Meta is pushing all ecommerce brands to implement the Facebook Conversions API. But what is it exactly? And what is the benefit of using an ecommerce data platform to push data back to Facebook? If you're running a Shopify store and you're not using Meta's Conversions API via Littledata, you're missing out on a lot of benefits that can help you drive more sales, grow your business and most importantly run higher converting Facebook Ad Campaigns. As Meta explains, the Conversions API can get you “closer to your customers” and help you “take advantage of first part data” from your Shopify store. But what does that all mean? Can’t you just add some extra code and be done with it? In fact, it’s not so simple. As with GA4 implementations, there are a lot of soft apps and integrations for Facebook Ads that work ok for very small merchants (less than $500k GMV). But serious brands need complete data in Meta — whether you’re focused on retargeting the checkout funnel, building better audiences, or just improving your overall top-line ad spend. Littledata has worked with several of the top DTC brands on Shopify and BigCommerce. Here are the top 4 reasons why you should reconsider your tech stack for advertising on Meta. These are the top benefits our most successful brands have seen after installing our Facebook Conversions API connection. 1. Better targeting of potential customers Meta's machine learning algorithm uses conversion signals to understand what type of people on their platform are likely to purchase products from your shop. By sending conversion event data to Meta, you're helping them understand your audience better and allowing them to target the right people with your ads. This can result in cheaper impressions and conversions for you. Think of this like training the platform to understand your ideal customer profile (ICP). Because Littledata tracks both one-off and repeat purchases (including subscriptions from apps like Recharge, Smarter and Stay Ai), you get complete data for both targeting and audience building (lookalike audiences with a higher LTV). 2. Improved ad performance Meta uses conversion signals to optimize your ads and find the highest quality potential customers within their user base. By sending Meta conversion complete event data and using it as the optimization event for your ads, Meta can show your ad to the right people at the right time, increasing the chances of them becoming your customer. This will cut down on wasted ad spend and increase overall conversions. 3. Better marketing attribution Meta's Conversions API allows you to send conversion event data to Meta from your backend systems instead of directly from the browser. This means that even if the user leaves the page quickly or has an ad blocker, the data is still being sent to Meta’s event manager. Using the Conversions API can improve the attribution of your conversions to your ads, which can result in better ad spend performance and audience building in the future. 4. More data to work with When you use the Conversions API, you can send personally identifiable information (PII) like email address, phone numbers back to Meta/Facebook. This allows Meta to match the user with their internal database and get a better understanding of who is converting on your site. It means that shoppers get better, personalized ads that fit their interests. You can also send Meta pseudo-anonymous data like IP address and user agent, as well as Meta's own cookies from the frontend. This gives Meta more data to work with and can help improve their targeting and optimization algorithms. How it works Littledata is the most advanced solution for Conversions API, but we didn’t get there by accident. Our Google Analytics integration has been the industry leader since 2017 and we used a similar framework to support CAPI so that brands can get complete, accurate data in Facebook Ads and Instagram Ads. In addition to the server-side tracking that’s automatically added by Littledata to capture everything that happens in your online store’s “lower conversion funnel”, such as checkout funnel activity and purchases, Littledata's integration with the Conversion API is superior to other solutions because of the way it sends the fbp and fbc cookies, which are crucial parameters for the event match quality score. Littledata ensures that an fbp is always available and automatically generates one in the event that the fbp parameter cannot be retrieved due to ad blockers. Additionally, the fbp and fbc parameters are passed with server-side events to ensure the highest event match quality. Why are the fbc and fbp parameters crucial for Meta CAPI? The event match quality score is an algorithm used by Meta to price impressions, choosing the right users within their user-base to target and provide you with the cheapest impressions and conversions. If the fbp and fbc parameters are not sent, the event match quality score will be negatively impacted, and Meta will not be able to optimize your ads to target the right users effectively. To overcome this, Littledata's integration with Meta Conversion API ensures that the fbp parameter is always available, even if it cannot be retrieved due to ad blockers. The fbp is automatically generated, and the user is attributed to it to ensure that the event match quality is not negatively affected. When using Littledata's integration with Meta's Conversion API, Shopfiy and BigCommerce brands can expect to see a boost in the number of conversions that Meta is able to attribute to their ads, resulting in significant ad spend performance and improvements to the overall ad campaign.  Still wondering how these four reasons work out in action? Check out how Flux Footwear used Littledata to support multiple data destinations. A shoe brand that embraced data when they kicked off their business, Flux saw amazing six-figure growth by making data-driven decisions with data they could trust.  On Shopify Plus? Book a Littledata Plus demo today. We’re happy to audit your Facebook data for free in advance of the call.

