Optimizing Your Conversion Signal Quality

With the decline of third-party cookies, brands must adapt to ensure accurate conversion tracking. The transition to first-party data is crucial for directly boosting conversion signal quality.

First-party data provides a stronger, more reliable signal than third-party cookies, improving conversion tracking accuracy by 10-15%. This boost can be a game-changer for high-volume campaigns.

Furthermore, platforms like Facebook and Google prioritize ads with high-quality data. By passing this data to platforms like Meta, you will increase your “Event Match Quality Score”, leading to more attribution and lower CPA’s.

Brands must make these changes immediately, especially before major sales events like Black Friday and Cyber Monday. Implementing processes for transmitting Personally Identifiable Information (PII) into event tracking software well in advance enables platforms to optimize effectively, leading to more accurate conversion tracking and improved campaign performance.

This article will guide you through the strategies and steps needed to optimize your conversion signal quality, ensuring you have the best data to enhance the performance of your ad campaigns.

Ensuring Conversion Tracking Accuracy

Source of Truth

Ecommerce

For ecommerce businesses, platforms like Shopify are commonly used as the source of truth. However, relying solely on Shopify may not provide the most accurate attribution.

Regularly compare the data attributed by Shopify (or other ecommerce platforms) with that of advertising platforms like Meta (Facebook). While Meta tends to over-attribute conversions to claim more credit, Shopify and other sources can help validate the actual impact.

 Integrating additional platforms like Triple Whale offers better attribution accuracy. Triple Whale goes beyond last-click attribution, providing a more comprehensive view of customer interactions and conversions.

Lead Generation

For lead generation businesses, a CRM (Customer Relationship Management) system is crucial as the source of truth. Ensure that leads are accurately tagged with their source information, including ad IDs and click IDs, to track which ads are driving quality leads.

Implement a robust tech structure to tag leads with all relevant information as they come in and fire back down funnel conversion events into the platforms using their Conversions API (cAPI). This allows for precise tracking and analysis of the effectiveness of various ad campaigns.

Managing Over-Reporting

Some level of over-reporting by ad platforms is normal. Generally, an attribution difference of up to 1.5x between your source of truth and the ad platform is acceptable. However, if you see 2x to 3x differences, investigate further. Possible issues could include multiple firing of purchase events due to page reloads or incorrect event setup.

Use Conversions API and JavaScript

For lead generation, consider using Conversions API for precise control over conversion data. The Conversions API ensures more accurate and comprehensive conversion tracking by allowing businesses to send customer actions from their servers directly to ad platforms, utilizing the information they’ve collected from the customer to attribute (like email, phone, etc).

Maintain JavaScript tracking to capture user interactions that the Conversions API might miss, ensuring a comprehensive view of user behavior.

By implementing these strategies and maintaining a rigorous approach to conversion tracking, brands can optimize their conversion signal quality, enabling better data, more effective ad targeting, and improved overall performance of ad campaigns.

Optimizing Your Conversion Signal Quality

Implementing the right strategies ensures you have the highest quality data to optimize your conversion signal quality.

Enhancing Current Setup with Personally Identifiable Information (PII)

Enhance your current setup by ensuring Personally Identifiable Information (PII) is passing through to the platforms. PII, including names, click IDs, emails, phone numbers, and even IP addresses, can significantly improve the quality of your conversion signals and help platforms identify users who converted. 

Event Firing and Signal Velocity

Ecommerce

Focus on firing every possible event to ensure high signal velocity and quality. Each event provides valuable data that helps platforms understand user behavior and optimize ad targeting.

Important conversion events for ecommerce brands to track include: 

1. Purchase: The final sale event, typically the main KPI for ecommerce clients.
2. Add to Cart: When a user adds a product to their shopping cart.
3. View Content: When a user views a specific product page or content.
4. Initiate Checkout: When a user starts the checkout process but hasn’t completed the purchase yet.
5. Account Creation: When a user creates an account on the ecommerce site.
6. Newsletter Sign-Up: When a user signs up for the newsletter.
7. Custom Events: Specific to the business needs, such as viewing a particular information page for SEO purposes.

Lead Generation

Track multiple CRM stages and pass these events back to platforms to optimize for more specific stages of the customer journey beyond the initial form submission, leading to more efficient ad spend.

Some of the key conversion events for lead generation include:

• Form Submission: When a user fills out and submits a contact form.
• Contacted: When a lead progresses to the contacted stage in the CRM.
• Deal Proposed: When a lead receives a proposal.
• Closed Sale: When a lead converts into a paying customer.
• Offline Conversions: Conversions that occur offline, tracked through conversations or other interactions, uploaded via the Conversions API or customer file. However, you can also utilize eCommerce events to track lead gen events as well, such as Purchase.

Custom Events and Audience Targeting

Leverage custom events for non-standard interactions, such as account creation or newsletter sign-ups. These events help build targeted audiences and refine ad targeting. 

By prioritizing different stages of the customer journey (e.g., add to cart vs. purchase), you can effectively target users based on their specific behaviors and interactions with your site.

Leveraging Customer Engagement Data

Optimizing your conversion signal quality involves utilizing every available data point to enhance targeting and campaign performance. One effective strategy is to leverage customer engagement data from email and SMS campaigns. 

Track and utilize various forms of engagement data, including email open rates, click-through rates, responses, SMS opens, and replies. These metrics indicate a user’s interest and engagement level with your brand.

