Facebook Pixel is one of the most important concepts in Facebook Advertising and helps to increase the efficiency of Ad Spend on Facebook and Instagram.
What is a Facebook Pixel?
A Facebook Pixel is a small JavaScript code provided by Facebook that you can embed in your website. The code then collects data that helps you track events or conversions from your Facebook Ads. This data is great because it helps you optimize ads, build better audiences and remarket to people who have already taken some kind of action. With the help of Facebook Pixel, you can do multiple tracking functions such as how many visitors have visited a particular page on your website, how many visitors have taken a certain action (CTA) and much more associated with the ads.
When visitors go from an ad to your website, the Facebook Pixel can fire depending on where they land on your website. You don’t have to be a developer or know to code in order to use the Pixel or to manage it. Facebook makes it very easy to create, copy and paste their code into your website and if you have created your website using WordPress, it also makes it easy to implement these pixels.
How does a Facebook Pixel Work?
Facebook Pixel is essentially a conversion tracking code. Conversion Tracking is a performance marketing tactic to find out which of the clicks are converting into sales. This conversion could be a sale, a lead, a particular action a user might be taking on your website, and so on. Let us understand conversion tracking with an example.
Example:
Let’s say you are driving 200 clicks to your website; 100 clicks coming from Facebook Ads and 100 clicks coming from Google Ads. Now, you want to find out among the 100 clicks from Facebook Ads, which of those are actually high-quality clicks and have converted. To find out this data, you embed a Facebook Pixel onto all pages of your website and track where the customer would land after making a purchase or submitting a lead form, i.e., your ‘Thank You, Page’. Once the customer lands on the Thankyou page, in other words, when the Thankyou page loads, Facebook Pixel fires, thereby recording the conversion. This is set up by creating an Event (explained further in the post). In case, out of the 100 clicks from Facebook Ads, 20 clicks have converted into purchases or leads, this data will be passed onto Facebook Ads Manager wherein it will display that 20 people have converted through Facebook Campaign that you have created.
The benefits of using a Facebook Pixel
Tracking and Optimizing Ads
If you have a Facebook Pixel in 10 different ads, you can track the conversion rates of all of those 10 ads and see not only how many clicks you get to your website from those ads but can also track and see how far they go within your website, how many end up in a sale or leads. This way you will be able to track a lot of conversions and optimize your ads.
Remarketing
By using the Facebook Pixel, you will be able to remarket to the same user. Now while Facebook doesn’t actually provide you an email or a phone number or any information about the actual user, they do have a user ID that is unique to that user and because Facebook is one of the largest databases in the world and they know a lot about people, they will be able to remarket to that person.
Create Custom Audiences and Lookalike Audiences based on pixel events
Custom Audiences are very important when it comes to Facebook Ads as you can use them to retarget your website visitors and to find new potential customers or clients using look-alike audiences. With the help of Pixel, you can create very specific custom audiences.
Detecting multiple events on your website
Facebook Pixel can detect
- which pages of your website are being visited more
- if people are adding things to cart, wish-list, initiating checkout or are adding payment information
- if people sign up for your newsletter
- make a final purchase
How to Create a Facebook Pixel?
Step 1:
Head over to your Facebook Business Manager and from the left menu click on ‘All Tools’ leading you to few more options. Among the option, select ‘Event Manager’.
Step 2:
Then from the left side, look for the green button with a ‘+’ sign on it that says ‘Connect to data sources‘. There are several different data sources that you can connect from.
Step 3:
Click on ‘Web’ and hit the ‘Connect’ button.
Step 4:
It will display two different methods of which you can click on ‘Facebook Pixel’
Step 5:
Enter a name for your Pixel and enter the website domain name where you want to embed this Pixel code and click on next.
Step 6:
Now you will come across two options to install your Pixel code. You can either install the code manually or you can choose a Partner Integration. Select the ‘Manually add pixel code to website’ option and hit on ‘Install code manually’
Step 7:
Click on ‘Copy Code’. This is called your Pixel Code which you are going to place in the header of your website. The header is basically the top of your website where the logo sits.
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How to Set Up Events you want to track?
Events are basically actions that you want to track using the pixel. These events are also referred to as Facebook standard events. Assuming that you have got the Facebook Pixel installed on your website, just double-check that it’s all working. To do so, install the Facebook Pixel Helper Chrome extension and click that to see that the pixel is working correctly on your website.
Now to set up the event; head over to ‘Event Manager’ from the All Tools option in Business Manager and once you’re inside Event Manager, you will be able to see the names of your Facebook Pixels,
Step 1:
Select the pixel for which you want to set up an event and then click on Add Events, a button right below the graphical chart.
Step 2:
Next, from the dropdown options, select ‘From the Pixel’. Then click on ‘Open Event Setup Tool‘.
Step 3:
Once the Setup Events dialogue box is open, all you do here is add your website URL and click on an open website.
Note: Add a Facebook Pixel Event on every “Thank You” page that people see after they perform an event that you want to track.
Step 4:
After you have clicked on ‘open website’, your website will open as well as a small window at the top left will pop up which says ‘Facebook Event Setup Tool’. There you have two options namely, ‘Track New Button’ or ‘Track a URL’. You need to select ‘Track a URL’
Step 5:
The next step is to select an event. Select ‘Lead’ as the event.
Note: You need to remember that everybody who views the “Thank You” page is a new lead. Because, to get to this page, the person has to enter their email address and click ‘submit’ on a form and finally land on this page.
Step 6:
Next, Select URL equals and paste the relevant URL and click on confirm and that is done.
Now, whenever somebody lands on the “Thank You” page, you will be tracking the Facebook Pixel Event called a ‘Lead’ and you can track this inside your Facebook Ad Manager.
