Facebook Dynamic URL Parameters

Key Takeaways

URL parameters are a foundational piece of PPC campaigns they allow us to see traffic source information or any campaign details in Google Analytics they allow us to understand where traffic is coming from and attributing value in CRM systems there are also a massive pain in the butt to setup when you have to do it manually you have to type in the specific characters that you have in your campaign names all of those nuance names that you have for your ad creative and up until recently in facebook you had to do this manually for every single thing that you wanted to track luckily they've recently launched dynamic ad tracking parameters and that's what we're gonna talk about today in the facebook business Help section we can see that there are six preset dynamic URL tracking parameters for Facebook ads they are set up for each level of campaign structure so there is campaign ad set and ad you can then use either the name what you have actually called it or the ID that's usually a long series of numbers that is unique to that campaign ad set or ad so depending on how you want to report on the information from Facebook be sure that you pay attention to name verse ID and the difference between the two if you use dynamic tracking parameters for other platforms like Google ads or Bing ads one thing to take specific note of for Facebook is that instead of using one of the curly brackets on the outside they use two that's for the beginning and the end Google ads will usually just use one and one at the beginning and want the clothes but for Facebook make sure that there are two in place let's look at an example of how these will work in just an excel sheet for a campaign we might set up something that looks like this we have our website URL paid media pros comm we then have a campaign ad set and AD Ning that we have in place all this is just for sake of example originally if we would want to set up manual tagging we would have to type in all of that information manually and make sure that it matched up correctly and wasn't going to break the URL so it might look something like this for each individual ad name for a different ad variant for a different ad set different campaign we would then have to go in and adjust the name change the tracking parameters make sure it all matched up and depending on how many ads you're trying to create if it's maybe just a couple that might be easy to keep straight but if you're in one of the larger Facebook accounts and you have 1020 hundreds thousands of ads and campaigns to keep track of you can go a little bit cross-eyed trying to make sure that all this stays straight so what we can use instead is a dynamic tracking set of parameters it'll look something like this here you'll see we've taken the campaign name ad set name and AD name dynamic parameters from that Facebook help page and just added them in in the same fields that we would have manually typed in the campaign ad set and AD name the benefit is that for any of the ads that we have in our account we can use this same set of tracking parameters and it will populate the information dynamically when the ad is triggered by a user clicking on it from the Facebook platform now that we know what a tracking parameter looks like with the dynamic fields in place let's hop into the Facebook Ads manager and see how we would actually apply this to our ads I'm going to copy this field here and then we'll hop into the platform when tagging your ads you'll want to add the different tracking parameters in the URL parameters field one thing to take note of is you do not add the question mark at the beginning of the tracking for this so that's just something to keep in mind you'll remember that there were only six variables that we could use for dynamic tracking to key notable missing pieces our source and medium which are foundational pieces within URL tracking so for my ads here I'm gonna want to still manually tag source and medium and then append the dynamic tracking to the end of it it'll look something like this the best part about dynamic tracking is within the Facebook platform everything source is going to be Facebook unless you tag Instagram slightly different I always use CPC for all of my paid campaigns so this set of tracking parameters right here I can easily copy and paste into every single ad that I'm going to use on Facebook I don't need to customize anything further than this because it will automatically populate the information that I want to have in there now if you want to take a slightly easier way or you don't have your parameters in a separate sheet like I did and you can easily copy and paste there's actually a really handy URL parameter builder right below the URL parameters field if you click on that it'll open up a builder so that you don't have to type in any of the question marks underscores any of that sort of thing for source medium campaign name content and the best part is if you scroll down here maybe to campaign name as soon as you go into the field it will pre-populate these six dynamic parameters to choose from you can choose them any level that you want all you have to do is come in here click a couple let's say medium for whatever reason you want it to be campaign ID it'll show you a parameter preview at the bottom this is what it's going to populate into the URL parameter field for you so you actually don't have to type a lot of the stuff that could trip you up especially those double curly brace on the outside simply click apply and you're finished thanks for watching our video make sure to subscribe to the paid media pros channel to see more videos