3 Magical Uses Of The Facebook Pixel
What is the Facebook pixel?
The Facebook pixel as described by Facebook “is a piece of JavaScript code for your website that enables you to measure, optimise and build audiences for your ad campaigns. Using the Facebook pixel, you can leverage the actions people take on your website across devices to inform more effective Facebook advertising campaigns.”
In fact, it’s a simple but powerful bit of JavaScript code that sits covertly on your website. The code is used to drop a cookie that will track visitors on your website so that you can advertise to them at a later date on the Facebook platform. This is called retargeting and is very powerful.
The Facebook pixel code:
You must have an advertising account with Facebook in order to get you pixel. Once you have an account you simply head over to your Adverts Manager tab and select Pixels from the Assets column. You then copy and paste the code between the <head> and </head> in your website code. If your website is built in WordPress there are plenty of helpful plugins that will place the code in the right place across your whole website in swift click of the upload button!
3 Magical Uses Of The Facebook Pixel
So, how can we harness this powerful feature to allow us to market effectively?
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Website Custom Audiences
Website Custom Audiences allow you to target people that have visited your website. When somebody lands on your website, the pixel fires behind the scenes — alerting Facebook that this unique user visited this page. So, with that in mind, you can set up a Website Custom Audience of people that have visited certain pages on your site or visited in a certain timeframe.
Example:
A digital marketing agency could retarget users who visited a page that offered an eBook on Facebook advertising strategies with ads about their Social Media Management services. That ad could land users on a dedicated landing page where they are encouraged to enquire about the social media services on offer.
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Custom Conversions
Similar in a way to Website Custom Audiences, Custom Conversions allows you to build an audience of people that have fulfilled a conversion on your site. This may be somebody who has completed a purchase on your site. The pixel would fire upon the loading of the confirmation page.
Example:
If your business sells services that could add on to something someone has already purchased, you could use Custom Conversions to retarget to them and encourage them back to your site to upsell them. A company that sells computers and printers could retarget all users who purchased from their site with Facebook ads selling them their technical support services.
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Standard Events
Standard Events can get complex for some non-technical users, as it requires some modification for the Facebook pixel code. Standard Events allow you track certain actions on your websites and are particularly useful for ecommerce sites. Here’s a list of some of the actions that can be tracked.
The great thin with standard event and Custom Conversions is that you can optimise your as campaign for that particular action. By doing this you are fine tuning Facebook and working you ad campaign harder in order to reach more people that are likely to carry out the desired event or conversion – as a result increasing your ROI.