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The Beginner's Guide to Meta Ads for Web2App Campaigns (Part 1/2)

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The bottom line

Run web2app Meta campaigns by sending every event from the web funnel, in both browser and server, and optimizing on the standard purchase event. Meta's algorithm learns best from clean, rich, standard data, so better tracking means better spend.

Key takeaways

  • Heavy drop-off in a web funnel is normal, so judge it against benchmarks. 4:21
    • About 50% leave on the first screen, and only 20 to 30% reach the end of the quiz.
    • On the paywall 4 to 8% buy (sometimes 10 to 12%), which gives about 2% from visitor to purchase.
  • All events must be sent from the funnel, never from the mobile app. 6:48
    • After purchase, a deferred deep link (Adjust, AppsFlyer, Branch) passes the web user ID into the app, and RevenueCat syncs the subscription.
    • Put UTM tags on the ad link, because more tags give performance detail down to the creative level.
  • Optimize campaigns on standard Meta events, mainly purchase. 9:18
    • Meta has billions of standard events and knows what users do before a purchase, so its algorithm works better on them.
    • Only one or two of about 60 to 70 clients chose a custom event, and purchase has far more volume than subscribe or start trial.
  • Send events from both the browser pixel and the server Conversion API. 11:15
    • Ad blockers, private relay and some VPNs can block the pixel, so some events never reach Meta.
    • Browser events arrive faster, so the two channels work best together.
  • Deduplicate and enrich every event so Meta counts and matches it correctly. 12:34
    • Send the same event ID, FBP and FBC from browser and server, or Meta counts two purchases and misallocates budget.
    • Add email, name, location and external user ID. An Apple Pay payment can supply a name the quiz never asked for.

So the algorithm will be way more better when you optimize onto standard events.

Igor Lyubimov, web2wave

Chapter summaries

0:00 Why web2app runs on Meta

Meta is the main traffic source for web funnels, and the right setup depends on budget size.

  • Meta ads bring 80 to 90% of web funnel traffic. 1:55
    • Setup changes at each budget level. The first few thousand dollars differ from 50k or 100k a month.
    • This guide covers first steps only. Someone already spending 100k a month knows the rest.
    • Meta settings are most of what a new advertiser has to get right.
  • Web2app is a growing market, not a passing hype. 3:16
    • It has been happening for years.
    • The estimate is 5 to 10 billion dollars a year of revenue through these funnels, for mobile apps and similar subscription businesses.
    • The signs are client demand, conference talks and YouTube content.

4:10 Funnel metrics and the traffic flow

Return on ad spend is the main metric, and the funnel steps are proxies for it.

  • Funnel step rates are proxy metrics, and post-purchase usage matters too. 4:10
    • A first-screen drop of one in two is like sending paid traffic to an app store page.
    • Of 1,000 visitors, about 500 pass the first screen and 200 to 300 finish the quiz.
    • Buyers who never open the product are far more likely to ask for a refund or file a chargeback.
  • The ad link points to the quiz, and UTM tags are saved there. 6:14
    • Ads can run on Meta, TikTok or Google, landing on web2wave or a hand-coded quiz.
    • Many new clients wrongly want to send purchase events from the app.
    • In Meta you build the campaign and ad set, paste the tagged link into the ad, then choose the optimization event.

8:48 Choosing the optimization event

Custom events work only as side metrics, and one campaign per standard event keeps the optimization clean.

  • Custom events serve as proxy metrics, not as the optimization target. 9:50
    • A custom event can be named freely.
    • It must be approved in the pixel source settings.
    • Purchase is the richest event because it happens on e-commerce sites, mobile apps and subscription sites.
    • Several campaigns can run at once, each optimizing for a different event.

10:35 Installing the pixel and server API

Setup is one dataset, one script and one access token, and the server side is easy to build.

