Facebook Ads Over Reporting Results?! Here's the FIX...

0:00hi guys it's ben heath from lead guru and in this video i'm going to talk about the issue of facebook ads over reporting results a lot of facebook advertisers are seeing too many conversions too many results show up in their facebook ad account they know that that's not accurate it's not realistic and they're wanting to fix it and it's very important that you do fix it if you have got over reporting facebook ads because if there's too many conversions too many results in your facebook ad account that's going to make it very very difficult for you to know what's right and what's wrong and be able to

0:28optimize your campaigns based off of that it's also going to make it almost impossible for facebook to optimize your campaigns properly so if you have got too many conversions if you are seeing an over reporting of results in your facebook account very very important you get it fixed that's what i'm going to show you how to do in fact we've identified three potential reasons why you may be seeing too many results in your facebook ad account and each one's got to fix we're going to go through in this video before we get into it i want to very quickly ask you to smash that like button that really helps me out is

0:54much appreciated and of course subscribe to my channel if you haven't done so already i'm releasing facebook ads videos just like this all the time at the moment and i'm covering lots of potential issues and if you're running facebook ad campaigns for your business it's very important that you're aware of issues like over reporting and that you're able to either fix them when they come up or sidestep them avoid them in the first place my channel the videos i produce are absolutely designed to help you do that so make sure you subscribe you'll see my next videos and yeah hopefully help prevent some big issues and allow you to keep running facebook

1:26ad campaigns successfully for your business anyway let's get into the topic of this video over reporting so what i've done is i've just brought up a example uh well it's it's a campaign that we ran recently um for what six weeks something like that is a lead magnet campaign where we're just testing out um a bunch of things you can see cost per lead was roughly two pounds on average and you can see obviously the results fluctuate they go up and down up and down but let's take the beginning of this campaign so day one we launched it it generated 41 leads website leads day 2 33 day 3 23

2:00day 4 30 and on and on and what often the way people identify that their campaigns are over reporting is they will take a look at this data here this is in facebook charts by the way if you're not familiar with this with this view it's quite easy to see um and they will then take a look at their google analytics data and see that those two numbers don't match up or if you're optimizing a campaign for purchase you'll take a look at your shopify data and go hang on facebook's telling me i've got eight purchase today shopify's telling me i've got four what's going on

2:28there and perhaps it's how many people have actually filled out your contact form if it's sending people to a website and that's how they're becoming a lead and one i think the first thing to that's very important to mention and be clear is that there's always going to be a discrepancy between what facebook tells you and other data sources there's never going to be 100 accuracy there and that's aside from ios 14 all that sort of stuff which we're going to get into um later on in this video there's always going to be a difference and you have to accept that as an advertiser so for me

3:01when we're running campaigns for clients let's say anything less than a 20 discrepancy between what we can see within facebook ads and data we can see from other sources we're not going to worry about we think that's an acceptable margin of difference and we're just going to operate based on the facebook ads data know that it's not 100 accurate but proceed anyway and that 20 can easily be explained by things like attribution so google analytics is perfect example google analytics uses last attribution so google's going to attribute a conversion to the last thing that that person did the last interaction they had whereas facebook is going to count the conversion if they

3:43feel they've had a hand in that conversion and it falls within the attribution window so let me give you an example let's say someone clicked on a facebook ad today or yesterday's probably better someone clicked on a facebook ad yesterday they went through to your website they checked it out didn't do anything and they did that on their phone then this morning they on their laptop remember the brand name googled your business went straight through to your website via google and purchased now google analytics is going to register that as a organic google purchase because they googled the business that's how they found you it's on a completely

4:19different device they go through and they purchase facebook if they can prod you're logged in on both devices they're going to register that again provided they can track you more in that later on as having had an impact on they showed an ad to you you gotta click you purchased um facebook is gonna say they generated a purchase there so you can see how google is not going to attribute that purchase to facebook but facebook is going to say we had a big hand in that purchase we're counting that as a conversion for us so those sorts of things is why there's always going to be a discrepancy and you

