I think this post might have questions more than answers.
Decided to post anyway so I can revisit this again in the future.
Questions:
1 – Data freshness. How delayed is the reporting going to be?
2 – Onsite platform analytics or GA 4?
3 – Facebook ads attribution vs GA attribution
4 – Discrediting checkout page on purchase event
5 – UTM tags. The best practise. This will be on seperate post but I’ll put it here for the record.
Let’s visit this one by one.
Data Freshness
I’m not sure about the previous GA or UA but obviously, the data seems “fresh”. Meanwhile the report in GA4 (I’m trying to embrace whatever the people are complaining about it), seems delay.
Quick search on it and there are my answers.
Now why do these questions arise in the first place? Why I am so keen about it?
It’s all about the changes that I made towards the campaign.
When you spent north 4-5 figures on a daily budget, and the changes are related to your landing pages, you wanted, sort of, to know how it fares.
Unless you’re using some kind of Funnels software inside your platform, Funnelkit does this, you do not have the visibility.
What about custom metrics on Facebook Ads Manager? Yeah – for sure but remember the attribution. It’s the first click and seems to credit whatever purchase towards the first touch. User journeys are complex – it is not straightforward. Hence I believe, data-driven attribution, GA4, has more accuracy.
I can confirm the delay on the purchase event might go up to 24-48 hours based on pure eyeballs monitoring. So be it.
Onsite Platform
I am not sure about onsite platform tracking when you have a caching mechanism on the web. Does hit on the page being cached considered a hit? It’s hitting the cache for sure but what about the actual page hit?
These are the questions that I have – I have not decided yet to go down into the rabbit hole.
The majority of the Woocommerce-based e-commerce that I built was being cached on the Edge. Looking at the header response, it is a hit hence I am not sure how if we have onsite platform analytics, it is going to be accurate.
Hence, the offsite tracking platform like GA, where the script is loaded every time the page hit, regardless cache being hit or not, it will get fire every single time.
At least that’s my thought. I am not sure if this is even remotely correct 😂
Attribution
Let’s narrow on the Facebook attribution and perhaps I will share more on attribution in a separate post.
As defined by Facebook, any conversion that happens within a finite period (7 days click, 1 day click, 1 day view etc) will be attributed to your campaign and will be used to optimize the campaign.
According to Klientboost, Facebook is using delay attribution models. We will discuss more on the models later on a separate post.
What does it mean?
In simple words, as long as the user clicks the Facebook or Instagram ads during their journey, your Facebook campaign will be credited.
If you have your UTM tag set correctly, when you compare the data on GA, the variation of the two results is way off – I have seen more than 40-50%.
Why is it so?
Considering a user who came across your Youtube Ads, then decided to search for it, then 2 days later, the user was served by retargeting ads from your Facebook campaign, guess who will get the credit?
All of it.
Your Google/Youtube Ads and Facebook retargeting campaign.
So if you’re looking into the Last Click attribution model, Facebook will get the credit. If you are looking into the Delayed attribution model, Facebook will get the credit. If you are looking into the first-click model, YouTube ads will get the credit but still, if you are looking at the report, let’s say the last 7 days, you will see each of these channels is “claiming” the credit of conversion.
Hence, that raises the question – which attribution model should we use in order to troubleshoot?
We will discuss more on this later.
Checkout Page Taking The Credit
If you look at your Pages and often time you will see, that your checkout page is taking all the credit on the purchase.
Big question is..why? It doesn’t make sense. It shouldn’t be credited to any of the pages related to Thank you, upsell, cart or even checkout.
Since I’m on Woocommerce and relied heavily on the plugins such as Pixel Your Site, one of the way I think was to exclude the pixel or GA from the Checkout page.
The cons of doing this you will lose the tracking since the page is required to initiate a “checkout” event.
I guess I will be reaching out to the author and see what he think about that.
I do not have answers to some of my questions at the moment but will be visiting and revising this post as soon as I have more information.
Let me know what you think!