  • The pixel sends quiz events from the browser, and the server sends the same events to the Conversion API. 12:05
    • Meta now calls the pixel a dataset in Events Manager.
    • The script goes on every page.
    • The access token authorizes server events.
    • The back end catches the event and forwards it in any programming language.

12:56 Testing and deduplicating events

Real-time sending, a test extension and one unique ID per event keep the data trustworthy.

  • Meta Pixel Helper shows exactly which events and properties were sent. 13:04
    • It is a Chrome extension.
    • Similar extensions exist for TikTok and Snapchat.
    • Clients often ask how to confirm their events fire.
    • Automatic advanced matching should be on when setting up campaigns.
  • The FBC comes from the click ID Meta appends to the ad link. 14:01
    • The fbclid is a unique identifier for each click.
    • It attributes the user to a specific campaign.
    • An event ID can join the subscription ID or user ID with the event name, such as purchase.

15:09 Enriching events for matching

The more user detail each event carries, the better Meta matches it.

  • Every event should carry required fields plus as much user and order data as possible. 15:20
    • Required: event ID, event time, FBC, FBP and the event URL.
    • Add country, city, state and zip, taken from the IP address.
    • Also send gender, order line item and subscription ID.
    • Currency and amount can go on initiate checkout and payment info, before the payment happens.

In the growth library

Steve P. Young and Igor Lyubimov, Steve is founder of App Masters; Igor is CEO and founder of web2wave, a web-to-app funnel builder. A beginner's guide to the technical setup of Meta ads for web-to-app funnels: which events to optimize on, how to send them from pixel and server, and what funnel conversion rates to expect. The payoff is a clear benchmark chain (about 2% visitor to purchase) and a tracking setup that avoids double-counted events and weak optimization.

Lessons that draw on this:

More from App Masters · The whole library, and ask it anything

Transcript363 lines
0:00

Coming up, we're going to break down the beginners's guide to running meta campaigns for your web to app campaigns. We're going to talk about campaign structure, creative testing, the events that you should be targeting whether you're starting off or you're starting to scale. And if you're feeling a little bit bad about the performance of your web to app campaigns, well, we'll give you the numbers you should be aiming for. All that and so much more.

0:39

What is up app nation? It is Steve P. Young, founder of appmasters.com. And in this video, we're going to break down how to optimally run your meta campaigns for your web 2 app funnels. And if you're not considering web appunnels, you really got to check it out because I think it is definitely the future and of the biggest apps are using web to appunnels to increase their revenues. And I brought on my friend and expert at web2atfunnels, Igor from web2wave.com to break it all down for us today.

1:13

Eigor, welcome back to the show. >> Hi Steve. Hi everyone. Yeah, Steve, thank you for inviting. Always happy to be here and share share some knowledge and help others to build web funnels. Um, >> you I'm extremely excited because we are working with one of our clients on user acquisition for a web to app and they are using web to wave and so this is very timely and I'm excited to learn from you today. So without further take it over my friend.

1:41

>> Yeah. Okay. So today I'm going to tell you about the user acquisition for web to app. Uh the first thing to like to to know is mostly like I'd say 80 to 90% of the traffic that we get uh to our web funnels is coming from meta ads. So we will talk a lot of um meta things that you have to consider when launching campaigns there. And another um thing that you have to know that when you do user acquisition, it became different on every level of the of the budget that you have. So when you launch um ads for first few thousands, it's different than when you launch for like 50k a month or 100k a month. So today we will be talking about how you do the first steps. Like if you know how to do 100k per month, then you probably do not watch this video. You know how to do everything by yourself. So >> they're on island. They're on island right now.

2:51

>> Yeah. Um so yeah, let's start. So I'm founder of web towave. We are web to app funnels builder. So you can go to us and create your quizzes, on boardings, pay walls by yourself, connect it to external systems and uh easily um easily launch your funnels. If you talk about the market, it is growing. It's like very hot topic. We see it from from everywhere from the clients that are coming to us from the uh content that uh the we see on the conferences or on YouTube. So like everyone is talking about that and it's not just the hype.

