Episode 700: The Least Sexy Task in Marketing You Must Do Now!

May 27, 2025

Ralph Burns and Lauren Petrullo dive into the “ugly duckling” of digital advertising: tracking. Lauren reveals her own messy Meta event setup and why that mistake—yes, even from a pro—could be sabotaging your campaigns. Learn why placing a pixel isn’t enough, what event match quality (EMQ) really tells Meta, and how CAPI fixes data loss issues caused by browser-side limitations. This is Part 1 of a 3-part tracking mini-series… and it starts with full transparency and a touch of public flogging.

Chapters:

00:00:00 – Cracking Open the Perpetual Traffic Vault
00:01:31 – Why Bad Tracking Kills Great Marketing
00:02:58 – Meta’s Bold AI Vision (and Why It Matters)
00:04:47 – The Data Black Hole of Flexible Ads
00:06:53 – From Pixels to Prediction: How Ad Networks Evolved
00:10:57 – Your Official Invite to the 3-Part Tracking Overhaul
00:14:28 – How to Set Up Tracking Without Breaking Your Brain
00:15:53 – Which Data Source Should You Actually Trust?
00:15:59 – The Truth About Pixel vs. Dataset IDs
00:17:04 – Don’t Just Place Events—Place Them with Purpose
00:17:27 – Next-Level Pixel Installs (That Don’t Break Your Site)
00:23:44 – What Your EMQ Score Is Really Telling Meta
00:25:05 – The Showdown: Browser Events vs. CAPI
00:28:48 – Fix Your Errors Before They Cost You More
00:30:01 – Wrapping Up… and What’s Coming Next

LINKS AND RESOURCES:

About standard and custom website events
Specifications for Meta Pixel standard events
About the flexible ad format
Get Your nCAC Calculator Now!
Tier 11 Jobs
Perpetual Traffic on YouTube
Tiereleven.com
Mongoose Media
Perpetual Traffic Survey
Perpetual Traffic Website
Follow Perpetual Traffic on Twitter
Connect with Lauren on Instagram and Connect with Ralph on LinkedIn

Thanks so much for joining us this week. Want to subscribe to Perpetual Traffic? Have some feedback you’d like to share? Connect with us on iTunes and leave us a review!

Mentioned in this episode:

Unbounce – Code PT10off

READ THE TRANSCRIPT:

The Least Sexy Task in Marketing You Must Do Now!

Ralph: [00:00:00] Hello and welcome to the Perpetual Traffic Podcast. This is your host, Ralph Burns, founder and CEO of Cheer 11, alongside my amazing cohost.

Lauren: Lauren e

Ralph: you joined us here today. Every single time I say that you always just glow. Um, you are just a compliment person.

Lauren: I’m a

Ralph: You’re a glutton for compliments. Well, if you ever wanna get on Lauren’s good side, you know, listening to this show, that’s how you do it. Just compli, compliment her hair or shoes, shoes, shoes.

Ralph: Like

Lauren: Hmm.

Ralph: that speaks to your personality, your shoes. Yeah.

Lauren: Yeah. Yeah. Don’t compliment. Be like, oh wow, you’re tall. I’m like, tell me something. I

Ralph: And

Lauren: Tell me how great my

Ralph: why they like your shoes too. Don’t like No platitudes. None of that. Oh, I like ’em. It’s like, what do you like about ’em? Oh, they’re so cute. Oh, they’re so whatever. All the stuff guys don’t do. Oh,

Lauren: You know [00:01:00] what? I,

Ralph: you just take ’em.

Lauren: my compliments.

Ralph: okay. Well, that’s good to know.

Lauren: I was like, can you see that I am, uh, someone who

Ralph: totally are. That’s why you do the show. It’s like you got hundreds of thousands of people that listen to you every single month. It’s validation every day. Well, hopefully to those a hundred thousand people or so, couple hundred thousand actually more than that. Hopefully today’s show is validation for you.

Ralph: ’cause we are talking about tracking here. Everyone’s favorite subject. Is it really everyone’s favorite subject? I don’t think it is. I, I don’t think people like to talk about it ’cause they’re like, uh, I don’t want to think about it. I don’t want to deal with it. But that’s part of the problem. Tough shit.

Ralph: You need

Lauren: Yeah. Tough shit. You need to, it’s like for me, I’ve. Told you it’s the most important thing after your offer. I don’t care. I mean, I could be like, I don’t give a shit about what your ad looks like or your landing page. If your tracking is

Ralph: explicit rating here. We come on iTunes. But the point is, is like, I don’t care because that, this is the most important thing. I, I’ve been on [00:02:00] five sales calls this week, just like I’ll drop in on these calls now just because I’m like, well, I don’t, here’s the deal. Like you want X results, you want us to do certain things?

Ralph: Well, it’s kind of up to us to kind of figure out like what? We’ll get you that result, but if you don’t have tracking nothing, we do matters. And it’s, it’s the reason why, you know, if you go on tier 11, there’s a thing called conversion engine data and tracking is the thing that makes the whole machine work.

Ralph: And it’s the least interesting for many, many marketers like we have. Thank God I’ve got developers on our team that love this stuff. Like, love it. I’m like, oh my God, thank God there’s people out there that do this. I can’t stand it, but I know that if we don’t have, doesn’t work. Today’s show kind of arose because we are planning for the future here a bit because there’s a couple of different things on meta that [00:03:00] are in the process of being deprecated, a lot of changes going on.

