Facebook have undertaken a number of measures to give website owners options to get the Conversions API Gateway setup. Some of them are quite dangerous and reckless.
The problem with moving to Facebook’s Server-side Conversions API for tracking is that it requires much more technical expertise on the part of the website owner. Uptake is blocked by the quite advanced steps to get it up and running. So Facebook have undertaken a number of steps to make it easier, but beware.
Facebook Dangerously Sets Up Cloud Infrastructure On Your Behalf Using an API
One method involves Facebook using your credentials to go and setup servers and other services on cloud servers. Documentation snippets include:
Send events directly from your server. Learn more
Set up with Conversions API Gateway
Set up the Conversions API so data is hosted in your own cloud infrastructure and processed by the Conversions API Gateway. No coding is required in most cases and the setup process usually takes about 30 to 60 minutes. You’ll need access to your cloud and DNS provider accounts. Get Started >>
This guides through a UI that asks for a login for your cloud server account, and then the process proceeds to setup a number of cloud resources in order to manage this. In the case of AWS, the resources deployed were extensive, and included: 2 EC2 instances, load balancers, autoscaling groups, network interfaces, security policies, elastic IP addresses, data volumes and s3 storage, which amounted to over $600USD of billed resources usage in under two months, which is I am sure you will agree, excessive and a little bit scary. We ended up with about 14 resources scattered through our AWS hosting when we tried this, and we were barely even aware of the resources that were being “spun up” or under what settings.
Facebook and Associated Parties Shouldn’t Be Doing This
In an effort to get rid of the technical burden for website owners to have the Facebook Conversion API setup, Facebook are adopting a few tricky methods to get server-side tracking up and running for website owners/advertisers. In the case of this tactic, it’s one that should be avoid because of cost, transparency and security issues. This practice should be avoided by website owners, condemned by AWS and stopped by Facebook, in our opinion.