Facebook’s Conversion API Gateway – What Is It? Should You Consider it?

TL, DR: Facebook has announced a partnership with Amazon, from which they’ve created the Conversion API Gateway. This is a new tool to support the over 8 million small businesses that operate on their platform, and give them access to the uplift that clients have seen using Facebook Conversion API. While a great tool for the small business, it isn’t fit for use for sophisticated organizations, who have a higher regard for data security, are looking year into the future for their infrastructure needs, and want to control and validate every data point they send through to their advertising partners.

Late last month, Facebook announced the launch of the Facebook Conversion API Gateway, a new solution built on top of Amazon that helps companies more easily collect data from their website and pass it on to Facebook’s Conversion API endpoint. It is designed to help improve advertising measurement , through Amazon, and onto Facebook’s Conversion API endpoint. Essentially, this new offering helps save Facebook’s over 8 million small business clients the hassle of having to find and hire a developer to build out the infrastructure and code to connect to the API endpoint. 

While this is a great step forward for small businesses that use Facebook, it won’t be a good fit for your organization if you are a moderate to large spender, have multiple properties and ad accounts, and are looking for support in optimizing, governing, and protecting your client’s data.

At Tealium, we work with organizations around the world to support them in future-proofing their advertising channels, and the ways in which they operate with publishers like Facebook, Google, Twitter, The Trade Desk, Snapchat, and Tiktok. In working through the deployment of hundreds of clients for several Conversion APIs, there are some key questions we pose that you should also ask yourself before considering the Facebook Conversion API Gateway product:

1. Resources: Do you have internal development resources to manage the security around the instance, and to monitor the servers and scale as needed?
2. Uptime Requirements: Are having an uptime guarantee and monitoring important to your organization? What would happen if the instance had downtime or a delay in sending your data through?
3. Security Validation: Do you regularly have to pass new technology and infrastructure through an Infosec review process? 
4. Integration Architecture: Are you planning on using other integrations such as Google, Snapchat, Criteo, Etc. that have similar integrations available? Do you want to have different servers set up to manage each one?
5. Controls: How much control does your security team require of data sent and stored server-side? Do you need to have control down to a data point to ensure that the PII data you may be sending is hashed correctly?

This is a new discussion for many marketers and is reminiscent of the early days of Tag Management, which Tealium knows extremely well. As more of these integrations are created, marketers and IT professionals have to decide how much is too much to try and manage themselves. This is similar to placing a tag into the code of your website–as soon as you have 3 – 4 tags to manage, and start to be waitlisted around other priority projects, it becomes too much to manage yourself, and thus the rise of tag management platforms.

Integrations like the Facebook Conversion API will become commonplace for marketers over the next few quarters. Having a platform that is first to market with these integrations will set you, and your organization, apart as a thought leader that has future-proofed your marketing and technology stack. Tealium knew that this evolution was coming, and that is why we released Tealium EventStream API Hub in 2017 to deal with this challenge, and have become experts in supporting clients with this transition.

Ready to learn more about how Tealium can help future proof-advertising measurement with Facebook? Head over to the resources below or speak with us today to learn how we can help your specific business.

• Tealium + Facebook: Better Together
• [Case Study] Tealium + Facebook Help TUI Future Proof Social Ad Spend
• [Case Study] How Dodo increased conversions by combining Facebook Conversions API and the Facebook pixel with Tealium

Notes and References:

• Facebook number of businesses: https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/30/tech/facebook-ad-business-boycott/index.html
• TUI Case Study: https://tealium.com/resource/case-study/tealium-facebook-tui-future-proof-social-ad-spend/