How to Track Your Facebook Ads with Google Analytics

Ever run an advertising campaign on Facebook? If you have, and you have Google Analytics set up for your site, you’ll notice that Google Analytics doesn’t auto-integrate this traffic for you.

Today’s quick video blog post walks you through the exact tweaks you need to make in order to make Google Analytics see that traffic the way it’s supposed to be seen.

The Last Step

The last (assumed) step here is that you’ll take that *new* URL that you created with the instructions in this video and enter that as your ad destination in your Facebook Ad Manager.

What do you think?

Ever run a Facebook ad campaign for your biz? Did you find this helpful? Let me know in the comments!

(P.S. – looking for the training I mentioned in the video? More details coming soon… get on the in-the-know list here)

(Transcript)

Hi. My name is Liz Lockard from www.LizLockard.com and today I want to talk about how to track your Facebook ad traffic in Google Analytics. This actually isn’t a built-in feature to Google Analytics. You have to do a little bit of tweaking which is why I wanted to walk you through it today.

So right now, we’re looking at my Google Analytics account from a time period earlier this year where I slipped it around some Facebook ads and how I got here was Traffic Sources, Campaigns report.

So again, you need a little bit of tweaking so that’s what I’m going to walk you through today. You can actually use a tool from Google itself. It’s the URL tagging tool. I actually never remembered the address of it. So I have to type “URL tagging tool” into Google and it’s usually the first one that pops up here, this URL Builder.

So click that and it takes us to this handy little tool from Google to use with your account. The first step here is to enter in your website URL. So this is the landing page for your Facebook ads.

Let me say here that when I’m talking about tracking your Facebook ads and Google Analytics, I’m talking about the kind of ads that appear on Facebook and drive visitors actually to your website, not the kind of ads that actually drive visitors to your Facebook page or a particular post that you did. This only applies to Facebook ad traffic going to your website.

So to do that, we can just pull the actual website address. So over here, I’m going to take an example here. Say I wanted to run some Facebook ads for my upcoming Google Analytics course. I just would copy that. I did a control-C here but you can also right click and copy. Then just paste it in here.

So here you see that you have the whole URL including the “http” part. So that’s all in there as is. That’s perfect. For here, the next step is just telling Google a little bit more about the campaign that you’re going to be running. So campaign source for here is Facebook. Campaign medium, this is kind of the more generic term for the kind of campaign that you’re running. So for Facebook, it’s CPC. It’s cost per click since you have to pay per click on your Facebook ads.

Campaign term and content aren’t’ required. So we’re just going to go ahead and skip these. The campaign name, I like to use this for a description of what exactly it is I’m promoting with the ad. So for this one, I might type in something like “missing manual” because that’s the name of my training.

If you had a really complicated Facebook ad structure, say you have multiple campaigns running or maybe you’ve done it more than once, you might say “missing manual spring,” and then the year or fall and then the year or some other distinguishing that makes sense in your ad structure.

So the last step here is actually just to click Generate URL, this button here, and you get this really long URL with a bunch of funny characters on it. Just make sure you copy the whole thing. I’m going to do a control-C to copy and just to show you if you paste it in your address bar, and hit Enter, it takes you right to that page. It’s taking you to the same location that we had before that adds a whole lot of extra characters at the end that basically tells Google Analytics this came from Facebook, that it’s a CPC campaign, and you can see that that’s exactly what I get here.

So this has been how to track your Facebook ad traffic in Google Analytics with Liz Lockard from www.LizLockard.com. If you like this video, if you would like to learn more tips like this, feel free to come over to www.LizLockard.com and sign up for my newsletter list. I will be sharing a lot of these sorts of tips with the list and you only get them if you’re signed up there. So thanks. If you like this, also feel free to share it on Facebook or share it on Twitter and stop on by www.LizLockard.com. Thanks.

[End of transcript]