Do you ever feel like you’re being watched when you’re online? Anyone who has spent time on social media platforms has experienced a moment of surprise when they realise how personalised their native advertising has become.
To our knowledge, the Facebook business model doesn’t involve a team of old warlocks that read users minds to better target ads; there’s just a lot of software available that can be used to make visitor actions on business websites legible. The Facebook pixel is one of these services, and honestly, if you are running or planning to run ads on the social media platform or one of its properties (such as Instagram), using it can really improve your audience targeting and conversions.
So, What is Facebook Pixel?
If dealing with complicated software isn’t your forte – don’t be intimidated. As the name suggests, The Facebook pixel is a small and unintrusive piece of code that you can install on your business website. When a visitor enters your site, it drops a cookie, which then softly runs in the background, monitoring and recording their actions as they navigate their way around. The pixel can tell you which pages visitors passed through in which order, what services they viewed, what products sat in their shopping cart, and more. Of course, every business or organisation values different actions or events on their site, but it is often used to track:
- Pageviews
- Scroll depth
- Time spent on page
- Products added to cart
- Purchased items
How Do I Use This Data?
Essentially, this data enables you to know your audience and design ads that better target their precise interests and needs. At the same time, after running the pixel for a while, you also know which users aren’t engaged with your website or ads, so you can stop targeting these users and improve your ROI.
Retargeting
The Facebook pixel is particularly useful if your advertising strategy involves retargeting. Visitors often browse through e-commerce websites, check out a variety of products they’re interested in, and even add them to their shopping cart – but then close the page never to return. Retargeting can help you transform these ’lost purchases’ into conversions. The Facebook pixel can define categories of visitors by the actions they took with different pages and different products on your website, allowing you to target them with specific ads after the fact.
With this information, you can run ads on social media platforms that remind visitors of the products that they viewed or added to their carts already by re-presenting them with the products they interacted with.
Getting Started
- Finding the Facebook Pixel
You can find Events Manager in the sidebar of your Facebook business account. From there, you need to add a data source for your pixel – for a business website, select the Web option. From here, you can give your pixel a customised name and add your website URL for easy installation options.
- Installing the Facebook Pixel
Installing the pixel on your website isn’t difficult. Just copy the code from Facebook and insert it so that it is displayed on each page of your website. The simplest and most popular way of doing this and saving time is to just paste the code into your global header, either by finding <head> </head> in the code or using your header template.
If you own a Shopify store, you can enable data sharing with Facebook from within the platform. In Shopify admin, go to your sales channels settings, and click on data sharing settings. Further down this page, you can enable Customer data-sharing on a level anywhere between standard and maximum. After this, just choose your pixel from the list and follow the instructions.
Some businesses use a web developer to maintain their online business platform and don’t have direct access to their site code. Facebook is aware of this and has a third option for people in this situation: email instructions to a developer. Just enter your developer’s email address in the form and let them take charge of installing the pixel for you – it’s really that easy.
- Customise
Now you can tell Facebook what kind of event’s you would like it to track on each of your pages. The code has seventeen standard (pre-designed) events that it can track (purchase, add to cart, wishlist, etc.)
These can be customised further; for example, you can record information about product IDs, categories, and conversion value when a user selects a purchase. Be sure to include conversion events for your website – whatever that means for your business or organisation. With this information, you can define a custom audience based on your ideal conversions and start running dynamic ads that advertise to their unique interests on your website.
- Collect Data and Create Dynamic Ads
Users can, of course, disable cookies when they enter your business website; however, many people don’t, so it’s worth using them. If you’re already running ads on social media, install the Facebook pixel and watch the number of conversions per investment rise. And if you haven’t started running ads yet, with data collected via the Facebook pixel, you can start running optimised ads right out the gate. Check out Facebook’s dynamic ads guide for more on how to advertise to custom audiences.
