Meta Ads

If you advertise your events on Facebook or Instagram, connecting Meta lets Esora tell your ads every time someone buys a ticket.

What connecting does for you

Your ads learn from real ticket sales. Meta only knows what you tell it. Left alone, it optimises for clicks — and a click is not a ticket. Once connected, every paid order on Esora is reported to your ads, so Meta learns who your actual buyers are and spends your budget on people like them.

You will see how many tickets your ads sold. Tickets sold and money spent, side by side on the event’s Sales page.

Connect

In the Esora Organizer app, open the Profile tab and, under Integrations, tap Meta ads, then Connect Meta.

On the web, at esora.app/manage, go to Settings → Integrations and press Connect Meta.

Meta’s own sign-in opens and asks which ad account and which pixel you want to share with Esora. Approve it and you are done — there is nothing to find, copy or paste.

Two things worth knowing before you tap:

If Meta shows several ad accounts, tick only the one you advertise with. Sharing the rest gives Esora nothing useful.
If you have no pixel, Esora creates one for you, names it “Esora” and attaches it to your ad account. It is yours: it stays in your Meta business even if you disconnect later.

When it’s done, the screen shows your Ad account, your Pixel, and Last sale sent to Meta, so you can always tell the connection is alive. Tap the pixel’s name to open it in Meta Events Manager, where each paid order arrives as one Purchase — that is the number to look for in Ads Manager too.

Attach the pixel to your ad account

Sometimes Meta will not let Esora attach your pixel to your ad account for you — most often when the two live in different Meta portfolios. When that happens the connection still works and every paid order still reaches your pixel. What is missing is the last link: until the pixel is attached to the ad account, that account’s campaigns cannot learn from those sales.

You do it once, in Meta:

Open Meta Business Settings and go to Data sources → Datasets.
Pick the dataset (pixel) named on your Esora Meta ads screen.
Press Add assets, tick the ad account you advertise with, and save.

If the ad account sits in a different portfolio from the pixel, Meta will not offer it in that list. Use Assign partner on the pixel first, give the other portfolio access, and then attach the ad account.

There is nothing to press in Esora afterwards. Esora checks on its own, and the note on the Meta ads screen goes away once your ad account can use the pixel.

What you see in Sales

Open an event’s Sales page and look under Where buyers came from.

In the Esora Organizer app, a Your Meta ads line under the report shows the tickets Esora traced to a click on your Meta ads, the amount Meta reports you spent on the ads pointing at this event, and what that made one ticket cost.

A tracking link that an ad sends people to shows its own spend and its own cost per ticket.

Spend is shown in your ad account’s currency. The tickets are Esora’s count and the spend is Meta’s, so the two are never added together into one figure.

The figures appear once you connect, and refresh every hour after that.

Purchases Meta counts

Your Your Meta ads line also shows what Meta counted, as in “Meta counts 12 purchases”. It is normally a higher number than the tickets beside it, and both are right.

Esora counts a ticket when someone clicked the ad’s link and bought on Esora. It is an exact count of sales that came through the ad.

Meta counts a purchase when someone saw or clicked the ad and then bought, any way they bought: within 1 day of seeing it, or within 7 days of clicking it. Someone who watches your ad on Instagram, searches for the event the next day and buys from your bio link is one of Meta’s purchases and none of Esora’s tickets.

So Meta’s number is its own estimate of what the ads brought you, and Esora’s is what it can prove. Read them side by side and never add them together.

Ads run by Esora show Esora’s count of tickets only. Those ads are counted by Esora’s own pixel, which records every sale on the whole site, so a purchase figure beside them would include other organizers’ events.

Ads by Esora

Esora sometimes runs ads for an organizer’s events out of its own ad account. When we do that for your event, its Sales page shows a second line, Ads by Esora, under Your Meta ads.

The line carries two numbers: the tickets bought through those ads, which is Esora’s own count, and what Meta reports we spent on them. It is there whether or not you have connected Meta yourself — it describes ads we pay for, not yours.

The two lines are never added together. They are two ad accounts with two budgets, and one total of them would mean nothing. Each line is read on its own.

The currencies can differ. Our ad account is billed in US dollars, yours in whatever currency you set up with Meta. Nothing is converted, so each line shows its own money in its own symbol.

Your own ticket count can drop when we start. A ticket bought through one of our ads counts on our line and not on yours, because it was our ad that sold it. When one of our campaigns covers several of your events at once, Meta cannot say how much of the spend went to which show, so that campaign has no line on any single event. It shows on its link instead, in the list of tracking links on the event — Overview on the web, Promote in the app — where the opens, the tickets and the spend all cover the whole campaign.

A link named “Esora ad · …” is ours, and it is live. It belongs to ads that are running right now, so leave it switched on. Deleting it stops those ads’ sales being counted — on your figures as much as on ours.

What Esora sends, and what it never sends

Esora sends each paid order as one purchase, from our server rather than the buyer’s browser, so ad blockers never drop it. The purchase carries the order total and currency, the number of tickets, the event’s ID, and the buyer’s email and phone in hashed form so Meta can match the sale to a person who saw your ad.

Because one order is one purchase however many tickets are on it, cost per purchase in Ads Manager is your cost per order, not per ticket.

It never sends ticket names, event names, or prices beyond that total. Free registrations are never sent at all. And nothing is ever posted to your page, your account or your ads — Esora reports sales and reads what your ads cost. That is the whole of it.

Get your ads counted

For a sale to be traced back to the ad that brought it, the ad has to bring people through a link Esora recognises. Before you launch a campaign, create a tracking link for it and use that as the ad’s destination URL instead of the plain event address. Sales then show up under that link’s name in Where buyers came from, and they count toward what your ads sold. An ad pointing at the plain event page still works — the sale just may not be traceable to it.

If the row says “Reconnect”

Meta has taken Esora’s access away — usually because someone removed Esora in your Meta business settings, or the business itself changed. Tap Reconnect and go through the same short flow.

Sales made while the connection was down were not sent to Meta and cannot be sent afterwards, so it is worth reconnecting the day you notice it.

Disconnecting

Disconnect Meta stops sales being sent to your ads from that moment.

Everything else stays: your ad account, your pixel (including the one Esora created), everything Meta already recorded, and your Esora sales report with its tracking links. You can connect again any time.

If something goes wrong

“No ad account was shared.” Nothing was ticked in Meta’s dialog. Press Connect Meta again and tick the account you advertise with.
“Your ad account isn’t in a Meta business portfolio yet.” Meta can only give Esora a pixel through a business portfolio, and this ad account belongs to none. Open Meta Business Suite → Settings, create a portfolio, add this ad account to it, then reconnect. Trying again before that cannot work.
“Meta didn’t allow Esora to create a pixel.” Your Meta settings don’t let us make one for you. Create a pixel in Meta Events Manager yourself, then reconnect — we’ll use it.
“Couldn’t connect to Meta. Try again.” Something went wrong on the way. Try once more; if it keeps happening, get in touch.

Questions? Get in touch.