Miranda Chapman

by Miranda Chapman | Social Advertising

Let’s talk about Facebook app events! Like the importance of the Facebook pixel for tracking events on your website, app events are just as important for your app.

Setting up these events is important for performance marketing for three main reasons:

  • Optimization
    App Event Optimization (AEO), like Conversion Optimization, is used on Facebook to show ads to people who are more likely to complete specific app events once they install, e.g. AEO for Purchase.
    For retention efforts to current app users, you can utilize app events for Conversion Optimization. This allows you to focus on getting users through the funnel to that next event.\
  • Measurement
    When you’re looking to evaluate your marketing efforts, you’ll want to have the events you are using show up within the Facebook Ads Manager dashboard so you can understand performance in real-time.
  • Audience Building
    With app events, both standard and custom, you can build audiences based on in-app actions and time-lapsed.

If you are looking to move current app users further along in the funnel, (e.g. they’ve registered in your app but they haven’t completed their first purchase), you can do so by passing back a Facebook Standard Event. By passing through a Facebook Standard event, you’ll be able to create an audience (i.e. anyone who registered in the last 180 days but hasn’t purchased yet) and you will be able to optimize towards this purchase event. Once this campaign is up and running, you can view your data in Facebook Ads Manager and compare it to historical trends and other campaigns to gauge performance.

Now, let’s think about what app events might be right for you! To help you figure out what events could be useful to track, think about what your onboarding or purchase funnel looks like for your app.

Here’s an example for an ecommerce app:

Install App > Launch App > Complete Registration > Add to Wishlist > Add to Cart > Initiate Checkout > Purchase

Here’s an example for a gaming app:

Install App > Launch App > Complete Tutorial > Purchase > Spend Credits > Unlock Achievement (e.g. advance to level 10)

Once you’ve got your events mapped out, finish your event taxonomy by adding in what parameters you want to pass to Facebook with each event. For a purchase event, the main parameters you’d want to include are the purchase amount and number of items purchased. You could also consider passing back product categories purchased to provide a bit more context.

Your event taxonomy could look something like this:

Having an event taxonomy should make the process of implementing Facebook app events a breeze! When you’re ready to implement these events, you’ll want to make sure anything you want to optimize towards with App Event Optimization is set up as a Facebook Standard event. If it’s just an app event you’d like to see in the Facebook dashboard but may never want to optimize towards (let’s say Add to Wishlist, for example), that can be passed as either a Standard event or a Custom event.

Once you’ve got those events set up and tracking correctly, you’re ready to set up some killer app marketing campaigns! And if you want any help throughout this process, Metric Theory is always here to help.

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