Tracking Boosted Facebook Posts with Custom URL

Creating great content for Facebook ads is only half the battle. It is easy to come up with something really great and put it out in the world and just let it go. But, how well is it doing? Is it achieving the goals initially set in place to make the campaign effective? These are all really good questions. In this article, I will give you a really easy way to track your ads through to your website by utilizing a couple tools from Google.

Setting up the URL

The first thing we need to do is set up a custom URL to track the actions from initial click all the way through to actions on the website. Google has given us a really simple and easy tool to use that does most of the work for us. We start out by going to Google’s Campaign Url Builder. This tool helps create a trackable link for Google Analytics. We first need to set up a few items of information. Start with the website URL for the link. For campaign source, you can simply put Facebook.

The next few items are optional but I would recommend at least filling out the Campaign Name section. This will help you identify the campaign results within Google Analytics. Once you put in this information, at the bottom will be a uniquely generated URL. You can copy and paste this right into your Facebook Ad or you can also at this point shorten the URL. Google will then give you a short URL in which you can use the same way.

Checking the Analytics

After you deploy your ad with this Google generated URL, you can view the results of the campaign on your Analytics and see if the ad is working. To find your campaign, go into your analytics account and on the left menu look under Acquisition > Campaigns > All Campaigns. You should then be able to find your campaign in the list on the right based on the name you used for the Campaign Name section on the ULR builder. You can see the example below of the test campaign.

Now, you should be able to impress anyone with not only your social media skills but also a new found analytics capability. This is something very simple to do but very effective in maintaining and achieving goals placed around Facebook ads or really any other type of ad.

Feel free to leave comments or questions on this technique and I would love to hear what you’re doing to track all your Facebook campaigns.