This year, many small businesses began investing substantial amounts in Facebook ads, since organic reach has largely disappeared and paid promotion is now the main way to be seen. Sooner or later, the obvious question arises: is it working?
Facebook's dashboard provides its own answer: the number of people reached, the number of clicks and the cost per click. These figures are informative, but they cannot easily show a small dive centre whether any of those clicks led to a booking. Bookings take place on the website, the website is measured in Google Analytics, and the two systems do not communicate.
They can be connected by adding a few parameters to the end of every link.
What are UTM tags, and why does every ad link need them?
A UTM tag is a short string of text added to the end of a web address. It does not change the page. It tells Google Analytics where the visitor came from, in terms you define.
A tagged link looks like this:
yourdiveshop.com/courses/?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=paid_social&utm_campaign=open_water_march
The source identifies who sent the visitor. The medium identifies the type of traffic. The campaign identifies the initiative it belongs to. Two optional parameters are also available: utm_content, to distinguish two versions of an ad, and utm_term, for keywords. We recommend using utm_content, because comparing two photos within the same ad is often where the most useful insights emerge.
Without tags, Analytics groups Facebook visitors together. Paid ads, people sharing your post and links in groups are all recorded as roughly "facebook," and the paid visits cannot be separated. With tags, you can determine that the March ad with the manta photo sent a specific number of visitors, and how many of them took a useful action.
Google offers a free URL builder that assembles the link, and Google's help page on campaign URLs explains each component in more detail.
Which rules prevent confusion?
- Tag every ad link. A single untagged ad compromises the data for the entire month.
- Use lowercase throughout. "Facebook" and "facebook" appear as two different sources.
- Record your naming conventions in a shared spreadsheet so that everyone uses the same terms.
- Never tag links within your own website, as this overwrites the visitor's actual source.
How should goals be set for booking and enquiry forms?
Tags show where people came from. Goals show whether they took an action once they arrived.
In Analytics, a goal is usually a page. A visitor submits the booking form and lands on a thank-you page. You configure Analytics to count arrival on that page as a completed goal. From then on, every visit that reaches it is counted, along with its source.
The difficulty is that many small business sites have no thank-you page. The form simply displays "Message sent!" on the same page, and Analytics records nothing. This can be tracked as an event instead, but it requires some code. Much of the work is therefore technical groundwork: adding a proper confirmation page, ensuring that the booking engine, if there is one, sends people to a trackable page at the end, and testing the setup by completing the form yourself while watching the real-time report.
One further point applies at this stage. Google has been moving all users to a new version called Universal Analytics, which left beta in the spring. If your site still uses the old tracking code, this is an appropriate time to upgrade, before configuring your goals.
This work is not visible to customers, but until the goals function properly, every other figure remains an estimate.
Why compare cost per booking rather than cost per click?
This is the step that changes how owners allocate their budgets.
Cost per click is the figure the ad platform displays most prominently, so it is the figure most advertisers optimize. Lower-cost clicks appear to indicate success, but frequently do not. The least expensive clicks tend to come from broad audiences: people browsing on a phone with no intention to travel, who leave within three seconds.
Once goals and tags are in place, a simple calculation becomes possible: the amount spent on an ad divided by the bookings or enquiries it generated. This is the cost per booking. The ad with more expensive clicks, targeted precisely at divers in two countries, often proves to be the most economical, because the people who click actually book.
Clicks cost little; bookings are what the budget is meant to buy.
What are the limits of this setup?
The method is not perfectly precise, and its limits should be stated clearly.
People may see an ad on their phone and book a week later on a laptop, in which case Analytics attributes the booking to another source, usually "direct" or a Google search. Facebook recognizes this problem. A month ago, it relaunched Atlas, an ad-measurement platform acquired from Microsoft, with the aim of tracking the same person across devices. For now, it is designed for large advertisers, and a dive centre with a modest monthly budget is unlikely to use it.
Facebook also offers its own conversion pixel, which can be placed on the thank-you page. We recommend adding it. It usually reports more conversions than Analytics, because it counts people who saw an ad and returned later. Neither figure is fully accurate. We recommend reviewing both and giving more weight to the trend than to the exact figure.
Approximate figures on the right measure are more useful than precise figures on the wrong one. For businesses that prefer professional support, conversion tracking and analytics can be set up with assistance. For most small businesses, however, a free link builder and one afternoon of work cover most of the requirements.