4:53can't say that in that case facebook is wrong because yes they had a big part to pay in that conversion so issue number one is just a natural difference between facebook and other data sources anything less than 20 you know consistently over let's say a 30 day time period you're not going to worry about the fix is to just ignore it and move on as difficult as that may be so that's issue and fix number one issue and fix number two is around modeled conversions now this is something that's come in after the ios 14 update and i think it's actually this facebook ads over reporting results is one of the

5:26things that's confused a lot of people because they're thinking surely i should have less reporting based on the ios 14 um stuff and in theory that's true but that's not what a lot of advertisers are seeing hence the topic of this video and what modeled conversions means is that basically when you first launch a facebook ad campaign the data that you see is not accurate facebook is taking a very educated guess in a lot of cases as to the results that you're generating so let's say for example you've you've sent 100 clicks to your website and facebook's going to be accurate on that they know how many

5:59clicks people you know they've generated because the clicks happened on platform and they worked out that okay shopify stores like yours on average generate a three percent conversion rate therefore they pop three conversions into your campaign for now that's completely model data and it will be more accurate and updated in the future well that's why so many advertisers particularly first after you launch a campaign they're seeing things like no actual purchases when they take a look at their you know back-end system but facebook's saying there's five or you can even have the other way around of course five purchases when in your facebook ad account when actually you've

6:32generated ten it's because at the beginning of a campaign facebook is taking an educated guess they are modeling data so they're modeling data at the beginning this is worse at the beginning because we've got a facebook ads reporting delays the the data doesn't come in for two or three days they're more accurate data then they are also so that happens and that resolves itself after those first few well after you've had time to catch up from the reporting delay if that makes sense the the data becomes more accurate the longer longer you go in because facebook fills in the holes as they get more data coming in from the reporting

7:04delay but there's also model data based on the ios 14 users now we don't have the same level of reporting accuracy we had on those people we still it's not as bad as people were worried about people made out we can still see um even if someone opts out one conversion event your highest priority conversion event through aggregated event measurement so let's say for example someone purchase you'll still see that show up in your in your facebook account even if they're an ios 14 user provided you have purchase as your highest priority event i know that gets really complicated i'll include a link in the video description below to a video all

7:36about facebook pixel setup and all that sort of stuff because i think you're gonna maybe need to tie this into some of that stuff but facebook has a lot of data holes around ios 14 users and they are going to model the data and that could be another issue now what we tend to find is that if this is what you're seeing if your facebook ads are over reporting because facebook is doing a lot of educated guesses which is basically what model data is how do you fix that the first thing is to take a longer time horizon when you're assessing your results if you've got a lot of model data going

8:13on in your ad account you will see that your results are most inaccurate when you look at short time horizons and when a campaign is relatively new if you go okay well i know that's i know that i'm over reporting because of this but does my data look more accurate over a 30-day period yes it most likely does okay so that's definitely something to be aware of and to that that's that's the first partial fix that if you're getting over reporting for model data it's just to expand the time horizons okay actually the date is more accurate over a 30-day period or over a 14-day period and we're within

8:45our 20 margin for error fine let's crack on the other thing to do is to change your attribution setting from say a one day click to a seven day click or a seven day click on one day view there is less model data with the seven day click attribution setting than the one day click attribution setting and you may well find that if you believe that you are seeing facebook ads results being over reported because you've got lots of model data and you will have lots of model data if you advertise it to a lot of ios 14 users some businesses advertise more to ios for ios users than

9:20others and or if you're using one day click because facebook has to make a lot of guesses around one day click attribution settings i'll include a link in the description below to another video all about attribution setting how you change it and which one to go with and all that sort of stuff and facebook probably has some information around here um i haven't checked but there's probably some attribution stuff and there is yeah there we go about attribution models they'll be talking about in this document which you could obviously come in and see about facebook's modeled conversions and so that's that's the major fix for this is to is if you've

9:51got over reporting results because of model data change your attribution settings to seven day click or seven day click on one day view basically make those long as possible and also take a longer time uh when use a longer time window when you're assessing results and making adjustments that's how you fix that issue and then the third final and most complicated and this is something that's more easy to identify if you're having this as an issue is when deduplication goes wrong so let me explain what it is first and explain why it might be going wrong if you have the facebook pixel and conversions api installed which is what

