Facebook App Events Destination

Destination Info

• Accepts Track calls.
• Refer to it as Facebook App Events in the Integrations object

Components

• iOS
• Server

Connection Modes

Device-mode	Cloud-mode
Web	Web
Mobile	Mobile
Server	Server

Facebook App Events collects required information from one of Segment’s mobile SDKs (iOS, Android, or Swift) and sends it from Segment’s servers to Facebook App Events servers.

The iOS device-mode connection for the Facebook App Events destination is open source and available on GitHub.

Segment also has an Analytics Swift Facebook App Events Plugin for the Facebook App Events device-mode connection available. You can view the open-source integration code on GitHub.

Other Facebook Destinations Supported by Segment

This page is about the Facebook App Events. For documentation on other Facebook destinations, see the pages linked below.

Getting Started

1. From the Segment web app, click Catalog.
2. Search for “Facebook App Events” in the Catalog, select it, and choose which of your sources to connect the destination to.
3. In the destination settings, enter your Facebook App ID which can be retrieved from your Facebook Apps dashboard.
4. After you turn on the Facebook App Events integration in your app’s Segment project, we’ll start sending track data to Facebook’s App Events endpoints.

Screen

If you’re not familiar with the Segment Specs, take a look to understand what the Screen method does. An example call would look like:

[[SEGAnalytics sharedAnalytics] screen:@"Photo Feed"
                            properties:@{ @"Feed Type": @"public" }];

Our integration also supports using Segment screen events as track events. For example, if you had a screen event named Confirmation you could map the invocation of this to a Facebook app event as you would with Segment track events.

To use this functionality you must opt into it using the integration setting named Use Screen Events as Track Events. After enabling, you should start seeing screen events populate in Facebook App Events. The screen name you provide will be bookended with the words Viewed and Screen. So, if you have a screen event with the name property set to Welcome, it will show up in Facebook as an event called Viewed Welcome Screen.

Note: the integration will not automatically translate screen events to spec’d Facebook events as our track method does. If you would like to map these events to specific Facebook events you can do this using the Map your events to Standard FB App Events setting. Be sure to specify the event as Viewed name Screen where name is the name property of the screen event.

Track

If you’re not familiar with the Segment Specs, take a look to understand what the Track method does. An example call would look like:

[[SEGAnalytics sharedAnalytics] track:@"Article Completed"
                           properties:@{ @"title": @"How to Create a Tracking Plan", @"course": @"Intro to Analytics" }];

When you call track Segment automatically sends that event and it’s properties to Facebook. In the Facebook analytics interface you’ll be able to use the event properties to segment your data.

Facebook App Events doesn’t like events with periods in the name so if you send us an event with periods in the name, we’ll convert all periods to underscores. So if your event is friend.added, we’ll send that to Facebook as friend_added. We also truncate events that are longer than 40 characters long due to Facebook’s API constraints.

Facebook Parameters

We automatically translate our spec’d properties revenue and currency to the appropriate Facebook parameters (valueToSum and FBSDKAppEventParameterNameCurrency), and also send events with revenue to Facebook’s purchase logging method (logPurchase).

If you don’t provide a currency explicitly, we send USD. If any properties don’t match the below, we’ll pass them on as they were sent to us.

Facebook Events

Segment automatically translates any of your events that match one of our spec’d events that map to Facebook’s spec’d events. The below table shows the out of the box mappings in our integration:

If you send a track event that doesn’t match one of the above events, we’ll send it along to Facebook with the name you provide Segment.

Facebook Recommended Events

The most important events that can help advertisers improve campaign ROI are the conversion events or events closest to the conversion. Those events are marked with an “*” within Segment’s Facebook App Events settings page.

In addition, there are special requirements for dynamic ads. These events are marked with “m” for dynamic ads for mobile, and “t” for dynamic ads for travel within Segment’s Facebook App Events settings page.

Limited Data Use

In July 2020, Facebook released Limited Data Use feature to help businesses comply with the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA). This feature limits the way user data is stored and processed for all California residents who opt out of the sale of their data. You can send Limited Data Use data processing parameters to Facebook on each event so that Facebook can appropriately apply the user’s data choice. Segment recommends that you first familiarize yourself on this feature and the Data Processing Options Facebook accepts.

This destination supports the following parameters:

• Data Processing Options
• Data Processing Options Country
• Data Processing Options State

You can enable the feature using the Use Limited Data Use destination setting and control it using Data Processing Initialization Parameters.

Data Processing Destination Setting

You can change the Use Limited Data Use destination setting to enable or disable Limited Data Use. This must be enabled (set to “on”) if you want to send data processing parameters as part of the the Limited Data Use feature.

Data Processing Initialization Parameters

The Data Processing parameters you set are the Data Processing Options Segment uses when sending data to Facebook. By default, Segment uses the following Data Processing Parameters:

Facebook uses the context.ip to determine the geolocation of the event.

You can manually change the Data Processing parameters by adding settings to the integrations object.

Server-side library

The example below shows how you might set custom Data Processing parameters for a Segment server library.

