Solved: Track Facebook Ads Purchases on External Websites

Hi there,

Thanks for reaching out! Happy to give you some initial thoughts on your Facebook Ads setup. It's a common problem when you're dealing with third-party sites, but your current solution, while clever, is likely doing more harm than good. I'll walk you through why that is and suggest a better way to structure things.

The short version is you're training the Facebook algorithm to find the wrong type of person, which will inevitably lead to wasted ad spend and poor results over the long run. We need to fix the signals you're sending the platform so it can find actual ticket buyers for you, not just casual clickers.

We'll need to look at why your current setup is sabotaging your results...

Right, let's get straight to the point. Tracking an outbound click as a 'Purchase' is a massive mistake. I know why you're doing it – you're trying to get *some* kind of conversion signal for those third-party sales. It feels like the logical thing to do when your hands are tied. But from the perspective of the Meta algorithm, it's poison.

You have to think of the algorithm as a very powerful, very literal, but not very clever employee. You give it a single job: "Go find me more people who do X". In your case, you've defined 'X' as "clicking a button that leads to an external site". So, the algorithm goes off and does exactly that, with incredible efficiency. It scours its user base to find people who have a history of clicking on links, people who get distracted easily, people who might open a new tab but never complete an action. It finds the "clicky" people.

The problem is, the person who clicks a link and the person who pulls out their credit card and buys a £50 concert ticket are often two completly different people. The buyer is more considered, has higher intent, and is far more valuable to your business. By optimising for a click, you are actively telling Facebook to ignore the actual buyers and instead spend your money finding the low-intent window shoppers. Over time, your campaign performance will degrade because the algorithm is learning from the wrong data. It's a classic case of garbage in, garbage out. You're paying the world's most sophisticated advertising machine to find you the worst possible audience for your product.

Every event a user completes on your site is a 'signal' you send back to Facebook. The more high-quality signals you provide, the better the algorithm gets at finding your ideal customer. A 'Purchase' event with a value attached is the highest quality signal you can possibly send. A button click is one of the lowest. You're effectively telling the algorithm that a cheap click is as valuable as a real sale, and it's polluting your entire dataset. This confusion means higher costs and fewer actual sales in the long run.

I'd say you need to accept the limitations of your model...

This might be tough to hear, but it's the truth: you simply cannot accurately track conversions that happen on a website you do not own. There are no secret tools, clever hacks, or third-party platforms that can reliably solve this. Server-side tracking, APIs, and other advanced methods all require cooperation and integration from the third-party ticket seller. If you don't have that, you're out of luck.

So, the first step is to stop looking for a technical solution that doesn't exist and instead focus on a strategic one. Your issue isn't really a tracking problem; it's a business model problem. You operate as a hybrid of a direct seller and an affiliate marketer. Paid advertising platforms like Meta are built primarily for direct sellers because they thrive on the clear, closed-loop data they provide. Affiliate models are much harder to make work with paid social ads for this exact reason.

Accepting this limitation is liberating. It means you can stop wasting time and energy chasing an impossible goal and instead focus your efforts on the parts of your business that you *can* control and measure perfectly: the ticket sales that happen on your own WooCommerce subdomain. This is your goldmine. This is where you can gather high-quality data, calculate a true Return on Ad Spend (ROAS), and build powerful audiences for retargeting and lookalikes.

Your main domain and your ticket-selling subdomain should be your absolute priority for all paid advertising efforts. The third-party links should be treated as a secondary, less important part of the strategy, with a completely different goal and a much smaller budget.

You probably should restructure your campaigns entirely...

Given everything we've just discussed, the clear path forward is to completly segregate your advertising efforts. You need to run two different types of campaigns with two very different goals. This seperation is critical for data hygiene and for allowing the algorithm to optimise effectively for each objective.

Campaign 1: Direct Sales (Your Subdomain)

This is your main event. This campaign should receive the vast majority of your budget (I'm talking 80-90% or even more). Its single purpose is to drive ticket sales through your own WooCommerce subdomain.