Targeted ads have become essential for modern brands who want to find buyers in their niche and attract them with unique, engaging messaging. There's a wide range of content and delivery formats you can try, too. Video ads, carousel ads, dynamic product ads, user-generated content—the sky is the limit on how creative brands can leverage social ads to drive reach, conversions, and revenue. Just check out Facebook’s Ad Libary to see what we mean.   But, due to many well-documented changes to third-party data, users of these ads have had to adapt to a new digital landscape and adjust the way they collect buyer data. In this guide, we will walk you through how to set up a Meta Facebook Manager Account and create ads using Meta's new first-party data solution—the Facebook Conversions API. Follow these simple steps below and you'll be ready to start tracking customer behavior and put that data to work for your Shopify store. How to set up Meta Facebook Ad Manager Step 1: Create your Meta Business Account Head over to Meta’s Business Suite and set up your account by clicking “create account” if you have not already done so using your Facebook login. This will allow you to request and manage page permissions to create a Facebook Ad Account. You will need to have permission to the page to connect your store to Facebook Ads Manager.  Step 2: Connect a Facebook Ads account to your Meta Business Account Now that you’ve connected your business page from the dashboard, you can add, request access to, or create an ad account. This is where you'll create ads for your business, monitor spending, and execute your overall ads strategy. Step 3: Add Google Analytics to your Shopify store Next, you'll need to set up reporting to see the effectiveness of your ads. There are a couple of ways to add Google Analytics to your Shopify store, but we'll be sharing a solution here that both works for store owners of any expertise level and is one of the fastest—using the Littledata Shopify to GA connection. [tip]Don’t have a Littledata account yet? Sign up here for a free 30-day trial on us![/tip] Setup for using Littledata's Shopify to Google Analytics is as easy as signing up, installing the app from the Shopify app store, and following the self-serve onboarding flow to add Littledata's tracking script to your store. We have a complete detailed guide you can follow as well. Once you’ve connected, you will be able to see the following applicable events in your Facebook Ad Manager Account:  Great job! You are on your way to starting to run your ads based on accurate data from your Shopify store. Next, we'll set up the Conversions API to run those powerful dynamic ads. How to set up Facebook's Conversions API on your Shopify store Once you're set up in Ad Manager, have Littledata installed, and have your reporting ready in Google Analytics, adding the Conversions API only takes a few steps. First, you'll add the connection from the Littledata dashboard and approve the change to your plan. CAPI uses a combination of client-side and server-side tracking to increase event match quality and Facebook Pixel attribution, so the next step is to enter your Facebook Pixel ID into the app. Finally, in your Business Manager account under the Events Manager section, you'll generate an access token to include with your Pixel ID and finalize the connection. And voila! You're ready to start running dynamic ads and reach your ideal customers using Facebook CAPI. Conclusion Social ads might be changing in our new cookie-less world, but by leveraging the power of server-side tracking and first-party data through tools like Facebook's Conversions API, you can still gain crucial insights about your audience and create ads that will delight them. Now that you know how to get your Meta Business Manager and Facebook Ads accounts up and running, plus how to set up the new Facebook Conversions API, the only next step is to make sure you have the best possible reporting for your data so you can make decisions based on a single source of truth. Try Littledata free for 30 days to see the difference it makes having a truly accurate data layer for your store, plus access to connections that help you manage subscriptions, paid ads, headless setups, and more. [subscribe]