Ralph: Maybe just talk at a high level and then we’ll back into it and maybe we’ll do a screen share of how not to do it. The Mon account.

Lauren: Yeah.

Ralph: No.

Lauren: Hey, hey.

Ralph: It’s the first thing that you do for your clients. So anyway, give us a high level view, like why this is.

Lauren: Yeah. Um, so high level view, uh, is that, like we spoke recently about the Advantage plus changes, um, mark Zuckerberg has been on a PR around promoting how he’s trying to make advertising an essential part of the GDP and that the commerce and the way that the US makes money and. Where it’s reflected with advertising as a percentage of it is very small now, but he anticipates it to be much bigger and he is investing like triple down into ai.

Lauren: We’ve talked about this and this is just a [00:04:00] further follow up from that conversation of his billions of dollars investment of trying to create an advertising system where you get to remove the friction and the challenges. We’re in an essential space. He says, you tell me what you want. As an outcome and tell me how much you’re willing to pay for it, and then I’m gonna make it happen.

Lauren: And the closest we currently have to that is shop campaigns in Shopify. Right? So that’s exactly what they’ve done, which is amazing. We’ve talked about a lot, like definitely check out the episode with Andres where he goes into it explicitly like it’s my favorite campaign type right now for anyone that has Shopify.

Lauren: But, um, mark Zuckerberg and other AL algorithms and ad networks are trying to replicate this same type of. In that ROI and one of those things that has happened is dynamic creative is deprecating, and what we have now are flexible ads. Flexible ads is one of the newer products within the meta ads ecosystem, [00:05:00] and it’s very similar to dynamic Creative, but it’s essentially trying to, uh, remove a lot more influence, human influence.

Lauren: So that you have stronger performance. And with that, we are sacrificing reporting. ’cause reporting on flexible ads, you don’t have a dynamic creative, dynamic creative. You could see which creative combination yielded the best result for what you were trying to achieve, because then that allows you to get greater insights on what type of new creatives to work.

Lauren: But if you look at the bigger picture of what Mark Zuckerberg’s trying to do by 2030, is that you don’t have to use creative. You can say, here’s my product. Here’s the results I want. Meta, you create the ad, you create the copy, you create the creative, which is where AI is going. Um, but at the same time, like there’s gonna be a need for human led creativity, because that’s gonna stand out in different ways.

Lauren: But like right now, if you’re using flexible ads, you’ve probably noticed. You cannot extract insights of which creative is working. And it stinks. It’s like with P Max, right? Like all of [00:06:00] these new programs that are dialing into better performance, in theory, less work for the advertiser or more specifically the business owner, you’re having to make a sacrifice.

Lauren: And it’s like one of the biggest things, like anyone who’s using flexible ads, creative knows that you’re like, Ugh, F my life, this is not cool. Um, but. The way that, like, you can combat that right now and like most immediate things is like obviously doing like, like brand lifts so that then you can start to see like, is your brand memorable or is it, does it have more favorability things of that.

Lauren: That’s a whole separate issue. The biggest thing though is, um, reporting is deprecating. Um, the influence and creative strategy. Available to you when you don’t have to spend time and energy on some of these things is coming and at your basis is gonna be reliant on the data you put into it. So none of it all matters

Ralph: So that is a long vent, but

Lauren: Ugh,

Ralph: it hasn’t quite happened [00:07:00] yet the way that he’s explaining it. But this has been talked about. I mean, I can’t tell you how many years this has been talked about. It’s like, oh, we just want to be able to, you know, put in the result. I mean, I remember way back in the ad word days when I was running ads in 2000 9, 10, 11.

Ralph: It’s like. Cost per result, cost per targeted result. We’ll get it for you. It was like CPA, like Target, CPA. Like there is still TCPA. There’s still T roas, but I remember when that first came out, it’s like, you let us figure it out, and like there was hints of it. That’s, that’s almost 15 years ago. So it’s been coming like the algorithms and the AI.

Ralph: That was just hyperbole back then, which is a big word to mean, like it was just a bunch of bullshit. Um, but the point is like, it’s so a way to take your money. So I think people are skewed [00:08:00] to think, oh, well Pax is gonna be that performance Max and Google was gonna be the thing. Just throw all the creative in and I don’t have to do anything.

Ralph: And the media buyer now is no longer a consequential part of the equation. Didn’t really turn out that way. Performance Max just turned into a, just a big retargeting campaign. Which is fine as a part of your overall strategy, but it’s not the strategy. So I think where this is going, especially with Advantage Plus and this Andro to update, which Google Andromeda News or Andromeda update, there’s nothing out there on this.

Ralph: Like Meta has been super secretive and the reason why we know this maybe a little bit more is ’cause you’ve got contacts inside. We’ve got contacts inside Meta and we’ve been seeing now know. How at all it’s gonna work because of the insider stuff we’re getting, which we’re relaying to you, the perpetual traffic listener.

Ralph: And you know, there’s an episode that we just did this past week and the week [00:09:00] before that was, uh, John Moran talking about this new strategy that we’re using that we’ve kind of yet to unveil. But that was all because of an insider conference that he went to with meta. So because they’re explaining it there, but they’re not releasing this to the rest of the world.

Ralph: And this sounds like a big conspiracy theory. Like, oh yeah, you guys have gone down this road before, but I, this time I would’ve to say like, it is serious. Like they are going that way. Where, where Zuck wants to take it is not like gonna happen this year. However, it is, it is,

Lauren: No, no, no.