3:32

It's not new thing. I would say it happened for like years and there are already we we estimate the market to be like from 5 to 10 billions a year of the revenue that is going through web to app funnels for uh mobile applications and similar subscription uh subscription businesses. So it is growing. When we talk about the um conversions or in the funnel, they can be different uh from project to project, from niche to niche. And you always have to focus on return on ad spend. This is like the main metric, but there are some proxy metrics in the in the middle of your funnel that you have to focus on. So you will lose around 50% of users on the first screen. They will drop off after the advertising which is fine. I would say on average uh with the paid traffic you may lose the same amount on the app store when you from the advertisement you send them to the app store or Google play.

4:41

I mean really like one out of two users may drop off on this uh step. Then to the end of the quiz only 20 30% um of users will reach this point. Again it's completely fine. Then on the pay wall from 4 to 8 sometimes 10 12% of users will buy your uh your subscription. Overall visitor to purchase conversion is around 2%. It can be yeah >> can I ask you this? So like let's say a thousand make the math easier a,000 people come into the first page conversion. So let's just say 50%. So that's 500 of that 500 you say 20 to 30% >> notion from of them. So it will be uh like 200 300 will finish the quiz.

5:35

>> Okay. Good. Nice. Okay. Way better. Way better than starting from the 500 number. >> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So the main problem is like to start the quiz when they started it they understand the value and we discussed that in uh in some previous videos so we will not focus here. Um yeah and also another important metric that you have to measure is how many people actually started to use your product after they made a purchase because if they didn't start it then the the chances that they will ask for refund for chargeback are way more high.

6:11

So you have to focus on this part too. So okay some benchmarks then when we do the traffic we at first like we set up the advertisement on meta tik tokav and google whatever source that we have then well in the in our case it is web to wave but let's say it's just some other platform or your vcoded uh quiz and there you do all the UTM um magic to save all this information. You get all the events and you send these events to uh to meta directly from the funnel not from a mobile application and then after the user made a purchase you have to send them to mobile application. Usually with adjust apps flyier branch uh you use deferred deep links and you pass the user ID web user ID or of the user to mobile application and by that they receive their subscription you can get all their answers and synchronized statuses in revenue cat. So the thing here is that all the events are sent not from mobile application. You don't send

7:32

purchase events from mobile application because I have a lot of clients uh who come in the beginning and say that hey we want to send our purchase events from mobile about application because like they kind of didn't understand how it works. You sent all the events from the funnel. So, okay, we decided to set up our uh campaign. At first, what we do? We we get the link where we send the user. So, we send the user to our quiz.

8:04

We highly recommend to add all the UTM sources. It may sound obvious, but still you have to put all the UTM tags and the more the more UTM tags you add, the more detailed information you will have. It's great to have performance on the creative level on the ad level. You get this link, you put it into the meta campaigns about the creatives and the the other stuff. We will talk a little bit later. Now we are talking about like on the technical part of this integration I'd say. So you created your campaign, you created um an ads set and in the ad you put the link then you have to select the event on which you want to optimize your campaigns.

8:52

Um there are two strategies and we will cover them on how um how you can optimize your campaigns but the thing is we highly recommend to use standard meta events. You can create your custom event. You can name it as as you want. Then you go to meta pixel um um source settings and then you can uh approve this event. We do not recommend to optimize campaigns on custom events because um Facebook they when they have standard events they have like billions of these events and they know the purchase event. They know what can be before the purchase event.

9:39

They know the behavior of the user who make these uh purchases. So the algorithm will be way more better when you optimize onto standard events. You may have uh custom events just as a proxy metric but I'd say out of our like 60 70 clients only one or two clients decided to optimize onto some custom event. Uh the main optimization will be purchase. um but we'll discuss it a little bit later. So the purchase event is uh the the most interesting because the purchase happens both on e-commerce sites and mobile applications and subscription sites. So um Facebook has uh way more purchase events than subscribe or start trial.

