As Facebook pushes a replacement for its increasingly weak tracker, advertisers weigh privacy risk and reward

By Kate Kaye

Facebook’s tracking pixel is a ubiquitous-yet-invisible presence on sites across the web. But Facebook wants advertisers to trade it in for a newer model of monitoring people’s online behavior and connecting it with the ads running on its platform.

Facebook’s two-year-old server-side conversion tracking method — known as Conversions API or CAPI — aims to give advertisers a means of getting around tracking obstacles. While it can’t entirely circumvent new tracking barriers set up by Apple, CAPI is helping advertisers fill in some tracking gaps and delivering more refined data for measuring and optimizing ads, which helps them continue to do some of the retargeted advertising they’re accustomed to doing on Instagram or Facebook.

As the pieces of the tracking data puzzle disappear, server-side tracking is helping Facebook “get parts of the puzzle back together,” said Natasha Blumenkron, director of paid social at Tinuiti, an agency that specializes in marketing on Facebook and other big tech platforms.

In addition to helping advertisers view signs of ad performance otherwise obscured by Apple devices and browser-based ad blockers, Facebook’s updated conversion tracking method also gives them more detailed information than Facebook’s pixel. “We’re actually getting better data than we were getting from the pixel,” from the newer tracking method, said Ceilidh MacLeod, co-founder of digital consultancy Algae. While she is limited in the types of interactions she can track with the pixel, such as whether someone made a purchase, CAPI lets her “get super granular” by picking up on more specific actions such as whether someone clicked on a page or downloaded something, she said.

She said many of the small businesses she handles Facebook ads for, including her own healthcare and CBD brand called OEM, are just starting to test the technology in the hopes it improves their ability to see whether people bought something after being served an ad on Facebook.

But as Facebook touts new “Privacy Enhancing Technologies” — in part to convince government regulators, privacy watchdogs and everyday people that it respects data privacy — CAPI moves privacy decisions away from people and the browsers they control to brands and website publishers behind-the-scenes. Not only does the tracking tool need actual identifiable data like emails and phone numbers sent to Facebook in order to work — data some advertisers never shared with the company before — the process entices advertisers to share with Facebook what in some cases is a wider array of data than they may have in the past: on people’s interactions in online and e-commerce environments as well as offline settings like retail stores and customer call centers.

“Server-side conversion tracking is shifting who is making those consent-driven decisions from the user in the browser to the publisher on the back end,” said Drew Lanenga, chief data scientist at Lytics, a customer data platform that allows advertiser clients to set up Facebook’s CAPI system. “The consumer has less control. And as technology puts people in less control, the responsibility falls onto brands,” he said.

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Source:: Digiday