10:29i would recommend you do it's better to have both people often ask which one should i use no both one of the issues you're going to run into is duplicate events being reported and you can see facebook actually have some more information in here okay if you connect website activity using both the pixel and conversions api which is what i recommend we may receive the same events from the browser and the server pix browser conversions api server if we know that the events are the same and therefore redundant we can keep one and dis discard the rest this is called duplication now obviously if you've got

11:02two sources of conversions both reporting a conversion it would be very easy for you to have double reporting in your facebook ad account because the pixel says you've got a conversion the conversion api says you've got conversions therefore two is popping up in your ad account that's not what you want now facebook with deduplication is supposed to be able to work out that those are actually the same conversion being reported from two separate sources they discard one and therefore you have accurate data within your facebook ad account now this process of deduplication which is basically getting rid of the duplicate often goes wrong and we see this happen

11:37all the time so if you are seeing that you have not only over reported facebook ad results but that it's roughly two times so whatever's being shown in your facebook ad account is roughly double what you know to actually be true well then you can be very confident well you can be pretty confident or at least test the theory that you're obviously of course if you've got facebook pixel and conversions api installed both of them installed as well the duplication is not working properly so if you've got facebook pixel conversions api installed you're seeing about twice as many conversions in your ad account as um is is realistic then your

12:17deduplication process is not working properly and the simple and most effective fix we've had is oh you probably talk about it later down there is very simply to try uninstalling and reinstalling the face of pixel and try uninstalling or setting up and then reinstalling or setting up the conversions api um you may need to do one you may need to do both but that just sort of seems to i don't know give it another run of getting set up properly it's kind of like when your computer's not working properly you turn it off you turn it back on again it all works properly um but this this is quite

12:50an issue i've seen lots of comments people saying i'm getting twice as many conversions as is real this is why you've got conversions api set up you've got facebook pixels set up and the duplicates are not being removed properly even they should be so basically try the facebook ads tracking equivalent of turning your computer off and turning it back on again um which i show you exactly how to do i said link in the video description from the video all about how to set up the facebook pixel and all that sort of stuff right so go through that um if you're confused about how to go about

13:19doing that and that's the fix so through potential issues one you're gonna basically ignore there's nothing you can do about it natural discrepancy the other one change your attribution settings analyze things over a longer time period and then the third the fix is to uninstall and reinstall facebook pixel and conversions api to make sure that the deduplication process is working properly okay hope that's been useful before you go couple of things i want to quickly mention the first is a free webinar i've created called one facebook ads technique to supercharge your results and this webinar really focuses on what i think is the single most important facebook advertising technique

13:55that you want to get right if you want to have massive success on the platform i go through it all in a lot of detail i strongly recommend you check it out links in the description and completely free to watch it it's about 50-60 minutes long and it really goes through this process and as i said i think you're going to find it very very useful very helpful to uh to go through that if you're looking for better facebook advertising results other thing i want to mention is youtube channel membership so you can now become a member of my youtube channel and the way it works is that members get

14:24added perks um the first of which being priority reply to comments so as my channel has grown it's become impossible for me to answer every single comment like i used to on my videos so i'm prioritizing member comments so if you've got questions for me around any facebook advertising related stuff if you become a member it's a small monthly fee if you become a member then i effectively guarantee that i'll answer your i mean i may always miss one from time to time of course um but but i'm gonna do my absolute best to make sure i answer every single member comment and then of course with time i have left

14:55available i will still be answering some other comments from regular subscribers um to my youtube channel but members are going to get priority you also get to have your say in the content i create if you become a member i've got member only polls that are asking would you like me to create topics around this stuff or this stuff or this stuff you can have a say in that and you can help support my youtube channel which is some if there's something you want to do that would be much appreciated i put a lot of time and effort into creating this uh this free content um

15:19okay if you found this video useful thumbs up always helpful guys um i said subscribe to my channel this is just the sort of stuff that you may need to know depending on the issues you may run into as a facebook advertiser so i strongly recommend you subscribe you will see as i release videos on all the changes that are happening you'll see them pop up that way and um yeah comment below whether you become a member or not comment below to let me know what you think of this comment below with any questions you've got i'll do my best to answer them and i will

15:45talk to you soon thanks a lot guys bye for now