Using tracker redirect links with Facebook ads - yay or nay? (custom domain ONLY) (23)

Yo!

(NOTE: this discussion is NOT about using the default domain name of the cloud tracker vs our own custom domain. Custom domain is implied here with everything on the same root domains those varying subdomains might be used...so everything is under the same root domain that we own for redirects. Just wanna be clear on that )

So I'm getting setup with a new cloud tracker and they are adamant about using redirectless tracking with Facebook ads. They say "don't use any redirects on FB or you will be banned!" type of philosophy. I also searched Google and saw a few other trackers saying the exact same thing in their KB docs. While this is safer, it also could be overkill for how things really work.

It's my first time using a tracker with FB ads, and believe me when I tell you I know about getting banned by FB for "circumventing systems". I'm already sensitive to this issue.

I've also been told by another super affiliate that this is NOT the case for him, or others that spend a fair amount on FB. He spent just over $3 million last year on ads, and claims that redirects are fine under our own custom domains, and he knows other affiliates that say the same...redirect trackers are fine if you do it with our own domains.

(FOR TLDR FOLKS: right now you can skip to the bottom "THE MAIN QUESTION", over the explanation following, if you don't want to read about my recent little test on this)

In fact, I was using a self-hosted tracker last month (switching over, long story) and I was getting banned multiple times for Circumventing Systems (during that super crazy ban period post-election around Thanksgiving week in US) in a new ad account with basically no spend. Luckily I got that account back fine and it's still running today...I'm running completely Whitehat BTW so I'm not fighting BH issues here.

I started off using a tracker redirect under my own domain with a setup, using a subdomain redirect setup like this as an example:

track.mydomain.com/fancy-tracker-stuff >> go.mydomain.com/lander1

During that time I tested to see if it was the tracker triggering the ban, by creating a redirectless tracker setup, to where it would ONLY land on "go.mydomain.com/lander1" with no redirect at all.

And guess what? I still got banned! (I know you're really shocked right now)/ So it appeared NOT to be using a redirect tracker, even in my little ol' new account.

Once I got through that period of being banned by fighting the bans getting it reactivated and continuing to spend a bit, I went back to using the original tracking link setup with ZERO issues. Now, this doesn't mean necessarily that redirects are completely OK or the safest thing. It just means it appeared that it wasn't a true factor in my account and I haven't had any problems since. It also doesn't mean I couldn't get flagged for using custom domain redirects.

Again tech support from this new tracker said this, I started looking it up and see that several other trackers recommend the same thing "do not use any kind of redirect or you will be banned by FB!" While I appreciate them trying to protect me as a client, it's looking like a more rudimentary understanding of how FB ads work, because I'm assuming they really don't run FB ads day-in and out like we do.

THE MAIN QUESTION...

What is your experience with redirect tracking on FB and bans?

How are you running your tracker on FB redirect or redirectless?

No matter what setup you prefer or whatever techy things you do , make sure the domain in ad manager, lands on the actual domain. If it doesn't, FB won't like it no matter how you pull it. And yeah some get away with putting a Voluum tracker in FB, but most don't. Exceptions everywhere....

Avoiding redirects is "common knowledge", but clearly you know affiliates who put in their custom tracking domain without issue. I also know people still running bit.ly links. It is probably like most things Facebook, there is a secret score and once you hit it, you're toast.

It would be difficult to draw conclusions from a single test. And there are so many factors that could have been in play as you've pointed out / implied yourself. For example:

-Account history and account track record can make a difference. So what your friend can get away with (with 3 million spend per year), other people may not be able to.

-All bans are not equal. Bans by the FB bot can result in a lot of false positives, which is where human reviewers come in - but I strongly suspect that some of the evaluation criteria are subjective which will result in different decisions by different reviewers (or even different decisions by the same reviewer depending on how they're feeling that day).

-Degree of leniency can change, e.g. during and after the election.


