Prepare to work with 8 conversion events per domain

Due to the iOS 14 update of Apple, Facebook is implementing the ‘Aggregated Event Measurement’ Protocol. This new measurement feature will limit the amount of data that advertises are allowed to send to Facebook using the Facebook Pixel or other tools.

Facebook web events processed through the ‘Aggregated Event Measurement’ protocol are limited to 8 conversion events per domain. If you want to measure and optimize for web events from people using iOS 14 devices, you will need to configure and prioritize these 8 events. Remember that you will first need to verify your domain to be able to ‘edit’ your events.

When ‘Aggregated Event Measurement’ is used, only the highest priority conversion event will be sent to Facebook whenever a customer takes multiple actions during a website session. This is important to know as it will impact the volume of data that gets reported.

Rethink your strategy and campaign structure

You will need to rethink your campaign setup and prioritize your web events to allow for maximum reporting data and results of your Facebook campaigns.

Before this limitation, the prioritization of your sales funnel events would normally be prioritized as follows:

  1. Highest priority: Purchase
  2. Add Payment Info
  3. Initiate Checkout
  4. Add to Cart
  5. Lowest priority: View Content

Remember that the ‘Aggregated Event Measurement’ method will only send 1 of these events, based on priority. So rethink how to prioritize your most important conversion events. If you are running campaigns optimizing for ‘Add to Cart’ events, you will need enough data about that event, so you might want to prioritize this event high in your priority list.

Let me explain this setup with a simplified example.
The following example is the journey of 1 customer that visited your webshop:

  • 1 product views (View Content event)
  • 1 product views resulted in 1 Adds to Cart (Add to Cart event)
  • 1 Add to Cart resulted in 1 Purchase (Purchase event)

If you would rank ‘Purchase’ at the highest level and ‘View Product’ at the lowest level, Facebook would receive the following data: 1 ‘Purchase’ event, 0 ‘Add to Cart’ events, 0 ‘View Content’ events. In this case you would lose conversion data about ‘Add to Cart’ events and ‘View Content’ events.

If you would rank ‘Add to Cart’ above ‘Purchase’, Facebook would receive the following data:
0 ‘Purchase’ events, 1 ‘Add to Cart’ events, 0 ‘View Content’ events. In this case you would lose conversion data about the purchase and data about the product the customer viewed, but you would maximize the data about which products got added to the cart.

If you would rank ‘View Product’ above ‘Add to Cart’ and ‘Purchase’, Facebook would receive the following data: 0 ‘Purchase’ events, 0 ‘Add to Cart’ events, 1 ‘View Content’ events. In this case you would lose data about all lower funnel ecommerce events, but you would keep all data about the product views.

Event priority

Think about how much data you need to optimize your campaigns. Your campaigns need to generate enough data to optimize results. The growth of your business will probably be most important, so you might want to consider choosing events that have high value to your business and optimizing for events in the upper funnel, such as ‘Add to Cart’, ‘Content Views’ or ‘Landing Page Views’. Landing Page Views are part of the default Pixel integration and aren’t subject to the 8 event limitation.

The following prioritization might provide the most value to your business, but note that this is just an example. Every business is different, so prioritize on your business needs.

Sales Funnel based Event Priority example
event prioritization in the new ‘Aggregated Event Measurement’ interface

Heads up!

Go ahead an change/prioritize your web events using the new ‘Aggregated Event Measurement’ interface. But be aware! When editing the priority order or removing events, ads and ad sets will be paused for 3 days. These updated events will not be available for optimization or reporting within these 3 days. Remember to reactivate your ads or ad sets if they were paused because of this change. Adding new events at the bottom of the priority list will not cause a 3-day pause.

About the Author

Bram

Bram Van der Hallen is an all-round Belgian Digital Marketer and Meta Certified Professional with 16+ years experience in media planning and buying.Bram talks about Facebook Ads and all things Digital Marketing on LinkedIn where more than 80.000 marketers follow his weekly updates. Click here to Follow Bram on LinkedIn.

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