for 30 days and still counts that referral as a conversion if they make a purchase in the 30 day window.

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For more granular tracking, use RunSignup’s Custom Source Tracking to create an unlimited number of tracking tokens to capture conversion rates on specific ads placed on Facebook, Google, or other platforms and compare success rates all in one place.

You can even trace referrals to individual athletes and attendees to better understand how to target those participants for future events.

You can also use RaceInsights in conjunction with Facebook Pixel tracking to get the best of both worlds. You can review the capabilities of RaceInsights at around 4:30 into this session, or a friendly explainer on why and how to use Custom Source Tracking, check out this short episode of talkSIGNUP.

GiveSignup | RunSignup Domain Hosting

If you want to continue to use Facebook Pixels and get the deep insight into conversions provided by our platform, then you can use our free custom domains available for Run/Walk/Ride registration events, Ticket Events, and Donation Websites. Many event hosting sites like Eventbrite do not provide this functionality, while others like Classy charge money for it.

We will be releasing the capability to easily verify your custom domain with Facebook in May, 2021. You can get started now with the process of hosting your own domain or subdomain via GiveSignup. This webinar reviews all the details of domain hosting, or you can walk through this how-to.

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