If you are new to using Facebook’s marketing tools to market your business, you may be surprised to find out that their tools are actually pretty extensive. They offer much more than just a way of promoting your posts or ways to get more likes. One of the best tools Facebook has to offer is called a “Facebook Pixel.” If you don’t have any experience at all dealing with things like snippets, tracking codes, or remarketing codes, then a Facebook Pixel is probably going to seem pretty confusing. Don’t worry, you are not alone. Many business owners give up the second they see computer code. Still, with a little help and some proper implementation, you could start seeing it’s many benefits.
What is a Facebook Pixel?
A Facebook Pixel is simply a piece of code which is unique to you that Facebook generates. You can take this code and place it on pages of your website to help track data and better measure the success of your Facebook advertising campaigns. Adding the code to a page won’t affect anything from your customers’ perspectives. The page will look exactly the same and the data collected by the Pixel will only be visible to you via your Facebook Ads Manager.
What’s it Do?
It collects data that can help you gauge the success of your marketing campaigns! Without the Pixel, all you’d know is that someone on Facebook clicked on your ad. However, you wouldn’t have any idea what happened afterwards. For example, did they go on your website and make a purchase or sign up for a newsletter? Did they browse around through your inventory or request a quote for your services? Or, did they simply go back to Facebook or navigate away from your site as soon as they got there? These are important questions to have answers to because simply knowing that the ad was clicked on only gives you a snippet of information about an action at the very top of your purchase funnel.
You need to know things like whether users add things to their cart but never check out, what percentage of your ad clicks actually lead to real purchases, and what’s the ROI for your Facebook marketing campaigns? A Facebook Pixel, when properly implemented, can help you find the answers to these questions and provide you with information about what happens on your website after a user clicks on your Facebook ad.
How’s it Implemented?
It’s really fairly simple, use Facebook’s Pixel creation tool to generate a unique Pixel for your website. Once completed, you’ll have to copy and paste the code from Facebook to the <head> section of a page on your website. Determining what page you’ll paste it on depends on what you are trying to measure. For example, if you want to measure completed checkouts, then you should paste the code on a page which individuals are taken to after they complete their checkout. You’ll want to make sure that only people who have actually completed a checkout can get to this page, otherwise your tracking will be thrown off. Generally, this would be something like a “thank you for placing your order” page.
Another example, if you want to measure the number of people who signed up for your weekly newsletter, you’d place the code on the “thank you for signing up” page that your users are directed to after they sign up. Again, be sure that users can only get to this page by actually signing up for your newsletter.
Advanced Features
Facebook Pixels are pretty customizable. You have several optional settings for optimizing a Pixel to fit your needs. One very useful option is to give your conversions a specific monetary value. Let’s say you have an ad on Facebook for a recipe book you are selling on your website. You can add the monetary value of a purchase (the purchase price of the book) to your code. This feature will help you better determine the profitability of your ad. For example, if you are spending $10 for each purchase that comes from your ads on Facebook but your recipe book only sells for $8, clearly it’s time to rework your campaign. Adding a custom conversion can help you see these numbers more easily and help you find ways to optimize your campaign.
Optional features like these can help bring your social media marketing campaign to the next level. You can find a full list of options on Facebook’s standard events page. Alternatively, you can use custom conversions.
Need Help?
Some business owners simply don’t have the time to handle all aspects of their marketing, especially if it requires learning about a new marketing tool. That kind of time investment is just not always an option. If you are interested in working with a social media marketing company which can set up, monitor, and track your campaigns for you, give us a call or request a quote online.