Use this data to create more refined and targeted ad campaigns. For example, users who frequently open your emails or engage with SMS messages are more likely to be interested in your offerings and should be targeted accordingly.

You can also set up custom events based on email and SMS engagement. For instance, you can create events like “Email Opened” or “SMS Clicked” and track these interactions. These custom events can be used to build specific audiences for retargeting.

Then, collect lists of users who have engaged with your emails or SMS and upload these lists to your advertising platforms. This can be done through platforms like Facebook or Google, allowing you to create custom audiences based on this engagement data.

Platforms like Klaviyo offer tools for integrating customer data across email and SMS campaigns. Klaviyo helps you identify high lifetime value (LTV) customers based on their engagement behavior, making it easier to target these valuable segments.

This strategy ensures that you have the best quality data, allowing you to optimize your ad campaigns effectively.

Selecting and Prioritizing Conversion Goals

Here’s how you can strategically approach selecting and prioritizing conversion goals to enhance the quality of your conversion signals and improve your overall campaign performance:

Optimizing Conversion Events

Lowest Funnel Event with Sufficient Signal Velocity

The Golden Rule for optimizing conversion events is to choose the lowest funnel event that provides a reasonable amount of signal velocity. 

This event is the most valuable action a user can take that still occurs frequently enough to provide meaningful data. For most ecommerce businesses, this is typically the purchase event. 

For products with a high price point, the purchase event may not occur frequently enough to provide sufficient data. In such cases, focus on intermediate events like “add to cart” or “view content.” These events happen more often but can still provide valuable insights for optimization.

For example, take a brand that sells e-bikes for $2,000 each, a relatively high barrier for entry. A potential customer may visit your site once or twice and then see three or four ads before they make a purchase. 

In this case, targeting sales, which occur infrequently compared to other conversion events, is impractical. Instead, it’s beneficial to track and optimize for intermediate events that occur more frequently, like add to cart, view content, or checkout initiation.

Optimizing ad campaigns based on these insights can allow that e-bike brand to retarget these users and nudge them towards a sale.

On the other hand, brands need to calculate the cost per event and ensure that their budget can support a sufficient volume of the chosen conversion events.

In contrast to the e-bike brand selling high-priced items, for lower-priced items like $25 lipstick, achieving a high number of daily purchases is feasible, so prioritizing purchase events might be the way to go.

But even for lower-cost items, it’s still worth tracking and giving weight to intermediate events. These events provide additional data layers that help refine audience targeting and campaign optimization.

Prioritization Strategies

Most advertising platforms allow you to set priorities for different conversion events. For instance, Meta (Facebook) lets you prioritize the top three events, while Google categorizes events into primary and secondary conversion actions.

Work with your media analyst to determine which events are most critical for your business goals. For example, purchases may be your primary event, with add to cart and view content as secondary priorities.

By focusing on the most valuable events with sufficient signal velocity, setting strategic priorities, and leveraging custom events, you can ensure your ad campaigns are data-driven and highly effective. 

Legal and Emerging Trends

Staying compliant with legal requirements and adapting to emerging trends is crucial for optimizing your conversion signal quality. Here’s how policies, laws, and emerging trends impact strategies for conversion signal optimization, and how you can navigate these changes effectively.

Cookieless Future

This is the most significant trend impacting conversion signal quality. Brands must adapt to the cookieless future by capturing and utilizing first-party data to maintain robust conversion tracking.

User Consent for PII

Ensure you obtain explicit user consent before using PII in marketing efforts. Inform users about how their data will be used and provide options for consent.

Tracking User Preferences

If a user does not opt-in to share their PII, your Conversions API or other data collection mechanisms must respect this preference and stop transmitting their PII to advertising platforms.

GDPR-Like Regulations

The introduction of General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) regulations in the US, as has been done in Europe, could impose stricter limits on data usage. If implemented, brands will need to develop detailed compliance strategies.

Broad Adoption of Privacy Policies

Beyond Google, other platforms are adopting stricter privacy policies, reducing reliance on third-party cookies and enhancing user privacy protections. This trend necessitates a shift towards more secure and transparent data handling practices.

Controlling Your Conversion Signal Quality

The importance of optimizing your conversion signal quality cannot be overstated for brands aiming to enhance their ad campaign performance. The deprecation of third-party cookies marks a pivotal shift towards first-party data, which offers a more reliable and accurate signal. This shift is not just beneficial, but necessary, to stay competitive in 2024 and beyond.

Transitioning to first-party data improves conversion tracking accuracy and provides a competitive edge by allowing platforms like Meta and Google to better identify converting users. 

Prioritizing key conversion events and leveraging customer engagement data from email and SMS campaigns enhance targeting effectiveness. Adapting to the cookieless future and complying with privacy regulations ensures your strategies remain effective and compliant.

By focusing on these strategies, brands can achieve superior data quality, leading to more effective ad targeting and improved campaign performance.

About the Author: James Williamson is the Strategy Lead Data & Insights at adQuadrant. Originally from Alabama and a graduate from Chapman University in Orange, where he fell in love with California and the energy it brings. He lives and breaths tech and is always excited about the ever-changing challenges and strategies that arise in the digital marketing space. Outside the office, James enjoys gaming, coding, music, and everything else that typically comes with someone who gets excited about pixels.