Ralph: But like we’ve talked about before, the investment that they’re putting into ai.

Ralph: In these, you know, these data centers throughout the us like we’ve said it before on the show, $65 billion in investment in 25. In 25. That is a, that is a boatload of money. Like that is incredible amount of money. And the only reason why he’s doing is because [00:10:00] it’s serves the purpose of ads. That’s how they make their money still.

Lauren: Well. Did you, uh, Ralph, did you see, like you say, six five billion’s a lot? Do you know about the $940 billion state funded investment in Saudi Arabia? With so much of it being led by the princes to go into AI and creating those data servers like this isn’t going away, but it’s not the like Terminator Matrix future, at least.

Lauren: For me, like there’s adaptability. There’ve been systems that have existed. You just talked about like ads network back when, um, of how that was where it is. Like it’s, we can see what’s coming, not because there’s a crystal ball or not exclusively because of the conversations and access we have, but from the, uh, continued investment in rollout of products that are further.

Lauren: Showcasing like it’s confirmation bias to an [00:11:00] extent. Um, but that this is what’s clearly written out. Like the, the lines are being drawn in the sand. We just don’t know the 3D rendering, but we can see the outline of what’s coming. So the long and short of it is, uh, so today’s episode’s about

Ralph: all this relates

Lauren: it in today

Ralph: the original point is that what is the one truism in all of this that you absolutely must have, must need. It’s great.

Lauren: Yeah, and like there’s like what is great tracking is an ambiguous answer because what is great for some may not be good enough for others, but what, at least my goal is to show you like when we are showing today in the. The screen shares. If you’re watching on YouTube, amazing. If you’re not, I’d recommend you jump over to YouTube, ’cause I’m gonna

Ralph: Ah.

Lauren: behind the scenes and

Ralph: Lifting the

Lauren: and show you the Mongos Media ad

Ralph: like worth

Lauren: is the worst,[00:12:00]

Ralph: Yeah.

Lauren: version.

Lauren: Oh gosh. Oh, if nothing else. To see how uncomfortable I am to show that like, oh. We’ve done this for so many of our clients, but we’ve not taught, treated ourselves like a client. So this is my promise to everyone who’s listening. If you jump in on the YouTube channel, like I will show you

Ralph: And we see this.

Lauren: ad accounts look

Ralph: Yeah, we see this all the time. So

Lauren: all the time

Ralph: traffic.com/youtube. You used a, as you’re getting your screen share ready here. You used a different analogy, which was a little bit more, you know, R-rated said you were, you know, not under the hood. You said you were lifting your top off.

Ralph: Yeah.

Lauren: Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Tops off. Hits out.

Ralph: Alright, so let’s appears to, so like you don’t wanna show this, like, I had to convince Lauren for 45 minutes before recording, like, this is what we need to see. It’s okay to show what’s, how not to do it because [00:13:00] 90, uh, 90 plus percent, uh, will give 10% sort of a state of execution are probably gonna look like this.

Lauren: And the like. Yes. It was an embarrassment to be like, oh my gosh, my, my top

Ralph: let’s get into it. Enough of the buildup.

Lauren: you know, they used to be best friends, now they’re distant cousins and we’re gonna, enough of the buildup. But I, but I’m just trying to say that there’s the. I was listen, like show the damn screen already.

Lauren: But I just wanna say my promise to you, the listener, is we’ll do a follow up where I’ll have like, I’ll be like, look, now that we’ve installed capi, and then now that this is the event match quality, so this is gonna be a three parter series where I’m showing you what you probably have and understanding a little bit of a walkthrough and then going in through it so you can be like, okay, cool.

Lauren: This is what you actually want, not just

Ralph: So this is a three parts there. I didn’t mention this to begin with, but this is part of a three part series of what not to do, [00:14:00] what to do, and then the end result of like how to do it the right way. So we’re gonna do this over the course of the next couple of weeks. Uh, so this is step, this is step one.

Ralph: So if you’re walking.

Lauren: Well, I would say this is step two. ’cause step one would’ve been you’ve already installed the

Ralph: but don’t you think like everybody who’s listening to this show has already done that? I mean, come on, what? What level of listener do you

Lauren: You know, I look, I just wanna, lemme validate and compliment everyone who’s

Ralph: You’ve already installed the damn pixel. Like, geez, if you haven’t done that, I don’t know. Go back to episode two of. So insult our listeners. We’ve just lost half our listeners there anyway. So here we are. Getting to the point.

Lauren: Step two for, for all of you guys who are already installed the pixel, right? So this is where like I’m inside data sources. So we’re in the events manager. So if you’re in their business, not facebook.com, if you’re not [00:15:00] watching Fall along this way. Um, and there’s on your left hand side an octopus, like a three legged

Ralph: Way over on the left, left, left part, kind of on with your like, what do they call that? The dock on a Mac? It’s like way over there. So they go to the octopus. I bet a lot of people have never even clicked on that icon anyway, but people who listen to this show, I’m sure they have. I mean, come on. Anyway, so continue.

Lauren: Because we’ve shown you on other episodes, but um, what, I’m not gonna go through all of the data sources because your partner integrations your custom conversions. The overview of that, we’re specifically talking about data sources, which is our triangle. And then you’ll see that I have three of the five pixels set up.