One of the biggest marketing areas hit by iOS14 updates, and tracking prevention in general, is social ads. As Meta’s main moneymaker, the company of course wasn’t going to stand by and have their best feature for brands become unusable. Enter Facebook's Conversions API (CAPI), a solution that complies with new tracking and privacy laws by letting Facebook and Instagram Ads users share customer actions from the servers directly to Facebook. Facebook Ads via Conversions API work alongside Facebook Pixel to help you improve the performance, measurement, and data collection of your campaigns for Facebook Ads and Instagram Ads. But Facebook CAPI isn’t a replacement for Facebook Pixel. Instead, it’s an enhancement that enables deeper first-party data to help you understand performance in more detail and run more effective ads. Using Littledata to set up CAPI on your store makes this data more accurate and reliable so that your campaigns reach the right shoppers at the right time. When using Littledata and Facebook CAPI together, you can: Automatically improve Event Match Quality Score Run dynamic product ads based on accurate shopping data Make revenue data in Shopify match revenue data in Facebook In this post, we’ll share six reasons why you need to add this powerful advertising tool to your toolbelt ASAP. Why use Facebook CAPI? 1. Facebook CAPI solves for VPNs and ad blockers Originally, Facebook Pixel provided us with all the information we needed to build powerful audiences for our ads. Then, VPNs, ad blockers, and other privacy software began causing some discrepancies in the data. This is where the Facebook Conversions API came in. Facebook CAPI sends events “server-side” instead of “client-side” through the third-party browser a customer is using to access your site. That means they aren’t interrupted by the web browsing and privacy trends mentioned above. Even better, you can share almost 100% of purchases from your store with Facebook via CAPI. [tip]Learn how to use Facebook CAPI to run dynamic Facebook ads and target your top buyers.[/tip] 2. Facebook CAPI is iOS14-friendly With iOS 14 privacy changes, we’re not just dealing with discrepancies in the data, but gaps. Those gaps negatively impact Facebook ad targeting because iOS 14 limits what data advertisers can collect through client-side (pixel) tracking and allows users to turn tracking off entirely through app tracking transparency (ATT). Facebook CAPI sends user data directly from your server (not the user’s device) to Facebook instead of relying on the cookie and browser data the Facebook Pixel collects. Even if the customer has opted out of marketing cookies — meaning the purchase cannot be attributed via Facebook’s Pixel ID — Facebook CAPI can send some extra user identifiers like email address, physical address, and phone number. These give Facebook a better chance of linking the purchase to a user, and from there to the ad the user clicked on. We’ll talk more about user data below. 3. Facebook CAPI captures important lower-funnel activity Facebook CAPI allows you to send more than just website behavior to Facebook. Not all server-side events happen and/or are recorded directly on your site. They may happen on your app, a free tool, a third-party payment tool, a support hub, or offline (like through phone calls). If you record this data in your CRM, you can send additional data to Facebook through Facebook CAPI. Events in payment and shopping cart tools are often lower-funnel, making them particularly important to track. 4. Facebook CAPI will be necessary when cookies are gone Perhaps most importantly, when third-party cookies are gone, Conversions API will be our only source for conversion tracking and ad performance data. Google has already announced the phase-out of third-party cookies, and as the market leader, every other service using them will almost surely follow suit. Enabling Facebook CAPI on your store now protects the accuracy of your data, even after third-party cookies have been thrown out. 5. Get a complete picture of your conversion data Facebook Conversions API helps you to see information that the Facebook Pixel can’t see as a result of ad blockers, iOS 14, ATT, and cookies. This includes website events, offline events, and ad CRM data. On the other hand, Facebook Pixel helps you to see information that Facebook CAPI can’t, such as demographic, psychographic, and other behavioral data from around the web. That’s how they work together and why each covers gaps the other has. 6. Get more out of your budget With both Facebook Pixel and Facebook CAPI working together to give you the most accurate data possible, you can: Understand exactly who is interacting with your ads Better understand the customer journey Build strong audiences and generate leads on Facebook, even with iOS 14 Make data-driven optimizations and allocate the budget accordingly Now that you know why you need Facebook CAPI, it's time to get it set up on your store. Get in touch with our data experts and they’ll help you set it Facebook CAPI, show you how to track events, and ensure you get accurate data on your ads in the new age of first-party data. [subscribe]