If you’re a digital marketer, or a business owner keen on ramping up your digital marketing, you have probably undertaken some social media advertising on the renowned platform that is Facebook. But have you heard of the Facebook Pixel?

Facebook allows you to target customers with an extremely high accuracy, through its business manager. You’re able to harness Facebook’s data on people. And that’s a lot of data.

You can target people based on a range of factors including:

• Location
  • Where they are
  • Where they live
  • Where they have recently been
• Age
• Gender
• Languages
• Interests
• Behaviours

While Facebook’s targeting is even more fine tuned than most, there is still more power to be unleashed here… The Facebook Pixel.

So, what is the Facebook Pixel?

I’m glad you asked.

As an entity, Facebook Pixel is a snippet of tracking code that you can add to your website- much like when you add in Google Analytics etc- and this enables you to track visitors to your site (as long as they are also logged into Facebook).

This gives you access to even more data, like custom audiences, custom conversions, and custom and standard events.

Custom Audiences

Custom Audiences work in a similar way to re-targeting campaigns in Google Ads. Once the pixel has been installed all website visitors, who are also logged into their Facebook, are tracked. This allows you to find data such as when they visit your site, and which pages they visit whilst on it.

Facebook then uses this data to build a specific audience that you can advertise to. You can’t target these people individually, but you are able to advertise to your custom audience based on their behaviour.

For example, if someone has visited your contact page, but did not visit your thank you page, it could suggest they didn’t fill out your form- why not re-target to them and request they do this again? Or, if someone visited your website, but has not returned, why not target them on Facebook and try and entice them back in?

Now, you can advertise to Facebook users whether or not they have liked your page on Facebook, and irrespective of whether they fall within your current targeted audience.

The Pixel creates these audiences whether or not you are already running Facebook Ads. So, you may as well get the pixel installed and start building your audience, so that when you do decide to run these campaigns you can instantly target people who are already aware of your brand.

Custom Conversions

Another exciting part of the Facebook Pixel is the ability to create customer conversions. If you already use Google analytics, you’ll understand the concept of events and goals. These allow you to measure and track when visitors to your website perform specific actions. Custom conversions using the Facebook Pixel are much like this.

A Custom Conversion is created by selecting a completion page and naming the conversion. Typically the completion page is some kind of thank-you page, or a page that a customer will land on once a meaningful action has taken place.

This means that you can create Custom Conversions independently of your Facebook ads, and then choose when to use them in the future.

You can also choose the category for the conversion and add a monetary value e.g. you could create a Custom Conversion that tracks visitors to a whitepaper download page, you can include the cost of the ebook. This feature will help you figure out if your ad campaigns are profitable.

It’s worth noting that you can only have 40 custom conversions at once, although these can now be deleted at any time.

But don’t worry, that’s why there are also…

Custom and Standard Events

You can only have 40 custom conversions, however you can have custom and standard events. These do require adding some extra code.

Custom and Standard events help get past your limit of 40 Custom Conversions, offer more robust analytics and reporting, and have greater accuracy.

Facebook’s help section lists the custom and standard events that you can track. You can also find the event codes needed on this link too.

How to create and install your Facebook Pixel.

As mentioned before, installing your Facebook Pixel is a similar process to installing your Google Analytics API code.

The prerequisites are:

• You must already have a website for your business
• You must be able to update your website’s code (or be able to ask your digital agency to do this for you)

Creating a Facebook pixel:

• Log in to your Facebook Ads Manager and click the hamburger menu (3 lines in the top left corner)
• Go to your Pixels tab under “Events Manager”
• Click Create a pixel
• A Pixel code will be produced which you can then add to your website, below the closing </head> tag

If you aren’t comfortable doing this, then many platforms do have a Tag Manager that can be used, or alternately you can email the instructions to your website developer.

Give us a shout if you want a hand with your social campaigns.