10:35

Okay, we got the link. Then we put the optimization for our campaigns and we can launch multiple campaigns for multiple multiple events. Then we have to implement our metapixel. So we use metapixel to send events from um from our quiz from our website to uh to Facebook. And there are two ways how we send events. We can send browser events using pixel and then we can have uh conversion API events that are sent through the server. We highly recommend to send both events from browser and from server. This way you will have uh you will feed more data to Facebook because you may have more data on um on the browser side. The events will not be blocked because Facebook pixel can be blocked by ad blocker by private relay by some VPNs because of it's like a tracking software. So if you will decide to send only browser events not all of them may reach the Facebook.

11:50

uh that's why you have to use a conversion API but the there is a browser events are better because they are delivered to Facebook faster. So we recommend um creating a data set now they call data set before they were called pixel in events manager. You get the script you install it on all your pages. You get an access token for server events and their API is relatively simple like it's easy to send these events. You just need to catch it on your um back end or in browser and send it to your server and from your server with any programming language you can send this events to conversion API but you have to do the dead duplication.

12:36

uh if you send the purchase event from browser and then to server and if they will be not properly set up, Facebook will treat them as two events and by that your campaigns wrongly optimize. They will get two times more events and um they will distribute budgets not the right way. Send events in real time. When setting up campaigns, use automatic advanced matching uh and use metapixel helper Chrome extension. We we have this question a lot of from a lot of clients when they want to test the events. They want to be sure that they are sent. Uh >> I love it. Sorry. I was you're like why are you making a face? No, I love it. I didn't even know about this Metapixel helper Chrome extension. I'm about to Google right now.

13:26

>> Well, yeah. you Google it. So yeah and there are pixel extensions for meta for Tik Tok for Snapchat for uploven. So you just install it in chrome and you see the log of all the events with all the properties. It really helps to understand what is uh what is sent. So for the dead duplication so for dead duplication we pass the same parameters usually it's event ID but also FBP and FBC. FBC it's a FB click ID. So when we have this link and when we put this link into Facebook, Facebook adds additional parameter FB click ID FBCL ID where they put basically like unique identifier of the every click that user made and by this click you can then attribute this user to particular campaign on meta and when you send events from browser and server you have to send the same FBC uh to wi with every event every event has to have one event ID so it can be I don't know like concatenated string of subscription ID and uh the event name

14:52

purchase for instance or user ID and uh event name purchase something like that so they have to be different So, Facebook will treat them as a one event and it will merge them and it will treat them just as one event. A really important thing. But also when you send events to uh Facebook to improve the matching you have to provide uh a lot of additional information that you may have for this user. So required uh event ID event time which is simple FBC it's kind of simple you get the FB click ID you save it and like you do some magic around that but it's pretty simple you send the URL where this event happened you get the FBP cookie from Facebook pixel and you send it also in the pixel and from the server but then you have to add additional data at first like external ID meaning the user ID from your system, you have to pass the information about country, city, state, zip code. So, you better get some

16:01

external tool to get this information by the user's IP address. You may save it to your server. You may not save it, but it's way more better to send it uh with the Facebook events. Then, email, first name, last name. For instance, if you do not ask the user their first name or last name, but they paid you with the Apple Pay, for instance, you can get their name from Apple Pay and send this information to uh to Facebook and it will increase the quality of the events that you sent. Also, you can send gender, order line item, subscription ID. So the information about what they actually purchased and obviously you have to send the currency and the amount if this event is about uh making a purchase or related to starting the purchase because like you can send currency and demand for the man event uh at payment info or initiate checkout that happened that happens before uh the payment but still have this

17:13

information. Okay. So we made the technical integration. We got the link. We started to send events from browser and server. Then we have to set up our campaigns.