Don’t Be A Fool Use The Facebook Pixel Tool

Imagine a world where you can track exactly who visits your website daily. Wouldn’t it be useful to know what these potential customers look like and what they do whilst they navigate through your website?

Data is becoming more and more important in this modern world, and you really need to take it upon yourself to get to grips with the importance of advertising on Facebook whilst using their pixel in order to harness its capabilities.

Facebook describes its pixel as ‘..an analytics tool that allows you t measure the effectiveness of your advertising by understanding the actions people take on your website’.

What does the Facebook pixel Do?

Once this pixel is fired, it then communicates back to Facebook and gives them all sorts of different data, such as their gender, age, location, interests and their buying behaviours! Three main cools bits of information that can be gathered:

Track Conversions

If you actively marketing or just interested to learn what are you best performing internal pages then you need to be able to monitor how people interact with your website. In addition, to ensure that your proactive marketing is performing effectively across all devices having the data to hand allows you to refine your marketing strategy.

Remarket

Facebook Ads, in my opinion, is an essential component for businesses of all sizes. The pixel tracking data allows you to first identify those who have visited your site and then remarket. If you want to be really clever you can even show a remarketing ad to people who have viewed a specific page or product, viewed a video or even those who abandoned your shopping cart.

Create lookalike audiences

One of the cool features of Facebook is their ability to create lookalike audiences. They do this by looking at the profiles of the visitors to your site then matching them against people who have similar likes, interests and even demographics. By doing this you are able to create laser targeted campaigns where your ads go specifically to those people likely to convert.

Run effective ads

More and more businesses are turning to Facebook Ads to market their products and services. Setting up and Ad could not be easier…just press ‘boost’ but be do this means you are missing out on a huge amount of valuable data which can help increase conversions and lower costs. Using a Facebook pixel can make your ads more effective by improving the quality of the ads you run, and by improving the targeting of the people who see them.

How to use a Facebook pixel

You can use Facebook pixel tracking to collect data on two different kinds of events. With standard events, you can set up and measure one or all of nine predetermined actions or you can create your own custom event to track a particular action on your site.

Standard Events

The nine standard Facebook pixel events for which you can simply copy and paste standard Facebook event code are:

• View content: records the pages visited.
• Search: triggered when someone uses the search function to find content
• Add to cart: a product is placed in the shopping cart on your site.
• Add to wishlist: Someone adds a product to a wish list on your site.
• Initiate checkout: Someone starts the checkout process to buy something from your site.
• Add payment info: Someone enters their payment information in the purchase process on your website.
• Make purchase: Purchase completed on your website.
• Lead: Someone signs up for a trial or otherwise identifies themselves as a lead on your site.
• Complete registration: Someone completes a registration form on your site, such as for a subscription product.

Custom Conversions

You can use custom conversion events in place of standard events to collect more details than Facebook pixel standard events can provide.

Custom conversions use URL rules based on specific URLS or keywords. So, for example, you could use Facebook pixel tracking to record views of a specific page or product category.

To set up a Custom Conversion go to Facebook Ads Manager, then go to Custom Conversions and click Create Custom Conversion to define your custom conversion event using URL rules.

After you have created at least 1 Custom Conversion, you can access each one and their data by visiting the same Events Manager –> Custom Conversion page mentioned above. This is also where you go to see if your Custom Conversion has received a green light (meaning, it is active) and has received conversion data.

How to create a Facebook pixel and add it your website

Now that you know what you can track, and why you would want to do so, it’s time to create your pixel and put it to work on your website.

Step 1: Create your pixel

1. From your Facebook Ads Manager, click the hamburger icon (≡) and choose Pixels

2. Click Create a Pixel.

3. Name your pixel, accept the terms, and click Next. When choosing the pixel’s name, keep in mind that you only get one pixel for each ad account, so the name should represent your business, rather than a specific campaign.

Step 2: add the pixel code to your website

The Facebook Pixel is a piece of code you install on your website that allows you to track and monitor what happens. There are two ways to do this but by far the simplest is the copy and paste method, the other using an integration or tag manager.

1. Click Copy and Paste Code
2. Copy and paste the base code into the header of your website. If you are using WordPress a very simple way of doing this a via the plugin ‘Insert Headers and Footers’

Step 3: Confirm your Facebook pixel is working

Before you start relying on the data from your Facebook pixel, you should confirm that it’s working properly.

1. Download the Facebook Pixel Helper extension for Google Chrome.
2. Visit the page where you have installed the Facebook pixel. If the extension finds the pixel, the </> icon will turn blue, and a popup will indicate how many pixels are found on the page. The popup will also tell you if your pixel is working properly. If not, it will provide error information, so you can make corrections.