Marketing / 05.17.21
What Live Event Professionals Should Know About Facebook Ads and Apple’s New iOS Update, Part 2
Bauer Entertainment Marketing
This is part two of a three-part video series. Watch part one here.
Brian Bauer, President of Bauer Entertainment Marketing (BEM), is sharing some technical steps you can take to help ensure your ad campaigns are served to target audiences with the highest propensity to buy from you and that your conversion events will be accurately tracked. As a reminder, conversion events are most commonly known as purchases but can also include things like add to cart and submit a lead form.
The first step you need to take is verifying your website domain using one of the following options:
To start, go to your Facebook Business Manager settings, then click on Brand Safety, add your domain and hit Refresh.
Once you refresh the page, you will see a set of instructions. Select the option “Meta-tag Verification” and copy the snippet of code provided. Then, add it to the <head> section of your homepage. Finally, return to Business Manager and click Verify.
Alternatively, you can verify through your website’s Domain Name Server (DNS for short). Follow the instructions provided by Facebook, which will guide you through the process of adding a DNS TXT Record to your domain. Once you complete these steps, you can then click the green Verify button after the text is added to your site. This may take a few minutes or as long as 72 hours to verify.
There’s a third way to verify your domain, but you’ll need access to your site’s root directory. This option requires you to download an HTML-verification file. After downloading the file, you’ll be able to upload it to your site’s root directory. The root directory is the folder that’s accessed when internet users type your domain name into the search bar of their browser. The easiest way to find where the root directory is located within your website is to search for “root directory” in the search function of your website host.
Once you’ve located the root directory, upload Facebook’s HTML file. The process to upload this file depends on your host, so you may need to contact customer support if you run into a roadblock.
After adding the file to your website, head back to Facebook and click the green Verify button. I recommend using this method if you do not have time for the 72-hour verification window using the DNS TXT Record.
For event producers, there are some extra, crucial and required considerations when it comes to domain verification. Marketing websites for most events link out their prospective buyers to third-party ticketing sites to complete their ticket purchase. Previously, an advertising pixel could track a ticket buyer’s journey across multiple domains by placing a pixel on both the “marketing site” and “ticketing site.” Now, with the requirement of domain verification, this becomes more challenging. Without a verified domain on your ticketing platform, you will not be able to track purchases, retarget potential buyers who’ve abandoned their cart, segment out buyers from receiving future ads and more.
There is, however, a solution to fix this. Ask your ticketing software provider to add your business as a Partner in their Facebook Business Manager. This will require you to send your ticketing provider your Facebook Business ID, which can be found by going into your Business Manager settings and clicking Business Info.
Next, ticketing companies can grant advertisers Partner access by going to Business Settings, selecting Partners under the Users section, and then choosing Add. From there, they’ll need to select “Give a partner access to your assets” and then enter the Business ID.
Once they grant you Partner access to their domain, and they’ve gone through the steps to verify their domain with Facebook, you should then be able to create ads that successfully target high-value audiences and track conversions.
If you cannot gain Partner access to your ticketing site’s domain, you should establish a private purchase confirmation page on your own website, if possible. This page should not be accessible to anyone who has not already purchased a ticket from you. So, to hide this page from Google searches, work with your web developer to add a “No Follow” HTML tag to that page. A basic online search will reveal all you need to know about No Follow tags, so we won’t dig into that during this video. Once your private confirmation page is set up, work with your ticketing provider to enable a way to auto-redirect ticket purchasers back to this new confirmation page on your verified domain. Doing this will allow purchase conversions to be tracked.
Some ticketing platforms allow you to white-label their site by using your domain to establish a subdomain. For example, a prospective ticket buyer on “festival.com” will click a Buy Tickets button and be sent to “tickets.festival.com.” The purpose of the “tickets.festival.com” subdomain is to provide a more seamless, trustworthy and branded experience for potential buyers. In the case of this recent iOS update, it becomes simpler to verify your ticketing site’s domain with Facebook since you also own the subdomain. We encourage ticketing platform providers who do not already offer this option to consider establishing it for their clients.
In our part 3 video, we’ll be exploring important Facebook campaign measurement changes you need to know about it. If you have any questions about anything shared so far, please message BEM.
This article was sponsored by Bauer Entertainment Marketing.
Tags: Sponsored Content , Marketing