Lauren: I don’t even have all of ’em. Like this is where it’s like not to do, right? You have five different types of pixels. I believe we’ve talked about it on past episodes. Um, but here I’m gonna show you specifically the website Pixel and why. This screen matters as like, here is your [00:16:00] foundational place to start, and then at the end of this like multi-part series is gonna be like, okay, cool.

Lauren: This is how you’ll be able to compete in a space where in a few years from now, other agencies that can’t do this will be wiped off near T.

Ralph: yeah. Let’s see. Suckers. All right, so what are we looking at here? over@perpetualtraffic.com slash YouTube. We’re looking at data sources. We’re looking at event activity. I, I vaguely recall looking at these. Yep.

Lauren: So this is dataset. Anyone that like is like, what is dataset? This is Pixel. They changed that name like a year ago. But now in settings you’ll see it’s dataset and pixels. But when someone’s like, Hey, what is your, your pixel? So anyone that sees this now, you can see what might pixel is. That’s what you add as your base code.

Lauren: So anyone that’s ever installing a pixel on your website, you need to use the base code, which is templated, and

Ralph: which used to be the pixel id, but now it’s called

Lauren: and that should be on. correct. And that dataset ID that needs to be on every single page of your [00:17:00] website, every single page of your website needs that base code so that then you can have

Ralph: 1 0 1, by the way. But anyway, I’m, I’m glad you’re reiterating the basics here. ’cause it all starts with the.

Lauren: Yes. Yeah, yeah. You know, well, I say that because I’ve met people that are like, well, I don’t put the pixel on like my blog pages or on my privacy policy pages. I’m like, you need your pixel on every page of your website. Now you can have standard events where if it’s like, hold on, I’m gonna see if I can open up the developer’s page.

Lauren: So just on this one, it’s developers.facebook.com/docs/megapixel/reference. And then this gives you standard events. These are. Like a few extra lines of code that you can add to your pages, right? So if you’re installing the base code pixel, you might be putting in the header or like next level is you’re using a Google tag manager and putting inside of a container so that it’s not like [00:18:00] damaging your load speed,

Ralph: That would be the preferred method. By the way, just interjecting here, just so you don’t have page load

Lauren: Yes.

Ralph: So we’ll leave links in the show notes for all these resources. By the way, just FYI, in case you’re listening and not watching.

Lauren: Perfect. Um, so in that you have your base pixel everywhere and then you ideally are putting those standard events on my screen. You can see event activity that goes over the dataset. You can see that there’s a website and it’s showing you, uh, more than one website, link.dagal.com is showing up there. But that’s just because that’s our high level white label version.

Lauren: So that’s an approved allowed website that I have given. Credibility to sending

Ralph: Makes sense.

Lauren: Um, and then, okay, cool. Underneath what you can see is page view. You have schedule, you have view content, contact, submit application, complete registration, lead subscribe. All of these are standard events that we’ve put on specific pages.[00:19:00]

Lauren: You have your base pixel and then you add a few extra lines of code.

Ralph: there’s standard events, 16, 17, I forget now off. But anyway, the point is, is like you could actually amend those, you can append them and create custom events, which is a whole other thing. But the point is, is that these are the events that you’re giving. Like those are the standard events like purchase lead

Lauren: Yeah, I’m gonna read them off ’cause we’ve done another episode on this, but it’s like add payment info, add occur, add a wishlist, complete registration, contact, donate, customize product, find location, initiate checkout, lead, purchase schedule, search, start trial, submit applications, subscribe, view content.

Lauren: Those are the standard events. If any of those sound like, oh my gosh, we have applications on my website, why are you not doing a submit application? Well, cool. Glad you’re listening because these are like things that can enhance the data you’re sending back into it because these are a hierarchy of destinations that the [00:20:00] people browsing your website may end up on.

Lauren: That gives you enhanced information back into meta ads for you to

Ralph: there’s a, there’s an indication of intent in each one of these to. Degrees based upon what your business is.

Lauren: Start trial, submitting application, donate anyone who’s got a nonprofit in any capacity. If you don’t have donate, like why? But then there’s like the next level, which I’m just gonna share, like it’s object properties, which then you can enhance that JavaScript even further by adding in this type of information.

Lauren: So with the submit application or the complete registration piece, we have a status section. So that we have inside Mongoose Media a status of open, started, enhanced, completed, so that you can have more signals back into both your algorithm and into your reporting. That provides, like you said, contextual relevance on their indication or [00:21:00] predictability of becoming a customer and a purchaser back over into the events manager. What we’ve got is like, so this one you can see that there’s different, um, icons that are next to the various pages. So lead, complete registration, contact, view, content, all of these things. View content is the extra code that you wanna put on your most important pages.

Lauren: If it’s a page you want someone to look at, you have you content. This is your landing pages, these are your product pages. These are key pillar blog pages, right? Your page view is on everything. Your view content are on the pages that matter.

Ralph: So there’s a hierarchy there based upon

Lauren: so

Ralph: View content is typically is like view

Lauren: And you can even see like

Ralph: always sort of think of it as that. That’s the product page. View content might be like your homepage, for example. Yeah.[00:22:00]

Lauren: Yeah, sure. Your contact us page can have the contact one on it, like, and view contact, like there’s, you’re not limited to having only one. Now there can be an argument of like, is it competing standard events, all that jazz, like then you can go, that’s where Great has such a large spectrum, but um. Those things are, you know, that’s step three.

