We’ve gone ahead and outlined what the Facebook Pixel is, why you need it, how to install it, and some examples of how you can use it to greatly improve your Facebook advertising success.
What is the Facebook Pixel?
The Facebook Pixel is a piece of code that gets installed on your website and allows Facebook to track the people that come to your site from Facebook. It works very similar to Google Analytics. The Pixel allows Facebook to learn about the behavior of the people browsing your site, in addition to understanding the demographics, interests, and other behavior characteristics of these people. All of this information is crucial to help further improve the delivery and overall performance of your ads.
We recommend you install the Facebook Pixel on your website before you begin to run ads. However you are still able to run Facebook Ads without the pixel installed on your website. The Pixel provides many benefits to advertisers and will allow you to improve the performance of your ads. Additionally, you can develop a Custom Audience of past site visitors to re-target people that have previously interacted with your ads on your website.
Increase conversions by optimizing your Facebook campaign
Facebook’s powerful targeting tools can help you reach the right audiences for each one of your ads. The Facebook Pixel can look at the actions people take on your website to make your Facebook campaigns even more effective and efficient while improving your targeting by identifying new customers. After the Pixel is installed correctly on your website, Facebook is better equipped to deliver ads.
Creating custom audiences
One of the best features of the Facebook advertising platform is Custom Audiences. You can create ads using Core Audiences (information that people share in their profiles and the behaviors they show online) by creating Custom Audiences, for example, making an audience out of your email list of current customers (you can load these email list of customers into Facebook and Facebook will match them to profiles). Next, you can use Look-Alike Audiences. A Look-Alike audience is based on Facebook’s sophisticated algorithm that identifies people who share similar likes, interests, or characteristics in your current audiences and creates a new audience group that looks identical. The idea is that the new look-alike audiences are similar to your current customers and will perform just as well. For example, you can create a look-alike audience based on all the people that have visited your website during a specific time period. In order to do this, you will need the Facebook Pixel installed on your website.
How to get and install the Facebook Pixel
The Facebook Pixel is created in Ads Manager. You can access the Ads Manager at business.facebook.com
At the top left, next to Ads Manager, click on the menu lines. That will open the drop-down. Click on “All Tools” at the bottom.
A full menu of options will open. You will see “Pixels” under the category “Measure & Report”. Click on it.
Depending on whether or not you’ve tried to click on “Create a Pixel” before, you will get one of two screens labeled “a” or “b” below.
Both buttons “Create a Pixel” and “Set Up Pixel” will take you to the same place.
Click on “Create a Pixel” and then on “Create”.
Facebook will create the code:
And you will see this screen next:
There are two methods to go about doing this next part, depending on your technical skills. If you know how to work the back-end of your website, then you can click “Manually Install the Code Yourself”, or if you know how to use Google Tag Manager and it’s installed on your website already, then you can follow those instructions.
We recommend sending the code to their webmaster. To do this, click the 3rd box that says “Email Instructions to a Developer”:
Scroll to the bottom of the pop-up box and click “send”!
After your webmaster or developer installs the code, you should be able to see the “Active” status of the pixel in the Facebook Manager.
How to Check the Pixel Status
To check the Pixel status, go to Facebook Ads Manager and pull the drop-down menu next to “Facebook Ads”. Click on “All Tools” at the bottom of the dialog box. Select “Pixels” from the “Measure & Report” category. If the status is “Active”, your pixel has been installed correctly. It can, sometimes, take some time for your pixel status to change after it has been installed.
We are looking to see that the status is “Active”. It may take up to 20 minutes to display after the Pixel has been installed.
If the Pixel is not installed correctly, you will see a message that says “No Events Recorded”. You will be shown a message to finish setting up your Pixel:
After your Pixel is installed, you can begin to create your first Custom Audience.Go to Facebook Ads Manager and pull the drop-down menu next to “Facebook Ads”. Click on “All Tools” at the bottom. Now that the full menu is displaying select “Pixels” from the “Measure & Report” category, just like before.
Click on the “Create Custom Audience” button.The very first custom audience you should create is “All Website Visitors”. This is the default in the drop-down menu, which defaults to the past 30 days. You can change the default date to a maximum of 180 days. If your website does not get a lot of visitors, using a longer time frame is the best option. What this means is that once a visitor comes to your website, they will now be included in this Custom Audience for 30 days.The next step is to name your audience – you can call it “All Website Traffic” – anyone who visits any page on your website will be added to this custom audience. Click “Create Audience” and then click “Done”.
After the Custom Audience is created, you will be able to select this audience when creating new ads. As you create your ad, you will see a field for “Custom Audiences” right above the “Locations” field. Click on the “Custom Audience” field and a drop-down will appear with all of the audiences you’ve created. If this is the first custom audience you’ve created, you will only see one in the drop-down. As time goes on, the audience will grow in size as more and more people visit your site and are added to the audience.
You can continue building your ad by selecting from additional filters. Additional filters include options such as geographic location, interests, etc.Building Custom Audiences based on website visitors is just one of the many different ways you can use the Facebook Pixel. Even if you aren’t planning on using the Pixel right now, it is highly recommended to install it on your website site anyway. Allow the Pixel to collect data so when you are ready to use it, you’ll have tons of data already gathered.
Great Uses Of The Facebook Pixel
The Facebook Pixel has so many great ways to expand on your marketing objectives. Pixel allows you to segment your website visitors into related audiences and promote related content, products, or services.
Cross-Marketing Across Different Marketing Channels
One of our favorite uses for having the Facebook Pixel installed is that if you’re marketing in any other digital or traditional marketing channels, you just extended the life of that ad into Facebook. For example, if you are doing direct mail or print marketing of some sort, if people that see the ad go to your website, they just ended up in your re-targeting campaign, where they can stay for up to 6 months! Imagine that: a postcard campaign that could potentially cost you thousands of dollars was just extended into the digital space for another 6 months – that’s greatly increasing your mileage.Or, if you’re running Google Adwords campaigns, if someone ends up on the site from a Google PPC campaign, they too will end up in the Custom Audience of Facebook.So get the Facebook Pixel installed now!Do you need help with Facebook Advertising? Local Media Team is here to help! Contact us today!
