Facebook Ads: Build a URL Feature

Alright friends, Adam Arkfeld with ParaCore, and when I started this video, I was actually gonna create a video about writing your Facebook ads mobile first and not with the desktop version. And then I was perusing through the editor, just kind of like reminding myself, what I was gonna talk about. And I ran across this little link here that says, build a URL parameter, and I was like, hm, I’ve never seen that. What’s that guy do? And, if you worked in Facebook editor for a while, you know that your URL tracking templates are not dynamic, you have to kind of manually update each one, for every single ad, and so, coordinating that if you’re doing a lot of tracking can be quite difficult and annoying. And so, I was really intrigued to see this little link here that says, build URL parameter and the good news is that it is a dynamic URL generator.

So, I’m actually going to pivot away from the first video, I’m gonna do that after this one, but I wanted to show you this new feature that just popped up, or at least, that I just saw because it’s super helpful in the ads platform. Also gonna hide my screen here because it’s gonna cover it up when I hit this URL parameter deal. Alright, so, when I hit the link, this is what we’re lookin’ at. We have the website URL which is the main URL that the destination URL that the ad goes to, so we’re just, these are brand awareness ads, we’re just sending people to our homepage. And then now, when I click in one of these guys it pulls up these dynamic campaign ad set in ad parameters that you can use just like in AdWords, which is amazing.

So, I was kind of perusing through here, and I was like well, this doesn’t make any sense that I would use a dynamic parameter for like campaign source, right, I was like, this is just Facebook, so what I’m doin’ here is I’m just gonna type in like Facebook, and then campaign medium is PPC, and then, we have campaign name and I’m gonna hit campaign name here, and one thing that’s important to notice is this little icon so this says, name-based URL parameters are set to the names provided for your campaign, or ad set or ad when they are very first published. They’ll use those names as the parameter during the replacement. However, you can still edit those names, the campaign ad or ad set, however the parameter will always refer to the first published name. So that’s really interesting. What that does, is that maintains consistency with your, with your tracking, even if you’re just messing around changing the names in the ad platform. And so, that’s a really important and interesting distinction that, that I’m not really, actually quite sure how I feel about, because I’m wondering how you’ll know what the actual parameter that’s replaced in will be if you’ve just changed the name.

So, I don’t know that yet, but I think that’s very interesting. And then, campaign content, you can do like add name or something along those lines. Now you can also do ID’s, so if I wanted to do the ad ID, that’s also an option, and then you don’t get that little information icon so that’s really cool. So now, you can see that this URL has actually built out down here, and you can see what it looks like. So this is very similar to AdWords and what happens in that platform. And this ad parameter buttons allows you to add custom parameters, so I might do I don’t know what I would do. I’m gonna do color, for whatever reason, because I want to know that this was the green ad. Or, I can do, you now, one of the drop-downs again, right? So, one of these. Let’s just say green. So, I find all of this very fascinating and interesting and I’m happy to see it.

I am gonna speculate that Facebook will probably add more tracking parameters, this is probably just the start because really what you’re looking at currently is campaign ID, ad set and ad IDs, and then campaign name, ad set, and ad names. So you’re looking at IDs and names just for the three kinda major categories of organizing your ads, the campaign ads that it has. So, I just wanted to point that out, show you all what was going on, because that’s a huge, huge, huge update. Ya know, down here is typically what we’ve done UTM campaign branded, source is Facebook, and medium is PPC and that can be super annoying and it also doesn’t like show you the URL the way you want it and it’s just not a great, oh these have question marks not ampersands. Well, that’s the other thing, it’s prone to error. Which is a total bummer. So, you need ampersands after those not question marks. But what it does, is, I mean, that’s like exactly why a feature like this is so good. I mean, I literally built this out and I messed it up, so that’s cool. So, so, now when I look at this one, you have this URL parameter, now it’s just dynamically creating and it will dynamically add it in exactly correctly, ya know question mark there, and then campaign name, I’m just gonna do ad set name, and then ampersand, so there’s just no room for error, which is really cool.

Alright, so that’s the entire, that’s this video. I wanted to just show you guys that new feature. I’m sure it’s gonna roll out more in the future, and I’m gonna start using that stuff. I don’t make errors like I just did, and everybody saw, on my pulic Youtube channel. So, thanks for watching, I’m Adam with ParaCore. Please, like the video as usual, comment if you have any questions, and subscribe to our channel, we’re gonna post a lot more content, just like this. Thanks a lot.