Lauren: Step one. You have your page beyond everything, uh, installed on the website. And then step two is you’re adding in standard events on key pages that are relevant to the standard event

Ralph: All you’re really trying to do here is tell meta what’s important and what’s not on your site.

Lauren: Exactly,

Ralph: And then you, when you start running the ads, then you optimize for those events specifically, and or you can get even more granular, which we’ll talk about in more shows. But the point is, is like this at a base level is, say it’s the first [00:23:00] step.

Ralph: It really is the second step, like you said before. So placing the pixel is the first thing, or placing the, whatever it is, the data set

Lauren: Data set.

Lauren: Um, and on this, like, it’s not just a a, like, if we think about this in a future aspect, right? We, you can use it to optimize for in your ads, especially if you’re in like health and wellness, financial, political. You guys are very restricted of what you can do in terms of tracking for standard events and conversion events.

Lauren: But you can still have this data in there. And where Mark Zuckerberg’s plan is if you just have that data there, the algorithms are smart enough to know that, hey, someone may have view, had 400 page views on your website, which if you don’t have other standard events, may think this is a high quality person, but you might have someone that’s had four page views and they’ve gotten view content and they’ve gotten contact and they’ve hit standard

Ralph: Maybe an add to cart, you know,

Lauren: [00:24:00] their interest with you as a brand.

Lauren: Exactly that. Those matter. So if you don’t signal that they’re gonna use page’s counting. And what if it’s like a lawyer who’s checking your privacy policy nonstop to see like a I got you kind of situation.

Ralph: All right, so the next step of this is, do you wanna show EMQ scores or is that okay?

Lauren: Okay, good question. So the EMQ that Ralph is referring to is event match quality. So that’s to the, uh, right or left of pen, like you can you see on the screen. I’m just toggling them between. Um, but your event match quality, this is what you only get. You can only have an EMQ if you have CAPI installed. If you do not have server side data setting back in, you don’t know.

Lauren: The fact of the matter is like if you’re looking under integration, I’ve got multiple and I’ve got browser multiple. When you hover over, it means that you’ve got CAPI conversions, API and browser events. Browser events is equated to pixel dataset only items. On the website, [00:25:00] I am showing you an account that doesn’t have CAPI properly installed.

Lauren: We have not set up our integration with sta. We have not set up the containers correctly. We are purely just on like basic level one. We’ve got the pixel install on the website and we’ve got some standard events in place. We have been redoing so much of our website, so I know that we’ve neglected this. I own it, but I’m showing you how not to do this moving forward because now I’m going to be.

Lauren: Holding myself accountable to you all to show you how to go from this to what we actually want, which will be EMQ scores of

Ralph: Just explain to everyone difference between browser based tracking and CAPI integration just at a base level. You also have a graphic that I sent you earlier, which you could show if you would like,

Lauren: Oh yeah.

Ralph: that explains it in even more.

Lauren: Uh, then I have to open my text messages. That’s, that’s

Ralph: well, you can just double, double click on [00:26:00] the image and then just

Lauren: but,

Ralph: and then just drag it over.

Ralph: Kevin, Kevin, Kevin. Kevin, why don’t you integrate this in like after I say it and then you can just kind of have it appear on the screen. So when I intro it?

Lauren: Yeah. Here, let me, I’ll stop sharing for a hot second.

Ralph: Your screen sharing is work. Kevin, Kevin, Kevin. Just cut this all out. Your screen sharing is working. Yesterday when we were trying to screen share it was cutting out, so we have solved something here, which is good.

Ralph: I’ve got like three minutes left by the way.

Lauren: Okay. Oh, shit. Okay. Okay. Okay. Um,

Lauren: um, I’m like, I can’t, oh, share my.

Ralph: You can double click on it.

Lauren: So, yeah, but when I double click on it, it makes you disappear. So let me do it again. Make this bigger [00:27:00] and then you’ll see yourself. Okay. Screen.

Ralph: Uh, it

Lauren: Oh, was it not sharing my

Ralph: uh, it’s saying there’s an issue.

Lauren: Higher screen.

Ralph: Yep. It.

Lauren: Okay, I’m sharing here. Okay, so

Ralph: Weave this in after my

Lauren: match it in.

Ralph: conversation. All right, so now we’re looking at a visual of what CAPI actually is to answer the question that I just asked. So.

Lauren: Yeah, so Kapi, you can see it’s like data that’s going from the server side, using your APIs connected from whatever your algorithm is to go back into server side, and then what the event matches you have. The user who’s clicking, interacting with your ads, the activity that they’re doing on the website, right.

Lauren: You have your browser side information here, which is your pixel or dataset. So if they’re not, if they have cookies disabled, if they are on like [00:28:00] incognito mode, all of your pixel browser data

Ralph: They’ve opted out of the a TT prompt, for example, for iOS 14 originally. Now iOS, what? 17. Okay, so all of that browser data, which is blocked, those are users that are going to be blocked. Cappy is a solution for that. Using server side tagging, which

Lauren: Mm-hmm.

Ralph: show

Lauren: Yeah. So where you have the stop sign is like you can’t send that data back into the algorithms for optimization. But if you have conversions, APIs, CAPI installed, then that API sends that data back in for stronger

Ralph: And then the event match quality or EMQ score is how well those events actually match each other from what’s happening out in the real world in theory versus what’s being captured by conversions API. And it’s given a score one to 10 and.

