Optimize Facebook Ads — get more quality users

Optimize facebook ads — Part 2 — get more quality users

In the last post I talked about the basics of facebook app install ads and how to scale a campaign. In this post i’ll talk about how to determine the quality of your users and optimise further for better returns.

The post is broken down into:

  1. The basics — postbacks
  2. How to send events to the facebook ad dashboard
  3. Get users with more bookings/registrations rather than just a lower CPI

You can send actions/events your users are performing in your app, back to facebook and use these actions to optimize your ad-sets for quality of users rather than just the CPI. To send events one has to setup postbacks.

What’s a post-back?

A post-back is simply an API call from one platform to another. It’s called a post-back, since we’re sending data back to the original platform. In this case, we setup a postback to send data to facebook.

Setting up a post-back from Apsalar(or your attribution platform of choice ex. Appsflyer/Tune etc).

Postback — sending play and registration events

How to setup a post-back?

We can send events/actions we’re capturing in our attribution tool(Apsalar) in our instance back to facebook. Here’s a post from Apsalar’s support which describes how to setup a postback back to facebook. For completeness, let me describe here how it can be done. They also have a separate post for setting up events with facebook.

Steps to send data to facebook:

  1. Create a postback
  2. Configure postback to send event required from Apsalar
Create a new Postback

Add a postback — login to your apsalar dashboard, go to attribution tracking and then go to the postbacks section.

Set the recipient as Facebook

Select facebook as the postback recipient.

You can pass the event based on goal of your app. Example if it’s a dining app like Dineout, the most important event is likely a purchase. So select the purchase event. Note that a purchase would be termed as a ‘custom event’ in Apsalar. Select ‘Send all events’ within the 28 day attribution window.

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Here we’re assuming that you’re capturing the different events that occur within your app. If you’re not doing this right now, it’s a great idea to refer to this guide.

Once you have configured the post-back(consider it’s a play event to consider the simplest case), you should be able to see the data in your facebook ad dashboard.

Event-Setup at Facebook levels:

The events configured have a different notation terminology in the facebook dashboard.Once you have setup the postback, copy the url and check the name of the event being passed in the facebook dashboard.

Ex. a sample URL would look like:

https://graph.facebook.com/{FB_APP_ID}/activities{POST}event=CUSTOM_APP_EVENTS&advertiser_id={AIFA}&attribution={FB_ATTR_ID}&advertiser_tracking_enabled={NODNT}&application_tracking_enabled=1&custom_events=[{"_eventName":"fb_mobile_content_view", “_logTime”:{UTC}}]&access_token={FB_ACCESS_TOKEN}

In this event we are sending the ‘table booked’ event as ‘fb_mobile_content_view’. So navigate to the facebook dashboard and add the ‘fb_mobile_content_view” event to the column.

Add ‘Mobile App Content Views’ as a custom column

Add Mobile App content view as a column in the fb ad dashboard.

One can see the no of table bookings from each ad set

Shows the number of ‘mobile content views’ or ‘bookings’ resulted from a certain ad campaign.

One can derive parameters like bookings per user and optimize the cost to get users who get more bookings rather than just users with a lower CPI.

Consider you have the following campaigns on

Optimize for Cost per booking rather than just CPI

As you can see from the above chart Female users from Delhi might have a lower cpi but the overall return is much lower and the CPB is 146!

One can use these stats in combination with retention reporting to finally determine the quality of users being acquired.

Can we send more than one event?

Surely. Just configure a new postback to send the event from Apsalar. Verify the tracking URL and update your dashboard to reflect the new event.

Facebook has different events like:

fb_mobile_level_achieved, fb_mobile_add_to_wishlist etc which can correspond to each event in Apsalar.

Thanks to Aungeer Bhattacharya for introducing me to this. If you found the article useful, please feel free to hit recommend. I will be happy to hear your feedback on this. Feel free to comment here or tag me on twitter @vernekard or mail me at vernekardinesh@gmail.com

P.S. I work on growth at Gaana — India’s Favorite Music App. Would love your feedback on the product.