Balance privacy with personalisation using the Conversions API

Updated on 6 September 2024

For the most up-to-date information on Conversions API for government, political and charitable organisations, visit the best practices section of this page where you can download our guide.

This guide seeks to help you understand the evolving ads ecosystem and data solutions available for government, political and charitable organisations. This includes what the Conversions API is, how it works alongside the Meta pixel and best practices for integration. These solutions may help improve targeting, reporting and optimisation, decreasing cost per result and allowing you a complete picture of campaign outcomes while respecting people's privacy.

The power of personalisation. Government, political and charitable organisations rely on Facebook to make meaningful connections with their communities using personalised and targeted advertising. From fundraising for a cause to reaching a constituency with an important call to action, these experiences are powered by data to provide the most relevant message at the right time to the right audience.

While people benefit from personalised ad experiences, privacy is also important to them, and they want to ensure that their personal data is protected. When asked, 97% of survey respondents said they are concerned about protecting their personal data.

The ads ecosystem is evolving. People's increasing privacy expectations, regulation from governments and changes from large tech platforms affect the way that organisations like yours can collect and use data. For instance, web browsers have been changing their policies around third-party cookies, which is the mechanism traditionally used to identify people and their preferences online.

It's clear that the industry must look forward to new ways of connecting data that respects people's privacy choices and doesn't rely on cookies. That's because without visibility into your audience's preferences, organisations like yours may experience an impact across all stages of their digital marketing efforts.

Reliable and privacy-safe data connections will help:

• Reach people who have previously expressed interest in your organisation
• Deliver ads that feel relevant or useful to people
• Optimise ads towards a conversion outcome
• Accurately measure and report on campaign results

Until now, most organisations have connected their website data using the Meta pixel, but the pixel relies on cookies to identify customers who take actions on your sites and the industry is rapidly heading towards a reality where cookies are increasingly less effective.

Organisations who value data-driven outcomes are taking steps now to establish more reliable connections with their ad platforms.

The Conversions API is a Meta business tool for organisations that enables you to share data for which you have all of the necessary rights and permissions directly from your server. The API is also designed to honour Facebook's user privacy controls. For example, if people use our Off-Facebook activity privacy tool to limit whether their off-Facebook activity data is associated with their Facebook accounts, those privacy choices will extend to the data connected using the Conversions API.

With a more reliable data connection, organisations can continue providing personalised ad experiences across Meta technologies while respecting people's privacy choices.

Getting started with Conversions API. Organisations choose how they want to connect: either directly, by using their own in-house developer resources and our guided instructions, or alternatively, by leveraging a partner solution.

Both setup options are equally effective, and have their own advantages and considerations.

Choose your setup option and leverage the following resources to help your team implement Conversions API:

Adopting conversions

• About Conversions API

API

• Decide if Conversions API is right for your organisation
• Compare Conversions API setup options
• About partner integrations for web
• Conversions API case studies

Best practices

• Best practices for Conversions API
• Best practices for privacy and data use for Facebook Business tools
• Cookie consent

Training

• Facebook Blueprint: Stronger connections with Conversions API
• Facebook Blueprint: Set up, implement and verify the Conversions API
• Facebook Blueprint: Troubleshoot the Conversions API
• Video tutorial: Test your first Conversions API call

Support

• Developer support
• Developer Community Forum