In your specific case, there are so many possibilities of what could have happened to account for the difference in FB's treatment. Some sample scenarios (and this is all purely based on personal speculation - just to illustrate that there can be many possibilities):

-The FB bot banned you several times due to its trigger-happy nature, but human reviewers were able to verify that you weren't doing anything wrong, so reinstated your account each time. The last reviewer may have put a note for the FB bot to "tone things down a bit" to avoid wasting time on more manual reviews of the same issue, resulting in more leniency afterwards.

-Degree of leniency may have changed since the election, so what wasn't considered to be OK before, is OK now. It may not be that redirects specifically were not OK then but is OK now. FB probably keeps an overall quality score for each ad account (and likely for the BM overall), and there's likely to be a threshold score that, when reached, will result in an account ban. That threshold may have been set lower during the election.


Of course, the above is just speculation. It would be very difficult to arrive at any authoritative conclusions unless:

1)We could get someone from FB to chime in - someone who knows all the banning criteria etc. Or,

2)A split test of accounts that use redirect-based tracking vs. those that use redirectless tracking. Keeping track of ban rates until statistically-significant results are reached.


Lastly - I'm going to ask the obvious: Why try to get to the bottom of this when you can just avoid the trouble by going redirectless?


Would be curious to see insight from experts with more FB experience.



Amy

Originally Posted by vortex

Lastly - I'm going to ask the obvious: Why try to get to the bottom of this when you can just avoid the trouble by going redirectless?

Amy

Originally Posted by stickupkid

No matter what setup you prefer or whatever techy things you do , make sure the domain in ad manager, lands on the actual domain. If it doesn't, FB won't like it no matter how you pull it. And yeah some get away with putting a Voluum tracker in FB, but most don't. Exceptions everywhere....

Originally Posted by iwanttofly

Avoiding redirects is "common knowledge", but clearly you know affiliates who put in their custom tracking domain without issue. I also know people still running bit.ly links. It is probably like most things Facebook, there is a secret score and once you hit it, you're toast.

Originally Posted by mcstacks

Great question @vortex, thanks for posing it.

Right now as I'm learning how the setup works with this tracker (it's RedTracker), I'm being told by tech support that it means that everytime I want to create a new campaign in RT, I need to create a separate lander, because each lander needs a separate script for it. Which is a big pain if I am mapping from FB campaigns to RedTracker campaigns, one-to-one.

In thinking about it though, I don't necessarily have to map one-to-one FB campaigns to RT campaigns, because in RT campaigns are based on the same ID, so all campaigns with the same lander, can just bucket into one RT campaign...if I have my thinking correctly.

Pretty confusing right now trying to sort it all out! Any thoughts anyone had I'd appreciate on dealing with campaign structure stuff between FB and trackers too, though hopefully I can sort it out soon in my head.

I am not going to reply about the FB liking or not redirects. But:

1) Regarding creating a lander for each campaign, it maybe interesting to check if you can pass the campaign ID as a parameter.

We had that discussion a few months ago about redirectless on Voluum. The conclusion was that one can use the same lander in several campaigns by passing the cpid in the URL.


2) To easily duplicate landers, you can create a *.yourdomain.com DNS entry pointing to your hosting, and this will create you an infinite amount of duplicates. Just change the subdomain and you have a new lander.

This * DNS won't affect any subdomain you have specifically defined.

Tracking links into FB is a hard NO for me, especially when it offers no advantage over a “no redirect” setup. Why play with fire?

In fact, we removed all visible tracking (tracker js etc) from FB campaigns

A Binom “no redirect” setup using their php tracking API is fairly simple to setup and is just as accurate. Failing that, use their landing page grabber and direct link to it.

Originally Posted by mcstacks

Got it.

I believe you are referring to validating our root domains in FB Business Manager, correct?

So are you talking about root domain, or subdomain too needs to be validated?

Meaning you shouldn't even use a subdomain i.e. lander.mydomain.com and only use mydomain.com?

Not sure what your FB setup is so would love to hear that.

Originally Posted by mcstacks

Right now as I'm learning how the setup works with this tracker (it's RedTracker), I'm being told by tech support that it means that everytime I want to create a new campaign in RT, I need to create a separate lander, because each lander needs a separate script for it. Which is a big pain if I am mapping from FB campaigns to Redtracker campaigns, one-to-one.

