Verify your domain and pick your eight events

Facebook spent the middle of December taking out full page newspaper ads about Apple. This month it started asking advertisers for homework instead, and the homework is the part that actually touches your account.

There are two jobs. Verify the domain your ads send people to, and decide which eight conversion events you want to keep. Both are boring. Both take an afternoon. Both are far easier to do now, while the account is running normally, than in the week Apple’s prompt starts appearing on phones.

Here is what Facebook is asking for, why, and the order we are working through it in the accounts we run.

What Facebook is asking for

Apple’s App Tracking Transparency prompt was announced last June and pushed back to early this year in September. It arrives in an iOS 14 update this spring. When it lands, an app has to ask permission before tracking someone across other companies’ apps and websites, and on every phone where the answer is no, Facebook loses the link between an ad tap and what happened on your site afterwards.

Facebook’s answer is a measurement system it calls Aggregated Event Measurement. The parts that change your setup:

• Eight conversion events per domain. Not per ad account, per domain. You rank them in priority order, and that ranking decides what gets reported.
• One event counted per visit. For a visitor who has opted out, only the highest ranked event that happened is counted. If someone views a page, submits a form and books, you get one of those, whichever sits highest in your list.
• The domain has to be verified. No verification, no event configuration, and eventually no delivery for campaigns optimizing toward events on that domain.
• Shorter attribution windows. As of this week the 28 day click, 28 day view and 7 day view windows are gone. What is left is 7 day click, 1 day click, 1 day view and the combinations of those.
• Slower, thinner reporting. Conversions will arrive with a delay of up to three days, and the usual breakdowns by age, placement or region will not be available for them.

None of this is optional and none of it has a published hard deadline, because Apple has not named the day. The safe assumption is that it is sooner than you would like.

Step one: verify the domain

In Business Manager, under Brand Safety, there is a Domains section. Three ways to prove you own the domain: a DNS TXT record, an HTML file uploaded to the root, or a tag added to the head of the site. Pick whichever you can actually get done, which for most owners means finding out who has the DNS login.

Four things that trip up local accounts:

• Verify the root domain. If your booking pages sit on a subdomain, verifying the root covers them. Verifying only the subdomain does not cover the rest of the site.
• Only one business can verify a domain. If a former agency verified your domain inside their Business Manager, they have to release it. Start that conversation this week, because it involves a human replying to an email.
• You cannot verify a domain you do not own. If your ads point at a third party booking page or a directory listing, you cannot configure events there. That is a good reason to move the conversion onto your own site.
• Do it even if you only run lead forms. Instant forms inside Facebook and Instagram are not affected by any of this, but the first time you test a website campaign you will need the verification, and you will not want to be doing it under pressure.

Step two: rank your eight events

Most local accounts do not use eight events. They use three on purpose and fire another nine by accident, because the pixel was installed with automatic event detection switched on and every button on the site now counts as something.

The ranking is the whole game. The highest ranked event that fires is the only one counted, so if a page view sits above a booked appointment, an opted out visitor who books gets reported as a page view, and delivery learns to go and find more browsing.

Our default order for a practice or a home services company:

1. Booked appointment, the confirmation page after the calendar
2. Qualified lead, the form on the main offer page
3. Phone call longer than sixty seconds, set up as a custom conversion
4. Any other form submit, including the contact page
5. Click to call taps on mobile
6. Chat or text conversation started
7. Views of the financing or pricing page
8. Page view, last, if you keep it at all

Then stop. Anything you do not rank is not configured, and any campaign optimizing for an event you have not configured will stop spending once enforcement starts. Open every active campaign and check its optimization event against the list before you close the laptop.

Two practical notes. Value optimization eats several of the eight slots, so most local accounts should leave it alone. And if you run separate domains for separate locations or brands, each domain gets its own eight, which is a reason to consolidate rather than a reason to celebrate.

What this does to your numbers

They get smaller and blurrier. Fewer conversions attributed, a shorter window to attribute them in, a delay before they show up, and some of them modeled rather than counted.

The leads will not all disappear. Some of them will stop being counted, which is a different thing, and the only defense against confusing the two is a number Facebook does not produce. Every lead in a CRM with its source stamped on it. Every call tracked. Every booking marked kept or not kept. If you built that last year, you are in good shape. If you did not, build it in the next six weeks, because after the prompt ships nobody will be able to tell you what changed.

What to do this month

• Verify your domain in Business Manager, today if you have DNS access, this week if you have to ask someone for it.
• List every event your pixel currently fires. Most owners are surprised by that list.
• Write your eight events in priority order, money first, volume last, and configure them.
• Open every active campaign and confirm its optimization event is one of the eight.
• Save this quarter’s cost per lead and cost per booked appointment somewhere you will still find in June.
• Check that leads land in a CRM with a source attached, not in an inbox somebody reads twice a day.

None of this makes the account better by itself. It keeps the account working through a change that is going to get blamed for plenty of things it did not cause. We are doing the same pass for every client on Facebook and Instagram ads this month, alongside the unglamorous half that matters more: lead capture and follow-up you own, and conversions that happen on a site you control.