1st Party Data Made Easy: Leveraging the Meta Conversions API Gateway
Contributors
Kevin Goodwin, VP of Performance Marketing
DJ Sutton, Director of Performance Marketing
June 2023
The End of 3rd-Party Cookies Is Here
The “cookieless future” narrative has dominated the marketing world over the last few years, as consumers and regulators continue to demand more from tech companies and how they handle data privacy. Things started to heat up in 2018, from news overseas that the European Union had enacted The General Data Protection Regulation, to headlines at home surrounding the California Consumer Privacy Act.
As legislation began to catch up with tech companies, Google announced that it would deprecate third-party cookies and Apple rolled out new privacy features that came to fruition in the launch of iOS14.5. We probably don’t need to explain why or how these shifts have rocked the advertising world, but New Engen VP of Performance Marketing, Adam Telian, summed it up nicely in a recent Advertising Week article:
For the better part of the last 20 years, the work of a performance marketer was to find hyper-specific audiences that could convert to sales. The era of privacy and signal loss brings with it a sobering thought to performance marketers everywhere – the days of riding audiences, powered by the likes of Google and Facebook, are over.
Meta Conversions API: How the Loss of 3rd-Party Tracking Lead to Innovation
Change is hard, but the downfall of 3rd-party tracking has spurred innovations that directly address the everyday needs of brands and marketers. We’ve witnessed net-new innovation of closed-loop advertising and e-commerce platforms from Amazon and Walmart. The revival of randomized controlled trials like marketing mix modeling (MMM) and conversion lift studies has enabled marketers to make data-driven decisions about budget allocation, a capability that is especially pertinent in the current economic climate. And key innovations in enhanced signal for in-platform optimization, like Meta’s Conversion API (CAPI), provide critical 1st-party data measurement solutions for a post-signal world.
Meta developed CAPI as a means for safely capturing the marketing data from a brand’s website, app, or server, and connecting it to Meta’s advertising platform. During a recent webinar, New Engen & Meta: 1st Party Data Made Easy, New Engen Director of Performance Marketing, DJ Sutton, kicked off the CAPI conversation with a caveat, “If you’re a marketer, there has probably been some point in your career where you’ve been just a little bit skeptical of Meta-reported conversions.” For this reason, a team of New Engen leaders sought to validate the Conversions API internally, rather than relying on a Meta-commissioned study.
The results were undeniable. After launching CAPI for one of our clients, a leading outdoor apparel brand, we saw sustained revenue growth and a 57% increase in ROAS. We measured campaign performance using Google Analytics in order to validate the results under a third-party, Meta-agnostic attribution system. This was not an isolated incident, and success stories continue to pile up across the New Engen portfolio.
Spell It Out for Me: What Makes CAPI So Effective?
In the same webinar, DJ likened CAPI to a flywheel, with benefits like accurate measurement, improved learnings, enhanced delivery, and business growth all compounding on one another. Let’s break these down one at a time:
- Accurate Measurement: CAPI integration allows Meta to track valuable website events that can no longer be captured by pixels.
- Improved Learnings: With better visibility into campaign performance, marketers are better equipped to decide which factors drive success - from ad creative to audiences and bid strategies.
- Enhanced Delivery: CAPI provides a richer conversion signal for delivery optimization, which allows Meta to serve more targeted impressions to users with high conversion potential, all while delivering results more efficiently and at scale.
- Business Growth: These benefits (better measurement, learnings, and delivery) culminate in the heightened efficacy of Meta programs - resulting in significant business impact.
If you look at it by the numbers, Meta reports that CAPI adoption leads, on average, to a 13% improvement in Cost per Result and a 19% increase in conversions for advertisers who set up the Conversions API in addition to their Meta Pixel. And if that doesn’t convince you, perhaps the 97% adoption rate among New Engen clients will change your mind.
Setting Up the Conversions API
There are a handful of ways to integrate with CAPI, from direct integrations to partnering with a third party, but these methods can be labor-intensive and require weeks to execute. To mitigate such headaches, Meta developed the Conversions API Gateway, which allows advertisers to integrate CAPI without any developer resources. Under a single account, self-service configuration option, advertisers can configure the integration without developer resources, but they are still responsible for spinning up an Amazon Web Services account, establishing the gateway on their own, and assuming any related costs. In order to simplify the integration process even further, we partnered with Meta to establish a New Engen CAPI Gateway, which allows us to onboard our clients in a matter of minutes and at no additional cost.
Truth be told, when Meta proposed building a New Engen CAPI Gateway for added ease and efficiency, we weren’t wholly convinced. However, the immediate results and consistently smooth adoption we achieved for our clients assuaged any initial doubts we may have had about the potency of the CAPI Gateway.
Don’t Just Survive, Thrive
As we enter the new frontier of performance marketing, we have the opportunity to both innovate and embrace new technologies - ones that facilitate better relationships with customers by meeting them where they are while honoring their data privacy needs, and ones that power measurable, unequivocal value for the business. At New Engen, we’re committed to being at the forefront of performance marketing solutions like Meta’s Conversions API, and we’re proud to be able to drive growth for our clients through our brand-new New Engen CAPI Gateway.
In his closing remarks during this month’s co-hosted webinar, New Engen VP of Performance Marketing Kevin Goodwin left the audience with this,
I think the message is hopefully pretty clear today: CAPI is extremely valuable. DJ and I are not paid actors, this is not an infomercial. We just see it work for our clients and our brands, and it makes our lives easier as marketers.
To learn more about CAPI, reach out to us at info@newengen.com. To stay in the know on all things performance marketing, subscribe to our newsletter and follow us on LinkedIn.