Facebook ads data and tracking capabilities offer more than simply telling you how many times users clicked on your ads, taking them to your site. Facebook ads can also tell you if users who clicked on your ads, visited certain website pages, or took certain actions on your site like completing a purchase or opting-in to your offer.

Facebook offers some pre-built, standard conversion events that you can use for your conversion ads and tracking, but you are free to create your own custom conversion events as well. Many people find it easier to set up custom conversion tracking for their Facebook ads because they don’t need to add additional code to a specific website page, and can instead set up that desired conversion tracking by creating a custom conversion with the link of the website page you want tracked.

Each Facebook ads account can have up to 100 custom conversions. You can delete any Custom Conversions that you already have and don’t need anymore, as well.

Before you can begin setting up any conversions – custom or otherwise – you’ll need to first create and add your Facebook base pixel to your website. Some third party landing page tools will also accept your Facebook pixel. Facebook uses your base pixel as part of its conversion tracking process, so you’ll need to get it in place before beginning. 

Note: Conversion events tracking is in addition to the steps you need to follow to install your base pixel code.

How to Set Up a Custom Conversion for your Facebook Ad

From your Ads Manager account, click on the icon with the 3 lines located in the top left corner.

Next, click on Events Manager –> Custom Conversions.

Then the blue Create Custom Conversion button in the middle of the page.

Now you are ready to set the rules for your custom conversion tracking.

If you previously set up specific conversion events, you’ll find them listed in the drop down arrow on the right, under All URL Traffic.

To complete this step, you will need the URL of the page you want tracked. For the sake of example, let’s say you want to track people who clicked on your ad, then visited your landing page, then opted-in to your offer, and then were sent to your Thank You page after their opt-in.

When you set a Rule for a Custom Conversion, you are telling Facebook what activity you want to track and include for this custom conversion event. In our case, we want to track all of the people who reached the Thank You page found (only) at the end of an opt-in sequence. That means anyone who landed on that specific Thank You page, has opted in to our email list, and no one who hasn’t completed that sequence would ever visit that page.

This is where you’ll be adding the URL of that Thank You page. You’ll need to choose between “contains”, “does not contain” or “equals” in the drop down menu to the left of the URL keywords field. Make sure that you only use “equals” if you have an exact URL match, down to every last character. Otherwise, you’ll miss tracking events that occurred.

Note: It is possible to add more than 1 Rule for your Custom Conversion.

Name your Custom Conversion and choose the type of conversion tracking you’re doing from the list provided.

If you want, you can add a dollar value to each conversion. This is not required though.

Once you submit your new Custom Conversion, visit the URL associated with it to make sure the conversion is set up correctly. So in this case, we’ll want to visit the Thank You page link we used to set up our Custom Conversion event to activate the pixel and be sure that everything is working correctly. 

After you have created at least 1 Custom Conversion, you can access each one and their data by visiting the same Events Manager –> Custom Conversion page mentioned above. This is also where you go to see if your Custom Conversion has received a green light (meaning, it is active) and has received conversion data.

Both standard and Custom Conversion events need to be created before you launch your conversion ad. You will choose your already-created conversion that you want tracked as the first step in the Facebook ad build process.