Question from Reddit:
My client needs to track several types of conversions from their Facebook Ads campaign: applications, downloads, appointments, and email subscriptions. While some are a bit more important than others, they’re all important to them, ultimately.
How do I set up a FB campaign in such a way that FB simply optimizes to deliver conversions, whichever they are? I can’t select only one conversion type on the ad set level.
Should I create several ad sets, each focused on a different type of conversion (i.e. one ad set for applications, one for downloads, etc.)?
I’m afraid then Facebook will prioritize one ad set over another, when our goal is just to generate as many conversions as possible at the lowest CPL.
How would you do it?
tl;dr: Different types of conversions to track in Facebook Ads Manager. Goal is highest conversion volume possible at low CPL.
Best way to set up campaign to track and optimize for all types?
Answer from Nabil:
The short answer is:
You should not create separate ad sets, as that will indeed cause Facebook’s delivery system to prioritize one over the others, potentially missing out on overall volume at the lowest cost.
The correct solution is to use one conversion event that represents all of the valuable conversions combined, which is a Custom Conversion in Ads Manager.
You set this Custom Conversion to include all four of your goals – applications, downloads, appointments, and email subscriptions – and select this single Custom Conversion for optimization at the ad set level.
This unifies all valuable actions under a single event signal, allowing Facebook’s algorithm to focus on driving the highest possible volume of any of those combined actions for the lowest cost, thereby meeting your client’s goal of generating as many conversions as possible at the lowest CPL.
The long answer is:
Your concern about Facebook prioritizing one ad set over another is absolutely valid.
When you run multiple ad sets optimizing for different conversion events, Facebook’s auction system will assign a budget and priority based on its confidence in delivering the desired action, which often results in one ad set dominating the budget and limiting your overall conversion volume.
The best practice for this scenario is to use the Custom Conversion feature in Facebook Ads Manager to combine your separate Standard Events – Submit Application, Download, Schedule Appointment, and Subscribe (or whatever custom events you are using) – into a single, unified metric.
This unified event should be the only event you select for optimization at the ad set level.
This single signal tells the algorithm, “I value any of these four actions equally, so go find the people most likely to complete any of them for the lowest cost.”
To ensure this unified event is built on the highest quality, most reliable data, and to gain granular control for future optimization, you should implement the Facebook Conversions API alongside your client-side tracking using Google Tag Manager and a server-side tagging environment like Stape or Google Cloud Platform.
The server-side setup acts as a bridge: GTM sends the user actions to your server container, and the server container then forwards that data to Facebook using the Conversions API.
This is superior because it ensures that all four of your conversion types are reliably recorded, even if a user is using an ad blocker or has a slow connection, which are common causes of client-side tracking failure.
By building your Custom Conversion on top of these highly accurate, server-side events, you provide the Facebook algorithm with a larger, cleaner dataset, which significantly improves the optimization engine’s ability to find and deliver high volumes of applications, downloads, appointments, and subscriptions at the lowest possible cost per lead.
This architecture future-proofs your tracking and maximizes the performance of your single, unified campaign objective.
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