Lauren: Mm-hmm. Anything under eight [00:29:00] for your purchase conversions means your cap is not installed correctly. You need to have at least an eight and above for your purchases, and you should have a seven and above for your add to carts. And what you want is a higher EMQ score that shows the browser data that you’re getting, that you’re sending matches the server side.

Lauren: And if you don’t have that match, you need to understand or reconcile with your ad performance strategies on that, because what you want is that the data. You have matches with the customers, right? So you should be able to be sending information like name, phone, email, address. You can have enhanced information sent back so you have better matching of who this person’s on your website and the like.

Lauren: Like likelihood of like connecting them to an actual user that then meta can retarget later. That stuff is mission critical if you wanna stop optimizing for mediocrity and going after the people that are taking the conversion decisions you

Ralph: the takeaway here is that that is the way that [00:30:00] you should be doing things. We’re showing you how not to do it, in essence, but at a, yeah, just

Lauren: Yeah, like just having browser. Don’t do Just

Ralph: get blocked or you’re gonna get a lot of data that you’re gonna be missing. Meta will try and make up for it.

Ralph: With modeled data, however, and whether it’s accurate or inaccurate, it’s still modeled data and that’s what a lot of third party tracking solutions do, which is faulty because you’re really, you’re not operating under the guise of an actual click. An actual user CAPI mitigates that to a certain degree, and I think there’s lots of levels past.

Ralph: You know, you can take this to the sort of the nth degree, but at a base level you should have that. So this is an example of what not to do, which is great. Haven’t convinced you to do it. It was like, where’s your e MQ score? I’m like, oh yeah, I forgot. She hasn’t installed CAPA yet.

Lauren: I didn’t have CAPI installed properly, but then we’ll, in the next episode I’ll have CAPI installed. I’ll show you what the data is, you’ll see the event matched score, and then I’m [00:31:00] gonna also show you in the details of how I can, um, investigate different things. Oh, sorry. Before we go, I know like, um, there’s one thing I wanted to show, which is, if you noticed on my screen, um, we have this diagnostic.

Lauren: Situation where it’s because I have an error. So a lot of you like, if nothing else, check to see if this is, this is an active error. And what this says is review domain. That’s sending data, right? It says you recently started sending data from these events. Anyone is listening. Like you have to have to do this because it’s really easy.

Lauren: You guys saw my pixel? You can install it on a website that has like my exact opposite audience. This is a way that people trash. Companies, but what I can do is I’m like, oh, whatever this mr app spot.com is, this is not an approved website, so I’m ignoring it. You can review this solution and it’ll open up into settings and show you what are the allowable domains.

Lauren: If you remember, I showed you that I had Link dot dagal and Mongoose Media as our websites connected. I am not going to allow [00:32:00] this MR. App spot, so I’m just clicking and

Ralph: Somebody you stole your pixel who you didn’t

Lauren: because that’s something I think a

Ralph: that’s a, that’s a good Gotcha right there.

Lauren: Correct. Or they, they mistyped it, right? It’s, it’s a data set.

Lauren: So sometimes like

Ralph: Oh, look at you giving people the benefit of the doubt. Well, aw, isn’t that nice? Uh, well this is great. Well, this is the part, part one of a three part series. Okay. We’re gonna get the second one. So we’re gonna see some results here. At a base level, this is the most important thing that you should be. I hate to say it.

Ralph: And you know, this isn’t the most exciting episode in the world. ’cause we’re talking data. I don’t care because it is so important. Like there is levels of, of complexity above this. But this is a base that you need to have. It’s a base foundation, bedrock. How, how many stupid analogies can I think of? Uh, the point is, is like, do this.

Ralph: Don’t do what Lauren’s doing. [00:33:00] Do it the right way, and we’ll show you step two and three. In previous episodes,

Lauren: Wait, we’re doing it for our clients. I’m just treating

Ralph: flogging herself publicly on perpetual traffic, so. All right. Well anyway, uh, all of this, all the links that we mentioned here, if you don’t know any of this sort of stuff is over@perpetualtraffic.com.

Ralph: Make sure that you do click on those links and wherever you listen to podcasts. Please leave us a rating and or review, gets this podcast out to more marketers like yourself. Learn people or teach people. Kevin, Kevin, Kevin. Teach people the right way to do all this. And also lift up the skirt here to get open the kimono to show what not do.

Lauren: Oh my God. You’re gonna make the episode called like

Ralph: you did. Anyway. Well, on behalf of my amazing cohost, Lauren.

Lauren: who has a top on this entire recording in case anyone was listening

Ralph: I wasn’t the one to say it, but [00:34:00] anyway,

Lauren: we know you do anyways, so

Ralph: cohost.

Lauren: you, Jim.[00:35:00] [00:36:00] [00:37:00] [00:38:00] [00:39:00] [00:40:00] [00:41:00] [00:42:00] [00:43:00] [00:44:00] [00:45:00] [00:46:00] [00:47:00] [00:48:00] [00:49:00] [00:50:00] [00:51:00] [00:52:00] [00:53:00] [00:54:00] [00:55:00] [00:56:00] [00:57:00] [00:58:00] [00:59:00] [01:00:00] [01:01:00] [01:02:00] [01:03:00] [01:04:00] [01:05:00] [01:06:00] [01:07:00] [01:08:00] [01:09:00]

Lauren: Lauren e Petillo, the founder of Mongoose Media.

Lauren: I’m a glutton for compliments. I’m,

Lauren: Hmm. Choose.