In thinking about it though, I don't necessarily have to map one-to-one FB campaigns to RT campaigns, because in RT campaigns are based on the same ID, so all campaigns with the same lander, can just bucket into one RT campaign...if I have my thinking correctly.

Originally Posted by twinaxe

I don´t know about Redtrack but in Binom you can use the same lander with LP Pixel for multiple campaigns.



There you basically just add a parameter "key" with the campaign ID to the LP URL, a JS on the LP then grabs the campaign ID and adds it as a dynamic value.

Originally Posted by jeremie

I am not going to reply about the FB liking or not redirects. But:

1) Regarding creating a lander for each campaign, it maybe interesting to check if you can pass the campaign ID as a parameter.

We had that discussion a few months ago about redirectless on Voluum. The conclusion was that one can use the same lander in several campaigns by passing the cpid in the URL.


2) To easily duplicate landers, you can create a *.yourdomain.com DNS entry pointing to your hosting, and this will create you an infinite amount of duplicates. Just change the subdomain and you have a new lander.

This * DNS won't affect any subdomain you have specifically defined.

Originally Posted by stickupkid

Assuming you verified domain in BM, you use that same domain in the ad manager and as the actual lander right? This should be the case. If you gonna mix up domains/landers in one camp, you might trigger FB to check out yes.
Subdomains are oke to use for sure.

Originally Posted by mcstacks

For your first point this is exactly what RedTracker is working with me on today, passing cpid in the URL using a page script for redirectless.

Interesting on second point, will keep that in mind!

Originally Posted by nickpeplow

Tracking links into FB is a hard NO for me, especially when it offers no advantage over a “no redirect” setup. Why play with fire?

In fact, we removed all visible tracking (tracker js etc) from FB campaigns

A Binom “no redirect” setup using their php tracking API is fairly simple to setup and is just as accurate. Failing that, use their landing page grabber and direct link to it.

Originally Posted by iwanttofly

Frankly, I'm surprised they didn't already implement it this way. Voluum's pixel is implemented this way. It is a set piece of code and grabs information from the URL parameters to determine which campaign generated the click and thus where to send the visitor when they click off.

Hey @mcstacks, thought I'd drop some info here to give you a better lay of the land, and my personal opinion.

Firstly with redirects on Facebook, they are not "banned". This is patently false. Imagine if Facebook told Coca Cola and Unilever that they could no longer advertise URLs that split-tested between several pages. All their brand-level performance marketers would throw a fit.

So whenever someone says they are "banned", this is completely untrue. Find the official Facebook documentation where they state this. You can't, because it doesn't exist.

While that is true, is using redirection-based URL tracking a good idea? Probably not, but it depends. We know Facebook values user experience above all else, screw the advertiser. So they don't want to let advertisers get something approved then provide a different customer experience, or destination, to what was approved. Redirect links allow that, so are a very obvious flag for "hey, this advertiser could potentially do some dodgy stuff".

Facebook wants to put out fires, and where there is smoke... so its not that these are banned or will get you banned, but will add scrutiny where it otherwise might not be. So if you are not a super white-hat brand you have to weigh up if its worth it. If I was running clean desktop browser campaigns I would use redirect links and not care. If I was running stuff that could garner ad complaints or low ad quality markers, I wouldn't put redirect links near it.

Now, as for using no-redirect tracking, every tracker should have JS. FunnelFlux Pro (our new SaaS) actually focuses on JS tracking and that's where a lot of our development is focused. Redirect URLs are simple after all.


With FunnelFlux Pro, here is what you would do:

1//

You create some lander. You get the JS code for it, which includes a page ID for that lander. You drop in the code, which is similar to FB pixel code in structure, e.g.

