Sending the sale back to Facebook: Conversions API
3 min read
Facebook knows who clicked your ad, but not who paid. That gap raises the price of the advertising.
Why the pixel is not enough
The pixel works in the browser: someone opened the page, pressed a button, filled in a form. That is where its field of view ends.
The real sale happens somewhere else — after the operator calls, when the deal is closed in the CRM, or when the CPA network confirms the order. None of that happens in the browser, so the pixel never sees it.
The result is that Facebook learns to “collect leads”, not to “make sales”. The algorithm looks for people inclined to fill in a form, not people inclined to pay. The difference is large and it shows up in the budget.
An event sent from the server side
The Conversions API closes that gap: the event is sent from the server, not from the browser. Yuboraman knows the lead status has changed, so it can tell Meta about it itself.
The events go out every ten minutes, in batches of up to 1000 per send. So once a deal is closed in the CRM, Facebook knows about it within ten minutes.
Four events
The path of a lead is split into four steps, and each one goes out as a separate event:
- Lead — the lead came in
- CRMLead — the lead was written into the CRM
- QualifiedLead — the lead passed qualification
- Purchase — the sale was completed
These steps show Meta the quality of the lead. Send only Purchase and the algorithm loses the intermediate signals; send only Lead and it learns nothing about quality.
Match quality
How useful a server event is depends on which person Meta can tie it to. Meta gives a score for that called Event Match Quality, and it is visible in the panel.
A low score means the event was sent but Meta could not tie it to anyone — so there is little use in it. Watching the score matters, otherwise the CAPI looks like it is working while there is no result.
Where the status comes from
The system learns that a lead has become a sale from several sources. Working with amoCRM and Bitrix24, the deal status comes from the CRM. For teams that work through Telegram, the status can be set through the bot.
With the Uzbek CPA networks the order status is returned the other way: Yuboraman sees whether the network confirmed or rejected the order and sends the event on that basis.
What changes
Once Facebook starts seeing the customers who paid, the criterion for finding similar people changes too. The advertising starts looking for the lead that turns into a sale, not the cheap lead.
It does not happen overnight — the algorithm needs events to learn from, and events come with sales. But if the data is never sent, the learning does not begin at all.