Advertising Overview

Overview

This section covers how to connect your ad platforms to SuperFunnel and track what visitors do on your pages. If you have never run ads before, start here.

When you run ads, you pay a platform like Google or Meta to send people to your page. Two things then matter: knowing which ad sent each visitor, and telling the platform what those visitors did so it can find you more people like them. Everything in this section serves those two goals.

Three Ad Phases in SuperFunnel

Working with ads in SuperFunnel breaks down into three phases. The first two are easy to confuse, so it helps to keep them apart; the third builds on top of them (and is covered in later sections on Agents and Experiments).

How ads and tags work

A few terms come up everywhere, so they are essential to understand:

• Click ID — when someone clicks your ad, the platform tags the visit with a unique ID (gclid for Google, fbclid for Meta). SuperFunnel reads this ID so it knows exactly which ad, ad set, and campaign each visitor came from. This is how performance gets attributed correctly.
• Tag — any tracking snippet you place on a page so a platform can see what visitors do. The tag you use depends on the platform:
  • Google Tag Manager (GTM) — a free tool that lets you manage many tags from one place instead of pasting each one seperately into your page.
  • Pixel — the most common tag, a snippet that reports visitor activity directly back to an ad platform.
    • Meta's is the Meta Pixel.
    • LinkedIn's is the LinkedIn Insight Tag.
    • Google has its own Global Site Tag (gtag.js), but most people use GTM instead.
  • Google Tag Manager can host Meta Pixel, LinkedIn Insight Tag and other custom tags.
• Event — a recorded action, such as a page view or a form submission. SuperFunnel fires its own event when a visitor completes a form.
• Conversion — an event that matters to your business, like a purchase or a booked demo. Reporting conversions back to the platform is what lets it optimize, that is, automatically spend your budget on the people most likely to convert.

Putting it together, the same pattern repeats on every platform: an ad sends a visitor to your page, a tag reports what they do, and conversions are sent back so the platform can find more people like them.

• On Google: A click on your Google ad arrives tagged with a gclid. Tracking, which you typically manage through Google Tag Manager, reports activity, and conversions are reported back to Google Ads so it can optimize bidding toward the people most likely to convert.

• On Meta: Someone clicks your Meta ad and lands on your page tagged with an fbclid. The Meta Pixel on your page reports activity, a page view, then a form submission, and when the visitor converts, that conversion is sent back to Meta so it can optimize toward similar people.

• Running both: Each platform tags its own clicks (fbclid for Meta, gclid for Google), and SuperFunnel reads whichever is present to attribute every visit to the right campaign. You report each conversion back to the platform that drove it. Running both side by side lets you compare cost and conversion quality across channels and move budget toward what works.

Let an agent read your ad performance

The third job builds on the first two. Once your account is connected and data is flowing, you can connect Google and Meta as Connector Agents, so SuperFunnel can read your ad performance for optimization.

What's next