• Objective: Set the campaign objective to 'Sales'.
• Optimisation Event: Optimise for the 'Purchase' event. Make sure your pixel is correctly installed on your subdomain and that it's firing the standard eCommerce events: ViewContent (for event pages), AddToCart, InitiateCheckout, and especially Purchase with a currency and value parameter. This is the high-quality data the algorithm needs.
• Audiences: This is where you do your proper testing. Start with interest-based audiences related to the artists, venues, and music genres you sell tickets for. As you gather data, build retargeting audiences for people who visited specific event pages but didn't buy, or who abandoned their cart. Once you have enough purchase data (at least 100 purchases, but ideally more), you can create powerful Lookalike Audiences based on your actual customers. This is how you scale.
• Measurement: Your key metric here is ROAS (Return On Ad Spend). You can see exactly how much you're spending and exactly how much revenue you're generating. This is the only way to know if your ads are actually profitable.

Campaign 2: Affiliate Traffic (Third-Party Links)

This campaign should be treated very differently. It's not about driving direct, measurable sales. Its purpose is more for awareness and audience building. It should have a much smaller, fixed budget.

• Objective: Set the campaign objective to 'Traffic'. Do NOT use 'Sales'.
• Optimisation Event: Optimise for 'Landing Page Views'. This tells the algorithm to find people who will not just click the ad, but actually wait for your landing page to load. It's a slightly higher quality signal than a simple 'Link Click'. You should also set up a custom event that fires when someone clicks one of your outbound affiliate links. You can call it something like 'OutboundClick'. You can then track this as a secondary metric, but you're not optimising for it, so it won't pollute your main conversion data.
• Audiences: You can use similar interest-based audiences here. The key, however, is what you DO with the people who click. These users have shown interest in a specific concert. Even though they've gone to a third-party site, you've pixeled them on your landing page. You should add them to a specific retargeting audience (e.g., "Clicked outbound link for [Artist Name]"). You can then retarget this audience in your MAIN 'Direct Sales' campaign with ads for other, similar concerts that are sold on your own site. You're using the affiliate campaign as a cheap way to identify potential customers for your direct sales funnel.
• Measurement: Your key metrics here are Cost Per Landing Page View (CPLPV) and the size of the retargeting audiences you're building. Do not look at this campaign in terms of ROAS, because you can't measure it. Judge its success on wether it's feeding your main campaign with valuable, high-intent audiences for retargeting.

You'll need to calculate what you can actually afford to spend...

The beauty of focusing on your direct sales campaign is that it brings clarity. You can finally answer the most important question in advertising: "Is this actually making me money?". The key to this is understanding your numbers, specifically your Return on Ad Spend (ROAS). The calculation is simple: Total Revenue from Ads / Total Ad Spend.

If you spend £100 and generate £400 in ticket sales, your ROAS is 4x (or 400%).

Before you can set a ROAS target, you need to understand your margins. Let's say you take a 20% commission on a £50 ticket. That means your gross profit is £10. To break even, you need to acquire that customer for £10 or less. This means you need a minimum ROAS of 5x (£50 revenue / £10 ad spend) just to cover the cost of the ticket sale. To be profitable and cover your other business overheads, you'll likely need to aim for a much higher ROAS.

This is why the 'Direct Sales' campaign is your engine for growth. It's the only place where you can confidently invest more money knowing you're getting a predictable, profitable return. The 'Affiliate Traffic' campaign is a cost centre; an investment in future audience growth. You must treat them differently and have different expectations for each. Without this clarity, you're just guessing with your ad budget.

I've detailed my main recommendations for you below:

I know this is a lot to take in, and it represents a big shift from your current approach. It might feel like you're 'losing' tracking on the third-party sales, but the reality is you never had it in the first place. This new structure gives you honesty and clarity, which are the foundations of any successful advertising campaign. You'll be building your strategy on the solid rock of real, measurable data from your own site, rather than the shifting sands of misleading click data.

Getting this structure right, from the technical pixel setup to the audience strategy and creative testing, can be tricky. It requires a disciplined approach and experience in interpreting the data correctly to make smart optimisation decisions. Many businesses struggle to manage this complexity themselves, which is where expert help can make a significant difference.

If you'd like to go over this in more detail and have a look at your ad account together, feel free to schedule a free, no-obligation consultation with us. We can walk through your specific setup and map out a more detailed action plan.

Hope this helps!

Regards,

Team @ Lukas Holschuh