Great advertising is simple: reach the right people with the right message at the right time. Okay, obvious, but how? Track online user behavior. If we know what stage of the funnel a user is on, we have a better chance of converting by making their experience as personalized as possible.
Here is when the Facebook Pixel comes in handy; it allows you to monitor how effective your Facebook Ads actually are and target your ideal audience based on your website traffic and interactions.
So… what’s the Facebook Pixel?
The Facebook Pixel is a piece of code that you copy and paste on your website. This code tracks the behavior of visitors to the site and Facebook ads, and helps you to optimize future advertising campaigns based on insights and collected data to build better audiences and to retarget people that have already visited your website.
Here are 5 reasons why we love the Facebook Pixel and why you should too:
1. Track conversions and events:
After launching a Facebook ads campaign, you’ll probably want to know if the ads are effective and if the people are really converting, how many people are visiting your website, and what links inside your site they’re visiting. This is the precise purpose of the Pixel: it helps you to track the interactions of the visitors on your website after they click on a Facebook ad. This way, you are able to optimize your ads for the conversions or events that are most important to your business.
The Facebook Pixel logs every action that occurs on your website as an “event.” These events can be categorized into standard or custom.
Standard events are nine actions which Facebook recognizes across the ad products, like “Add to cart,” “Make a purchase,” and seven others. Custom events (or conversions) are actions that fall outside these standard events and are used to track non-standard actions.
To create a custom conversion, you will have to add the URL or piece of URL you want to track. For example, creating a rule to track who subscribed to your landing page by tracking the activity of the URL of the “thank you” page (since it will be visited by each user that completes your subscription form).
2. Create custom audiences and retarget
It’s not every day that a person makes a purchase the first time they visit a website. That’s why the Facebook Pixel is so essential: it allows you to display ads to people that have already visited your site.
We know that it’s easier to sell a product to people who have already shown an interest in your business, and reconnecting with these people can help to speed up the sales process. With the Facebook Pixel, you’re able to track the people who are visiting and interacting with your website, and use this information to reach out and reconnect with them by creating a custom audience. For example, you can retarget ads to visitors by showing them an ad with the specific product they added on their wishlist or shopping cart.
A custom audience is a list created by Facebook based on the people who have already a relationship with your business, like website visitors, video viewers, leads, customers, and more.
There are five ways you can create a custom audience:
- Customer File: upload a customer list with their contact information
- Website Traffic: build a list of people who have visited or interacted with your website (for this, you’ll first need the Pixel to track your site data)
- App Activity: build a list of people who have interacted with your app
- Offline Activity: create a list of people that made an interaction through an offline channel
- Engagement: generate a list of people who have previously engaged with your content across the Facebook family
3. Create lookalike audiences
Once you have created your custom audiences, you will be able to use one of the most exciting features of Facebook Ads, the lookalike audiences. With the information from your target audience you can create a lookalike audience with the same demographics, likes, and interests of the people who already visited your site, one with a similar likelihood of converting, and target your ads to these audiences.
4. Exclude people from your audiences based on their website behavior
We already learned that the Pixel helps you to understand your visitors’ website behavior. This information is useful so you don’t show the wrong messages to the wrong audience, resulting in a better ad performance and avoiding wasted ad spending.
There are three ways to exclude people based on information you already have: first, selecting a custom audience, for example, you wouldn’t want to show your “top of the funnel” ad to people that already bought your product; second, excluding people by location; and third, excluding people by interests or demographics.
It’s always important to test and find out which are the most significant exclusions for your target audience.
5. Optimize ads and prioritize budget
With the Facebook pixel, you’re able not only to measure and optimize the ads based on the insights of their effectiveness but also to improve targeting and show your ads to the right people that are most likely to convert.
Facebook pixel gives you data that helps you understand what’s actually working, so you’re able to allocate your budget to the ads and audiences that have better performance.
After seeing how powerful it is, by now you probably love the pixel too. If you don’t already know how to install it, here’s how:
Installing Facebook Pixel
Step 1:
On Facebook Business Manager, click on the hamburger tab on the top left corner of the page, and click on “Pixels” under the “Measure & Report” tab.
Step 2:
Click on “View Setup Instructions,” and you’re almost done! Now it’s time to place the Pixel code in your website header. You will have to choose a Setup Method: use an integration or tag manager, manually install the code yourself, or email instructions to a developer.
With the first option, you can easily install Pixel if you host your site on any platforms that are integrated with Facebook.
The second option allows you to install Pixel manually. You have to locate the global header of your website and copy and paste the Pixel code that Facebook gives you into the website header.
After copying the code, it’s time to add your events. An event is any action on your website that can be tracked, like purchases, add to wishlist, etc. Choose the event categories that are important for your business. You will have to also copy the code snippet of each event into your website.
If you still have some doubts, the third option is to email the instructions to your developer.
Step 3:
Verify that the Pixel actually works. First, click on “Pixels” on Facebook Business Manager and check if the status is “Active.” If it is, your Pixel is installed correctly.
You can also verify events with the Pixel Helper which is an extension for Google Chrome that helps you to check if your Pixel events are installed appropriately.
To learn more about the Pixel Helper, click here.
https://developers.facebook.com/docs/facebook-Pixel/Pixel-helper
Good luck! May you enjoy the targeted power of the Pixel!