Lauren: Yeah. Yeah. Don’t compliment. Be like, oh wow, you’re tall. I’m like, tell me something. I dunno. Tell me how great my shoes look.

Lauren: You know what? I, I don’t filter my compliments. Okay. I, I take them all. I was like, can you see that I am, uh, someone who [01:10:00] needs external validation? Ugh, so embarrassing.

Lauren: Nope.[01:12:00]

Lauren: Yeah. Hey, hey.

Lauren: Fair. Yeah. Um, so high level view, uh, is that, like we spoke recently about the Advantage plus changes, um, mark Zuckerberg has been on a PR around promoting how he’s trying to make advertising an essential part of the GDP and that the commerce and the way that the US makes money and. Where it’s reflected with advertising as a percentage of it is very small now, but he anticipates it to be much bigger and he is investing like triple down into ai.

Lauren: We’ve talked about this and this is just a further follow up from that conversation of his billions of dollars investment of trying to create an advertising system where you get to remove the friction and the [01:13:00] challenges. We’re in an essential space. He says, you tell me what you want. As an outcome and tell me how much you’re willing to pay for it, and then I’m gonna make it happen.

Lauren: But, um, mark Zuckerberg and other AL algorithms and ad networks are trying to replicate this same type of. In that ROI and one of those things that has happened is dynamic creative is deprecating, and what we have now are flexible ads. Flexible ads is one of the newer products within the meta ads ecosystem, and it’s very similar to dynamic Creative, but it’s essentially trying to, uh, remove a lot more influence, human influence.

Lauren: So that you have [01:14:00] stronger performance. And with that, we are sacrificing reporting. ’cause reporting on flexible ads, you don’t have a dynamic creative, dynamic creative. You could see which creative combination yielded the best result for what you were trying to achieve, because then that allows you to get greater insights on what type of new creatives to work.

Lauren: But like right now, if you’re using flexible ads, you’ve probably noticed. You cannot extract insights of which creative is working. And it stinks. It’s like with P Max, right? Like all of these new programs that are dialing into better performance, in theory, less work for the advertiser or more specifically the business owner, [01:15:00] you’re having to make a sacrifice.

Lauren: Sorry, that was a long vent. Ugh,

Lauren: no.[01:16:00]

Lauren: Hmm.[01:17:00]

Lauren: Yeah.

Lauren: Hmm.

Lauren: Hmm.[01:18:00]

Lauren: No, no, no. It takes time.

Lauren: Well. Did you, uh, Ralph, [01:19:00] did you see, like you say, six five billion’s a lot? Do you know about the $940 billion state funded investment in Saudi Arabia? With so much of it being led by the princes to go into AI and creating those data servers like this isn’t going away, but it’s not the like Terminator Matrix future, at least.

Lauren: Showcasing like it’s confirmation bias to an extent. Um, but that this is what’s clearly written out. Like the, the lines are being drawn in the sand. We just don’t know the 3D rendering, but we can see the [01:20:00] outline of what’s coming. So the long and short of it is, uh, so today’s episode’s about tracking, so you can see how to do it in today space.

Lauren: Yeah.

Lauren: Oh gosh. Oh, if nothing else. To see how uncomfortable I am to show that like, oh. We’ve done this for so many of our [01:21:00] clients, but we’ve not taught, treated ourselves like a client. So this is my promise to everyone who’s listening. If you jump in on the YouTube channel, like I will show you what most ad accounts look like and we’re gonna walk through it all the time when we audit.

Lauren: Yeah.

Lauren: Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Tops off. Hits out. Here’s the data, like it’s piercing into my soul right now, but I like.

Lauren: Yeah.[01:22:00]

Lauren: And the like. Yes. It was an embarrassment to be like, oh my gosh, my, my top is off, but like, whatever, you know, they used to be best friends, now they’re distant cousins and we’re gonna, enough of the buildup. But I, but I’m just trying to say that there’s the. I was listen, like show the damn screen already.

Lauren: This is what you actually want, not just what’s happening. You know what I mean?[01:23:00]

Lauren: Well, I would say this is step two. ’cause step one would’ve been you’ve already installed the megapixel on your website.

Lauren: You know, I look, I just wanna, lemme validate and compliment everyone who’s listening to know that you already installed the Pixel. So, good job. You Yes.

Lauren: So this is, this is step two. Step two for, for all of you guys who are already installed the pixel, right? So this is where like I’m inside data sources. So we’re in the events manager. So if you’re in their business, not facebook.com, if you’re not watching Fall along this way. Um, and there’s on your left hand side an octopus, like a three legged octopus icon that is our data sources and what we’re gonna be showing.[01:24:00]

Lauren: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Lauren: For.

Lauren: I don’t even have all of ’em. Like this is where it’s like not to do, right? You have five different types of pixels. I believe we’ve talked about it on past episodes. Um, but here I’m gonna show you specifically the website Pixel and why. This screen matters as like, here is your foundational place to start, and then at the end of this like multi-part series is gonna be like, okay, cool.

Lauren: This is how you’ll be able to compete in a space where in a few years from now, [01:25:00] other agencies that can’t do this will be wiped off near T. So suckers.

Lauren: Yep. Exactly. So this is dataset. Anyone that like is like, what is dataset? This is Pixel. They changed that name like a year ago. But now in settings you’ll see it’s dataset and pixels. But when someone’s like, Hey, what is your, your pixel? So anyone that sees this now, you can see what might pixel is. That’s what you add as your base code.

