Installing the Facebook Pixel is an essential step in setting up and optimising your Facebook Ads campaigns. In fact, it’s the key to measuring the success of your campaigns, improving your audience targeting and optimising towards your business goals.
What is the Facebook Pixel?
The Pixel is a small piece of code that lives on your website and kicks into action when a customer engages with your Facebook Ads and visits your website. It tracks user behaviour of people on your site (e.g. did someone click on a button, perform a search or view a valuable page?) In all instances the Pixel ‘fires’ and records the action.
Trust me when I say that you don’t need developer-level understanding of coding and cookies to reap the benefits of the Pixel! Facebook has simplified the installation process with step-by-step instructions to do it yourself, or a handy developer-ready email template.
Why do I need the Facebook Pixel?
The Facebook Pixel is powerful for two key reasons:
1. it allows you to track conversions on your website and optimise towards the actions that truly support your business goals;
2. you can create highly targeted website custom audiences, including Lookalike and re-targeting audiences.
The Facebook Pixel helps you optimise towards true business goals
It’s important to understand that without the Pixel in place, Facebook cannot track customer activity on your website and therefore, you can only optimise your campaigns towards link clicks. However, I know that this is unhelpful for most businesses, as value comes from actions much further down the funnel, such as purchases, newsletter subscriptions, enquiry form submissions etc. When Facebook can track these actions beyond a link click, you can tell the algorithm that this is where value lies and that you want your money to be invested in achieving more of these actions.
With Pixel tracking, you can build a picture of how website visitors are behaving to start improving conversion rate and ultimately, understand whether your ad investment is delivering a meaningful return.
Create highly targeted custom audiences with Pixel data
The only thing truer than your own definition of your customer, is the data that backs it up! With Facebook Pixel tracking in place, you can leverage the data on exactly who is visiting and engaging with your website to optimise your campaigns.
For example, you could use Pixel data to re-target a custom audience of users who have added an item to their virtual basket but not checked-out. Just because these users have not completed a purchase on their first visit does not mean that they are not interested. In fact, they still hold great potential and may simply wish to convert on another device or when they are in a more convenient location. To capture this potential, you can re-target the audience and loop them back into the conversion funnel.
An additional way to leverage Pixel data is to find new users that share similarities with those that have proven value, known as a Lookalike audience. With Pixel tracking in place, Facebook’s AI knows which users have completed your valuable conversion actions and can seek similarities with other Facebook users to show them your ads. With this strategy, you are advancing from simple interest and behavioural based targeting to reach new users, supported by a template of proven success.
How do I get started with the Facebook Pixel?
Now you know what the Facebook Pixel is and why you need it, there’s no better time like the present to get started! As soon as the Pixel is installed, it will start recording data from your website right away, giving you a head start on tracking.
I understand that Pixel integration can be technically challenging and that the importance of achieving a correct setup can be intimidating, so if you’re looking for support in getting the Pixel installed or you’re ready to get started with a campaign, please get in touch - I’d love to help!
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