Episodes

Oh, this was fun. In this episode of The Pubcast, I take a trip down memory lane and remember some of the things that you may have forgotten about Facebook, Facebook marketing, and Facebook ads from as long as a decade ago. Remember That??

If you've spent any time in Events Manager, you've surely received notifications from Facebook related to unrecognized domains sending events from your pixel. You can control this using a setting called Traffic Permissions.

If you've run any video ads at all, you're undoubtedly familiar with auto-play. This can be good and bad, but it ultimately complicates reporting. You're going to get a whole lot of video plays, but you lose some context on the quality of those views. You can get this back with Breakdowns by Action, which allow you to separate actions with sound on and off as well as from auto-play or clicked-to-play.

Advanced Matching is a little thing that can provide incremental improvements to your conversion attribution, optimization, and targeting. Here's what you need to know...

Automatic Events can help you set up those pesky standard events automatically (hence the name) without code. Here's how to turn them on...

Facebook has started rolling out custom formatting for ad reports, and it could be super helpful. Here's how to find out whether you have it, how it might be used, and my one big issue with it.

The ad auction is what determines who sees an ad. How do you win an auction? Your ad needs to have the highest total score, which is based on three different factors. Let's discuss...

On November 10, I published a podcast episode. I had no idea what I was starting. I'd end up going on a streak of publishing a new episode every day for 100 days (and counting). It's kinda crazy. In this episode, I crack a bottle of red and talk about how I organized myself to do this, the different methods of tracking, how it's impacted my content development strategy, and where it's going next.

Some advertisers have seen the Advantage Plus campaign creation method when setting up a conversions campaign in Ads Manager. It's actually been rolling out very slowly for the past several months. Is this a big deal? Does it offer significant benefits? Let's break down what we know...

The big spenders can make the most impact, but that doesn't mean that you can't drive results on a budget. But, with those restrictions, you can't follow the same rules. You should have three priorities for how you spend that budget...

The Pixel Event Setup Tool is a great concept. Add standard events to your website without the need for code. Unfortunately, it remains as flawed and limited today as the day it was released a few years ago. That doesn't make it completely worthless, though. Here are a few cases you should use it.

One of the primary ways that you can create a website custom audience is based on specific page or website. There are actually several different ways I use this within my advertising strategy.

Custom Conversions have a very specific purpose for Facebook ads reporting and optimization. Here, I provide an explanation of the three primary ways that I use them.

The Facebook Pixel Helper is an extension for the Chrome browser. It's a great, and free, tool for advertisers. Here, I lay out ways that you might use it.

View-through conversions have always been a thing. But changes during the past year have made them problematic. Let me explain what I was doing, what I found, my theory, and what I think Facebook should do related to view-through attribution.

Do you understand how custom conversions are different from standard and custom events and how you might use them? Let's clear up any confusion...

Have you ever run into a situation where Facebook isn't providing metric totals for conversions even though the rows above have data? This isn't a bug, there's a reason for it. Here's the explanation...

Businesses who haven't been able to verify their domains because their pixel was on a third-party website may have a solution due to Partner Level Configurations. This is a big deal!

If you use standard or custom events, you should also be sending parameters that provide more details about an action. Parameters are what provide granularity and power in reporting and targeting. Here's how they work...

Conversion numbers in Ads Manager rarely match up with other sources. One of the many reasons for this is view-through conversions. Here, I talk about what they are, when they might happen, and why they've been controversial.

You can now create custom audiences based on engagement with your product catalog. There are a couple of primary benefits to this over a typical website custom audience that should be useful for ecomm businesses.

Three months ago (on November 6, to be exact), I started an experiment. I wanted to see if I could reach all of my Facebook followers with a single ad. In this episode, I walk through what happened -- including some seriously weird and unexpected things -- and what I learned from it.

If you're only looking at surface-level metrics to measure the success of your ads, you aren't doing your job. You need to dig deeper. Ask these basic questions to help define what success looks like and what your ultimate customer looks like so that you can reach them.

If you're using both browser events from your pixel and server events from the API, you are probably sending the same events for each. This way, the API may pick up some events that the browser pixel does not. Of course, it's then important that Facebook runs a deduplication process to eliminate duplicates and prevent double-counting. Here, I walk through how to view your deduplication rate...