For businesses with mission critical conversions that happen offline, attribution reporting revealing if & how Facebook advertising impacted those offline conversions is extremely valuable in managing to success. If you have offline event sets being populated in Facebook when customers engage in those offline conversions, the next step is to surface related conversion data in the ads manager reporting interface.
Reporting offline activity in ads manager
You can view offline custom conversion and offline standard event results in the Facebook ads manager. For example, in the snag below – you can make selections to view offline “Lead” events in ads manager. This would report any “Lead” offline event associated with a person that saw or interacted with an ad in the date range (give consideration to your conversion windows). For example, this could be a person that viewed a Facebook ad, and later showed up at a real estate open house to view a home, providing contact info to show interest – with the contact info being sent to Facebook later as an offline “Lead” event.
Facebook offline conversions further combat ITP
This post was almost titled “Defeating ITP with offline conversions”. We call this “offline” conversion tracking, but with ITP and cookie-based tracking disintegration, you could argue we really should be doing this even with transactions that happen wholly on-line, especially for ad platforms that do not support fully integrated people based tracking – and certainly in situations where online conversions happen on a third party digital property that won’t allow you to deploy your own tag based tracking.
What about offline conversion tracking on Google & Microsoft?
Google Ads offline conversion tracking & Microsoft Ads (Bing) offline conversions solutions require recording in a CRM a GCLID or MSCLKID URL parameter value, respectively, in the ad click URL, and then passing it back to those platforms for any user that converted offline to do offline tracking. These solutions are “leaky” given that related ad platforms do not support fully integrated people based tracking.
Facebook offline event sets can be sent without a click ID*, and still allow matching with people to know if they viewed or interacted with an ad. No recorded GCLID or MSCLKID value = no offline conversion recorded in Google & Microsoft ad platforms (at least not without some heavy modeled guessing). This is the value of Facebook’s people based marketing.
With both Google Ads and Microsoft Ads offline conversion tracking, make sure you engage auto-tagging so the GLICD & MSCLKID URL parameters are appended & populated automatically. With Microsoft Ads, also note that auto-tagging of Microsoft Click ID, is different than auto-tagging of UTM values.
*Facebook’s server-side API, which receives event data just like a pixel, also does not require a click ID.