This goes in <head> and is universal, can just include on all pages by default:

<script src="https://DOMAIN/integration/lumetric.js?2.0.1"></script><script>
  var lum = new Lumetric();
</script>

<script>lum.event('view', {
  'query': {
    // 'f': '{FUNNEL-ID}',
    // 'n': '{NODE-ID}',
    'p': '0CZd9o8Me1kh',
    // 'ts': '{TRAFFICSOURCE-ID}',
    // 'c': '{COST}'
  },
  'options': {
    'cookieAllowed': true,
    'timeOnPage': false,
    'resolveTokens': [],
  },
  'onDone': function (response) {}
});
</script>

• You can turn cookies off entirely in the JS settings, and we don't rely on them
• On loading the page view, our JS scans the page for any action links and automatically modifies them to append a visitor ID and current node ID. This way we have zero reliance on cookies or referrers. For this reason we advise adding our JS even if you use redirect links as it maximises reliability of tracking
• Our JS lets you pull any data from the tracker that you want the page to use, using tokens. So you can tell the JS to return {isp}, {country}, {funnel-id}, etc. and the JS response contains these. It's then trivial to use these with basic JS code, and our JS has an "onDone" function where you can put such code to ensure things execute smoothly without any sequencing issues, race conditions etc.
• If you need to direct link between pages, not using our tracker action links (e.g. on an Ecom platform like Shopify, or website where you can't change links to be tracker links), you can set everything up as normal in your funnel but direct link between pages. You can then add an attribute data-lum="action" to URLs that should be treated like actions. Our JS will detect these and append our tracking params. On clickthrough, tracking is now reliable once again, and if our backend detects a user visits page A > page B, and those are connected by an action, we retrospectively add a click event. So its actually possible to track CTR and clickthroughs even if they aren't going through the tracker redirection. We added this to allow for better tracking of Ecom funnels mainly, so you don't have to mess around with trying to force tracker URLs into another system that itself wants to control links.
• We will be adding time on page and multivariate tracking at some point
• We are also going to add custom attributes (that can be modified) and custom events

Hello @mcstacks,

Based on our testing and information received from CPV Lab users, we also recommend the "no-redirect" tracking method. We found that the "no-redirect" tracking works in all cases, so it is a guaranteed success for Traffic Sources such as Facebook Ads, Google Ads, Bing (Microsoft) Ads.


Tracking with the Campaign URL (extra redirect) setup on a custom tracking domain from the same root domain as the lander also works in most cases, but we had users experience issues and getting their ad rejected. Such issues appear in less than 20% of cases when the Campaign URL tracking is used.


So in order to avoid potential problems, we always recommend users to implement the "no-redirect" tracking method for Facebook Ads. It is easy to setup as it involves only copy-pasting a few lines of code in the landing page. And it is also possible to use the same landing page in multiple campaigns, so you don't have to duplicate pages.


We also provide an option to split (rotate) traffic from Facebook Ads to multiple landing pages when using the "no-redirect" tracking method in order to test page variations easily.

Originally Posted by julia cpv lab pro

We also provide an option to split (rotate) traffic from Facebook Ads to multiple landing pages when using the "no-redirect" tracking method in order to test page variations easily.

Hi @jeremie!

Yes of course I can give more details.

It is quite simple, actually

Our multivariate testing tool, MV Lab, has a secondary ability to split-test traffic to your landing pages defined in a campaign. You generate the code needed for this from the CPV Lab interface (based on the pages available in your campaign and the share percentage of each page), then place this code in your split-page.

Then you send traffic from Facebook Ads directly to the MV Lab page that rotates between your landing pages.

It is an easy process and you are able to test performance from multiple landing pages from a single Facebook ad.

You can find more details here, but if you have additional questions, let me know

Julia

Jumping in the late in the conversation, but I got the feeling you're talking about Anytrack.

First and foremost, as someone mentioned in the thread, FB / Google bans can happen for various reasons.

Here is a simple way to check whether your site / domain / subdomain has good chances get flagged.

https://www.virustotal.com/gui/domain/voluumtrk.com/relations

yourpage.foo/offer_landing.html

yourpage.foo/goto/youroffer

yourpage.foo/offer_landing.html

sub.yourpage.foo/click/1