Why don't my Mobile App Installs show up under my Facebook Ad campaign?

Question

We created some Facebook Ads campaigns to drive installs to our Google Play page. We quickly realized that Facebook strips out any tracking parameters you might try to insert in the URLs.

This forced us to implement the Android Facebook SDK integration (bravo, Facebook, bravo). However, after confirming that all our events were getting recorded correctly in Facebook "Analytics for Apps", and configuring our Ads Account ID in our newly created Facebook App ID, our campaigns did not seem to register any Mobile App Installs.

How do I set up the link between my Facebook Ads campaigns, and the Facebook App ID / SDK integration?

Answer 1

The connection between a Facebook Ad campaign and the Facebook App ID happens right at the beginning of configuring a campaign.

When you choose "Get installs of your app", you are asked to "Choose app or enter its URL".

If you paste a Google Play link in here, you'll see your app icon appear next to your app name. Doing this will NOT work.

To configure everything correctly, you need to choose the Facebook App ID that you created earlier, NOT the Google Play link. Facebook App IDs have a different icon, and look like this:

In our case, we had created the campaigns before the Facebook App ID, so we had to edit all our campaigns to connect them up correctly. Annoying, although the campaign information was preserved, we needed to recreate all the ads manually.

As soon as we did this we started to see our Mobile App Installs being tracked in the campaign, which meant the AVG COST PER MOBILE APP INSTALL and related information began getting recorded. Hurray!