// node library example

analytics.track({
  event: 'Membership Upgraded',
  userId: '97234974',
  integrations: {
    "Facebook App Events": {
      "dataProcessingOptions": [[], 1,1000]
    }
  }
})

iOS Device Mode

You must use the Facebook App Events integration SDK version 2.0.0 or later to call setDataProcessingOptions when you enable the Use Limited Data Use destination setting. Events sent from earlier versions of the Facebook App Events integration SDK cannot call setDataProcessingOptions, but Facebook still has access to the IP address in the events to process LDU based on geolocation.

When you use Segment’s mobile libraries, you must set the Data Processing Options when you declare the destination in your app delegate’s instance. The example below shows how you might set custom Data Processing parameters in an iOS project.

// Add the bundle FB integration SDK
// Set data processing values.
SEGFacebookAppEventsIntegrationFactory *fb = [SEGFacebookAppEventsIntegrationFactory instance];
[fb setDataProcessingOptions:@[ @"LDU" ] forCountry:1 forState: 1000];
[config use:fb];

Android and iOS Cloud Mode

To send the Data Processing Parameters in cloud mode on iOS or Android, you can set them in the integrations object. The example below shows how you might set custom Data Processing parameters in Android.

Object[] dataProcessingOptions = new Object[3]
dataProcessingOptions[0] = {'LDU'} // options
dataProcessOptions[1] = 1 // country
dataProcessingOptions[2] = 1000 // state

Analytics.with(context).track(
  "Purchased Item",
  new Properties(),
  new Options().setIntegrationOptions(
    "Facebook App Events", new ImmutableMap.Builder<String, Object>().put("dateProcessingOptions", dataProcessingOptions).build());
)

Additional iOS Cloud Mode Set up for iOS 14

With the release of Segment’s latest Analytics-iOS SDK, which includes support for upcoming iOS 14 tracking changes, you must decide if you need to collect the user’s IDFA or not. If you do not need to collect IDFA, you can update your Analytics-iOS SDK to the next version, and Segment sets device.adTrackingEnabled to false, and starts deleting the device.advertisingId from the context object in your payloads. If you do need to collect the IDFA, you must import the IDFA closure as a config to the library, or import the Ad Tracking Transparency framework from Apple.

Facebook returns a 4xx error due to lack of required parameters if the device.advertisingId key does not appear in the payload. To work around this, enable the Fallback to Zeroed IDFA when advertisingId key not present destination setting for Facebook App Events from the Segment web app. When you enable this setting, Segment checks for the device.advertisingId key, and if none is present, sets the advertiser_id in the outbound payload to '00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000'.

Other Features

Facebook Login and Facebook Dialogs

The integration does not automatically support Facebook Login and Facebook Dialogs out of the box (you’d need to write code here regardless!). To use these features you’ll need to set up Facebook’s app delegate hooks by accessing the Facebook SDK directly.

Packaged Integration

In addition to the integration available for both iOS and Android, there is a client-side packaged integration available on iOS. We recommend integrating with the Segment server-to-server integration, but you can use the packaged integration on iOS if you want.

Pre-defined Events and Parameters

The integration currently only supports the FBSDKAppEventNameActivatedApp pre-defined event (via the activateApp handler). All other events are forwarded as custom events. If other pre-defined events are important to you, contact us.

Troubleshooting

Not seeing events?

You will have to be sure that the IDFA is working within your app, which involves adding the AdSupport and App Tracking Transparency frameworks.

Similarly, on Android, you’ll need to include the Play Services Ads library as mentioned here in order for the advertisingId to populate.

After you’ve added these, you will start to see the context.device.advertisingId populate and the context.device.adTrackingEnabled flag set to true unless the user has ad tracking limited or is using a mobile ad blocker.

Facebook requires that payloads include the following:

• context.device.id
• context.device.type
• context.os.version

For example:

{
  "anonymousId": "507f191e810c19729de860ea",
  "event": "Event Name",
​  "context": {
    "device": {
      "id": "B5372DB0-C21E-11E4-8DFC-AA07A5B093DB",
      "type": "ios"
    },
    "os": {
      "version": "8.1.3"
    }
  },​
  "messageId": "bbac-11e4-8dfc-aa07a53436b09b45567i8245237824",
  "type": "track",
  "userId": "97980cfea0067"
}

Missing custom events

Facebook will only accept custom events with alphanumeric names (you can include spaces, “-“ and “_”) that are between 2 and 40 characters in length. Otherwise, Facebook will reject the event payload with a 400 status.

Engage

You can send computed traits and audiences generated using Engage to this destination as a user property. To learn more about Engage, schedule a demo.

For user-property destinations, an identify call is sent to the destination for each user being added and removed. The property name is the snake_cased version of the audience name, with a true/false value to indicate membership. For example, when a user first completes an order in the last 30 days, Engage sends an Identify call with the property order_completed_last_30days: true. When the user no longer satisfies this condition (for example, it’s been more than 30 days since their last order), Engage sets that value to false.

When you first create an audience, Engage sends an Identify call for every user in that audience. Later audience syncs only send updates for users whose membership has changed since the last sync.

Settings

Segment lets you change these destination settings from the Segment app without having to touch any code.