Lauren: So anyone that’s ever installing a pixel on your website, you need to use the base code, which is templated, and then you insert your specific dataset id and that should be on. Correct, correct. And that dataset ID that needs to be on every single page of your website, every single page of your website needs that base code so that then you can have a page view.[01:26:00]

Lauren: Yes. Oh, [01:27:00] for sure.

Lauren: So that’s an approved allowed website that I have given. Credibility to sending pixel events for. Um, and then, okay, cool. Underneath what you can see is page view. You have schedule, you have view content, contact, submit application, complete registration, lead subscribe. All of these are standard events that we’ve put on specific pages.

Lauren: You have your base pixel and then you add a few extra lines of code.[01:28:00]

Lauren: Uh, a butt load.

Lauren: That gives you enhanced information back into meta ads for you to have enhanced optimization opportunities.[01:29:00]

Lauren: Yes.

Lauren: back over into the events manager. [01:30:00] What we’ve got is like, so this one you can see that there’s different, um, icons that are next to the various pages. So lead, complete registration, contact, view, content, all of these things. View content is the extra code that you wanna put on your most important pages.

Lauren: Yeah, sure. Your contact us page can have the contact one on it, like, and view contact, like there’s, you’re not limited to having only one. Now [01:31:00] there can be an argument of like, is it competing standard events, all that jazz, like then you can go, that’s where Great has such a large spectrum, but um. Those things are, you know, that’s step three.

Lauren: Step one. You have your page beyond everything, uh, installed on the website. And then step two is you’re adding in standard events on key pages that are relevant to the standard event you’ve added to it.

Lauren: Exactly, yes.

Lauren: [01:32:00] Data set.

Lauren: Exactly that. Those matter. So if you don’t signal that they’re gonna use page’s counting. And what if it’s like a lawyer who’s checking your [01:33:00] privacy policy nonstop to see like a I got you kind of situation. That’s not what you want.

Lauren: The fact of the matter is like if you’re looking under integration, I’ve got multiple and I’ve got browser multiple. When you hover over, it means that you’ve got CAPI conversions, API and browser events. Browser events is equated to pixel dataset only items. On the website, I am showing you an account that doesn’t have CAPI properly installed.

Lauren: We have not set up our integration with sta. We have not set up the containers [01:34:00] correctly. We are purely just on like basic level one. We’ve got the pixel install on the website and we’ve got some standard events in place. We have been redoing so much of our website, so I know that we’ve neglected this. I own it, but I’m showing you how not to do this moving forward because now I’m going to be.

Lauren: Holding myself accountable to you all to show you how to go from this to what we actually want, which will be EMQ scores of mesh qualities of eight and above.

Lauren: Yeah.

Lauren: Oh yeah. Uh, then I have to open my text messages. That’s, that’s lifting up my skirt. I don’t know if I wanna share my skirt side, but, um,

Lauren: okay. Fair. Okay.[01:35:00]

Lauren: Yeah. Here, let me, I’ll stop sharing for a hot second.

Lauren: Uh.

Lauren: Okay. Oh, shit. Okay. Okay. Okay. Um,

Lauren: um, I’m like, I can’t, oh, share my. So, yeah, but when I double click on it, it makes you disappear. So let me do it again. Make this bigger and then you’ll see yourself. Okay. Screen. Oh, was it not sharing my screen?[01:36:00]

Lauren: Higher screen. Okay, I’m sharing here. Okay, so now, so Kevin, you match it in.

Lauren: You have your browser side information here, which is your pixel or dataset. So if they’re not, if they have cookies disabled, if they are on like incognito mode, all of your pixel browser data is obsolete.

Lauren: Yeah. [01:37:00] Mm-hmm. And then, yes.

Lauren: Mm-hmm.

Lauren: Yes, you’ll have a score.

Lauren: Mm-hmm. Anything under eight for your purchase conversions means your cap is not installed correctly. You need to have at least an eight and above for your purchases, and you should have a seven and [01:38:00] above for your add to carts. And what you want is a higher EMQ score that shows the browser data that you’re getting, that you’re sending matches the server side.

Lauren: Yeah, like just having browser. Don’t do Just browser.[01:39:00]

Lauren: Yeah.

Lauren: I didn’t have CAPI installed properly, but then we’ll, in the next episode I’ll have CAPI installed. I’ll show you what the data is, you’ll see the event matched score, and then I’m gonna also show you in the details of how I can, um, investigate different things. Oh, sorry. Before we go, I know like, um, there’s one thing I wanted to show, which is, if you noticed [01:40:00] on my screen, um, we have this diagnostic.

Lauren: If you remember, I showed you that I had Link dot dagal and Mongoose Media as our websites connected. I am not going to allow this MR. App spot, so I’m just clicking and ignoring. I just wanna share that because that’s something I think a lot of people neglect. Correct. Or they, they [01:41:00] mistyped it, right? It’s, it’s a data set.

Lauren: So sometimes like people type the wrong number

Lauren: probably.

Lauren: Oh yeah.

Lauren: Wait, we’re doing it for our clients. I’m just treating myself like a client for the first time and being like, [01:42:00] Hey.

Lauren: Oh my God. You’re gonna make the episode called like Lauren got topless with her Meta Ads manager

Lauren: who has a top on this entire recording in case anyone was listening and had any misunderstandings, which we know you do anyways, so[01:43:00]

Lauren: you, Jim.

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