How to improve Ads ROI with Conversion APIs

To successfully navigate into a cookieless world, a new era of advertising is emerging, using a server-side first integration strategy.

Learn why traditional tracking and advertising methods are reaching their limits and what server-side integration is. Discover new solutions to limit the impact of restrictions on third-party cookies and understand how you can leverage DinMo to push your first-party data to all your social platforms to boost your marketing performance.

A conversion is observed when a user achieves a specific objective or realizes an action that is considered as interesting for a given company. As conversions are possible both online and offline, adopting cross-channel overviews is essential to monitor them correctly.

Conversion data powers ad reporting, allowing one to understand the reach and the performances of all marketing actions undertaken by an enterprise. Analyzing these performances makes it easier to identify the most performing campaigns to focus efforts on them and abandon the less relevant ones.

Yet, conversion data should not be only reduced to campaign measurement, as it appears to be key to better understanding customer journeys and optimizing marketing campaigns. Indeed, this highly qualitative data is key to feeding machine learning algorithms used in audience strategies, such as lookalike or (re)targeting. Moreover, bidding strategies can intelligently be adapted according to conversion events to obtain better results. Finally, the use of conversion data allows you to considerably improve your cost per action.

Conversion tracking has been traditionally based on web pixels – which are code scripts placed on the website of a company – since their invention by Facebook in 2012. These scripts are run on the user’s browser, meaning that web pixels are “client-side” solutions.

The functioning of third-party cookies and pixels is simple: a web pixel collects information when a user interacts with the website (=event) in a way that is interesting for an enterprise (=conversion). The information is then directly sent to the business managers of the social networks.

Web pixels can track users across their different devices, as far as they use the same identifiers.

More concretely, here is how a web pixel works:

The data is directly sent to the third-party platforms owning the Pixels, so it is never stored elsewhere. This data cannot be reviewed and/or edited by the advertiser before being sent, limiting control over it.

These web pixels are based on the use of third-party cookies.  Yet, these cookies are threatened by both technical and regulatory evolutions.
In concrete terms, the sending of this conversion data depends on:

Finally, the volume of data sent to the web pixels is less and less important, representing ~ 40% of the initial information. This has a deep impact on campaign optimization.

Although the loss of information related to the user consent will remain unchanged, it is possible to use workarounds to ad blockers and browser restrictions to avoid losing more information. Indeed, to maintain data volume and quality, using server-side solutions and collecting first party data show up as a key strategies as they are not unencumbered by ad blockers or browser restrictions.

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Moreover, using server-side solutions gives you more control over your data, allowing you to review and edit it before sending it. Both offline and online conversions can be sent, anywhere within the customer journey offering you more flexibility than with a simple web pixel.
Sending additional data allows you to obtain a 360° view of your consumers, especially by integrating data at the bottom of the conversion funnel.

To tackle these new challenges, the major social networks are developing their own “Conversions APIs”, as a more powerful and reliable way to share events. Indeed, Facebook, Google, Snapchat, and Tiktok are adopting server-side solutions to collect data that web pixels and third-party cookies can no longer capture.

💡Many companies have considered using a Customer Data Platform to send their data to their platforms. However, traditional CDPs come with a number of drawbacks, explaining the desire to implement these APIs on their own.

If you want to learn more on that subject, do not hesitate to check our guides on:

Unfortunately, these solutions can take a long time to implement and require technical teams if you decide to do it yourself.

As event tracking is distributed across multiple point-to-point solutions, it appears essential to consolidate all your conversion data in a single source of truth, your data warehouse. Then, if your conversion events are already available in a single source, tools like DinMo can considerably reduce the level of effort to send conversions to your social platforms.

💡If you need help implementing your single source of truth, consult our guide on how to build a data warehouse.

Connecting your data warehouse to your media platforms through Composable CDPs like DinMo is then less time-consuming, taking a few clicks to implement. All you must do is provide access to the appropriate tables in your data warehouse, build valuable segments, and synchronize them across all your media platforms to create value everywhere.

Want some help and advice on the best way to implement these APIs? Do not hesitate to contact us to set up a free consultation with our experts.