Time to read: 9 minutes

Running paid Facebook ads is a key component of producing a worthwhile online marketing strategy. However, this powerful strategy for driving traffic to your website is only as good as the marketer’s ability to track its performance in Google Analytics. How can you make sure these paid ads are being tracked correctly? Let’s take a look.

Tracking Facebook Ads Correctly

Adding Facebook URL tracking parameters to your Facebook ads allows you to differentiate between organic and paid Facebook traffic in Google Analytics. By doing this, you are able to see analytics for individual Facebook ad campaigns that you run.

How to Add a URL Parameter

To do this, build a tracking URL parameter through Google’s Campaign URL Builder. These URL parameters help you as a marketer, understand the effectiveness of your ads. Simply follow these steps on the Campaign URL Builder form and Facebook to find success!

  1. Type in the website URL
  2. Choose Facebook as your Campaign Source
  3. Choose a Campaign Medium, with “paid” recommended
  4. Give your campaign a unique Campaign Name, potentially incorporating the date
  5. Insert Campaign Terms and Campaign Content (optional)
  6. Click on Generate URL – This will give you a tracking parameter for the URL
    Here is an example:
    “https://www.sixthcitymarketing.com/utm_source=Facebook&utm_medium=Paid&utm_campaign=RemarketingCampaign”
  7. Copy the portion of the URL after the “?” (in Power Editor interface)
  8. Go to the Facebook Ad Page where you build the campaign
  9. Click on the “show advanced” option
  10. Where it says URL parameters, paste the copied URL from Step 7
  11. Save the ad

Now that you have a tracking parameter connected with your Facebook ad, you can track the performance of the ad in Google Analytics.

What Does This Do?

These parameters are highly useful for marketers, as they can:

  • Identify the source of your ad traffic
  • Determine which ads help drive a conversion
  • Show you which ads were not successful, saving you time and money in future efforts

URL parameters are also ideal for ads that link to destinations off of Facebook, such as your website, or to another promoted Facebook post. When you go into Google Analytics, follow these steps:

  1. Go to Reports > Acquisitions > Traffic Acquisition
  2. Navigate toward the top and click where it says “Session primary channel group”
  3. Click it and change to “Session source / medium” or other options like session source, session source/medium, session source platform, or session campaign
  4. You can then search “Facebook” and see all relevant traffic from the platform like so:
paid facebook in GA4

This is important because the big catch with Google Analytics is that if you don’t use tracking parameters, your Facebook traffic will tend to look like organic traffic or possibly social traffic. This could lead to you not being able to note the difference in your paid campaign.

It is important to note that you can add multiple campaigns to this and see multiple Facebook ads that you have run. Then, you have a useful environment for comparing the differences in traffic and conversions. For further details on how to set up goals to track key events (conversions), head over to our informative blog post.

Types of Facebook Ads to Look Into

When selecting the type of Facebook Ad you want to run, aligning your choice with your specific marketing objectives and target audience is very important. Facebook offers a diverse range of ad formats, each designed to achieve different outcomes. Among the most commonly used formats are photo ads, video ads, carousel ads, collection ads, and story ads. Each of these formats serves a unique purpose, such as promoting products, driving engagement, or enhancing brand awareness, making it essential to choose the one that best fits your campaign goals.

By understanding the strengths of each format, you can optimize your ad strategy to effectively reach and engage your desired audience.

  • Image ads – Images are the most common type of Facebook ad. They are simple yet effective as they work to promote sales or specific items. The layout typically uses a single image that is accompanied by a headline and description.
  • Video ads – Video ads are another way to capture an audience. They are run in Facebook News Feeds and stories or might play during a longer Facebook video. Facebook populates statistics like how long someone spends watching your video, which means that you can use that information to inform campaigns moving forward.
  • Carousel ads – Carousels are a way to showcase multiple images or videos in one place. They flip through a series of 3-10 images or videos and are ideal for highlighting different products or brand elements. They are known to be more engaging than a typical static ad and demonstrate higher conversion rates than single-image and video ads (Lebesgue).
  • Collection ads – Collection ads are designed to target mobile users. They feature a cover image or video accompanied by a series of smaller product images. Once users interact with this ad, they are directed to a full-screen, optimized environment within the Facebook app to view products, explore information in detail, and make a purchase.
  • Story ads – These are full-screen ads that occur in Facebook stories. They are designed to be engaging and are best for encouraging people to reach out for your service or purchase your product.

