With Tend, you can track each visit to your website, but you need UTM parameters to differentiate between several ads on a single website.
UTM parameters explained
UTM parameters are extra bits of information added to the end of a URL that tell you something about the origin of the click.
Let’s say you have two different ads running on Facebook. One ad is a video ad with a dog and the other is an image ad with a happy baby. You could create two different links for each ad using UTM parameters like this:
Then, when you look at Tend, you’ll be able to see which ad performed better. Without the UTM parameters, all the traffic from Facebook would be lumped in together.
The problem with UTM parameters
But UTM parameters get unwieldy when you have several ad variations. If you forget to use them or use a different naming convention like “unhappy puppy” instead of “sad dog” the reporting in Tend will be incomplete or confusing.
URL dynamic parameters
To solve this problem, Facebook has come up with “URL dynamic parameters”.
With URL dynamic parameters, Facebook automatically populates the parameter values using information pulled from your ad acccount. Here is a list of the URL dynamic parameters Facebook offers :
ad_id={ {ad.id} }
adset_id={ {adset.id} }
campaign_id={ {campaign.id} }
ad_name={ {ad.name} }
adset_name={ {adset.name} }
campaign_name={ {campaign.name} }
These name-based parameters can be applied to individual ads, ad sets, or an entire campaign. Note, however, that while you can change the name of your campaign or ad at any time, the parameter values cannot be changed once they are set.
If you create an ad with the following structure:
Facebook will automatically generate a URL for your ad that looks like this:
https://yourwebsite.com?utm_content=happy_baby&utm_medium=video_ad
Here is how to build the URL using Facebook's "Build a URL Parameter" tool.
Seeing the parameters in Tend
In Tend, each of the parameters are searchable and will then show up in the dashboard, in the parameter report and on each contact’s timeline.
Using ad, adset, and campaign names to populate URL parameters will make reading reports more intuitive. But keep in mind that Facebook has a lot of other data about your ads that you’ll want to reference like cost, audience, and other ad metrics.
You can look up these additional data points with ad, adset, and campaign names, but you may also want to include the respective IDs for precision and to avoid confusion between similar names. Using Facebook IDs, along with names, would generate a URL that looks something like this:
https://yourwebsite.com?utm_campaign=fall_promotion&utm_content=happy_baby&utm_medium=video_ads&campaign_id=23&ad_set_id=15&ad_id=4
Again, all of these parameters will then be populated within Tend. Using both IDs and names will allow you to cross-reference the data Facebook has with the data Tend has.
