CallRail’s Facebook integration sends your calls, texts, and/or form submissions to your Facebook Business Manager account. This ensures the greatest chance of finding an ad viewer and correctly attributing them. Facebook’s method of registering conversions is different from the method used by Google Ads and Microsoft Advertising. If you feel that not all your conversions are present in your Facebook Ads account, this difference in method is important to be aware of.
While the other advertising platforms rely only on a unique click ID captured via a tracking parameter attached to your site’s URL, Facebook utilizes a multi-step process that is based on a user’s profile.
How Facebook Attributes Your Lead Activity
For a customer interaction to be correctly attributed to a Facebook ad, the following steps are taken:
- Facebook will try to find an existing user profile to match the call data CallRail sends through the integration. It will look for either phone number, email, or Facebook Click ID. Please Note: If your integration is set up with Offline Events instead of the Facebook Pixel, the Facebook Click ID (fbclid) will not be utilized for matching purposes.
- If a user profile is found, Facebook will determine if an ad was shown to that user within the attribution window.
- If an ad was found, Facebook will attribute the interaction if it falls within their last-touch attribution model (unless you have changed to a different model).
All calls, texts, and form submissions are sent to Facebook while the integration is active if you’ve selected those formats for inclusion. This allows us to match with as many Facebook profiles as possible.
When the integration is set up with a Pixel, sending this data helps Facebook attribute both view-through and click-through conversions. When setup is done with Offline Events, this data creates a larger pool of profiles for the Custom Audience that we will create.
Only lead interactions that receive successful attribution via the above steps will show in your Facebook Ad & Campaign Performance reporting. As a result, you will likely see a difference in what we post within CallRail and what shows in these reports.
Facebook’s Default Last-Touch Attribution Model
Unless you have selected a different model, Facebook Ads utilizes last-touch attribution for the interactions our integration delivers to it. This means that all credit for the interaction goes to the last marketing channel the ad viewer interacted with before clicking on the ad.
This attribution model has a 1-day impression window and a 28-day click window. Conversions that occur outside of those windows will not be counted under this model. If you have chosen a model besides the default last touch option, this window of time may differ.
If you suspect a discrepancy in reporting between CallRail and Facebook, it is strongly encouraged that you match the number of events in Facebook to the events in CallRail after filtering for Facebook, and then to look at all events in the same time period. This will account for any conversions that have fallen outside your chosen attribution model’s click window.
For more information on attribution modeling in Facebook Ads, see their help article.