Quick Win Paid Marketing Tips

If you are just getting started with online advertising or looking for ways to revamp a struggling campaign, here are a few things to consider:

  • Are you running ads on weekends? Be sure to check your data and see if you are getting conversions during those times. If not, you can save some budget by only running them during the week. It can go the opposite way as well!
  • Are your ads running at all times of the day? Given that most people are asleep from 12 a.m. to 6 a.m., make sure you aren’t wasting your money keeping ads running during this period, unless there is a good reason.
  • Where are you targeting? Sometimes, when you go too broad or too specific, you can be targeting the wrong audience based on location alone. It might be a good experiment to segment your campaigns based on location to see which performs the best.
  • What metrics are you having your audience meet? Whether it’s remarketing, based on interest, or more, if you compare your data a couple of months out, it could show you that your current audience isn’t bringing the best quality leads.

Facts and Stats to Know About Paid Facebook Ads and Audiences

Facebook Audience Stats

  • 91% of organizations use Facebook for marketing and engagement (Cropink)
  • The average Facebook user clicks on 12 ads per month (Cropink)
  • Videos are a great way to capture user attention, as there are around 3.5 billion reels shared daily (Sprout Social)
  • In the United States, 51.48% of the population (or around 193.5 million Americans) have a Facebook account (Cropink)
  • In Q4 of 2024, there were 3 billion active users on Facebook, making it the most-used social media platform worldwide (Sprout Social)
  • Moms in the United States spend 2.3x more time on Facebook than they do on TikTok (Sprout Social)
  • Only 2.6% of users access Facebook through laptops or desktop computers, meaning that the majority of people access Facebook through a mobile device (Keywords Everywhere)

Ad Stats

  • In 2024, Facebook ad revenue hit $164.5 billion (the previous year it was at $134 billion) (Sprout Social)
  • The average CPC for traffic campaigns is around $0.77 (WordStream)
  • The average click-through rate across all industries is 0.9% (WordStream)
  • Facebook is the third most visited website (falling behind Google and YouTube) in 2025 (Sprout Social)
  • Cost per lead on Facebook ads is the most expensive among businesses in the legal services industry at $78.26 and cheapest for organizations in real estate at $12.43 (Wordstream)
  • Mobile ad placements perform 45% better than desktop placements
  • The most effective CTA, “Learn More,” increases click-through rate by 22.5%  (Keywords Everywhere)
  • 67.55% of Facebook advertisers say that video is the most popular type of media and drives the most clicks on the platform (Databox)
  • 29% of marketers claim use of Facebook resulted in the biggest ROI for their organization, more than any other social media platform (Hubspot)

Achieve Paid Facebook Ad Success in Your Industry

So which industries see the most success when working with Facebook ads?

In terms of conversion rate, the average is around 9.21% across all industries. Which businesses are bringing this number up and dragging it down? Taking a look at things, we found that fitness studios have the highest conversion rate from Facebook ads, averaging around 14.29%. According to WordStream, industries that see a high conversion rate include:

  • Education (13.58%)
  • Employment/job training (11.73%)
  • Healthcare (11%)
  • Real estate (10.68%)
  • B2B (10.63%)

Industries like retail (3.26%), hospitality/travel (2.82%), and technology (2.31%) tend not to perform as well (Wordstream). This is not to say that you won’t see success when using Facebook ads, but the click-through rate tends to be a little lower than that of other industries.

Need Help with Facebook Advertising?

We have experience helping a variety of business types, including colleges, home services, entertainment, and more, to reach their goals by running creative and tailored ads through Facebook.

Our team would be happy to talk with you about what you are looking to accomplish through pay-per-click marketing and how we can provide expertise to help.

Want to Learn More?

We hope this overview can help you find success in running your Facebook ad campaigns. For more information, check out Facebook Business to further your insights on implementing successful Facebook ad campaigns.

In the meantime, here are some other helpful blog posts about Facebook, PPC, and more:

Stay in the Know on All Things Digital Marketing

And as always, reach out to your favorite digital marketing specialists here at Sixth City Marketing if you have any questions. Also, be sure to sign up for our email newsletter to get helpful posts like this delivered straight to your inbox.

This post was originally published in January 2018 and has been updated to reflect changes to Google Analytics.

About the Author

John Sammon

John Sammon is the CEO and founder of Sixth City Marketing. For the past 15 years since starting the company, he has helped create winning SEO, PPC, and website design strategies for a wide variety of industries. His marketing expertise has also been featured in many notable publications such as Forbes, Entrepreneur, and CBS News.