Don't trust the numbers in Meta Business Manager
Published:
We have now run advertising on Facebook and Instagram for a month for our sport tech platform, Hurry Up. Fortunately, the numbers are better in reality than what Meta Business Manager reports.
In May have we one campaign with 13 ads, divided into 6 ad sets, where the goal is conversions. In our case, conversion means someone creating an account on HurryUp.
And so that Meta can know how many people create accounts, we have added Meta's pixel.
We have been following the numbers almost daily in Meta Business Manager to see how things are going. And especially Cost per acquisition (CPA) is important to us. After all, it tells us how much it costs for a person to go create a new account.
But the numbers we get in Meta Business Manager do not match. They miss badly. Fortunately, we can say.
Correct numbers from Plausible
On the website, we use Plausible to measure traffic. It is a kind of light version of Google Analytics, but which is completely without cookies, and gets all traffic with it.
It also includes UTM tagging that is placed on the ads so that we can track how many people create accounts via the ads.
When we compare the figures of Meta Business Manager and Plausible, we see that Business Manager only registers 53% of the actual conversions.
If we hadn't had Plausible, we might have stopped advertising on Facebook and Instagram, as we thought the cost per acquisition (CPA) was too high.
But in reality the ads work very well and the cost for someone to create a new account on HurryUp is only half of what we thought.
Recommended reading: Why Plausible may be a better alternative to Google Analytics.
