What is the Facebook Pixel?
The Facebook Pixel is a piece of code that tracks your website visitors, regardless of if they have interacted with you on social media or not. What makes the Pixel an important tool in your social media belt is that it allows you to measure, optimise, build and retarget audiences.
The Pixel helps Facebook understand your audience better, continuously optimising your ads to be shown to people who are more likely to take an action. It will also give you better insight into how your audience interact with your website.
It even allows you to create Custom Audiences. A Custom Audience is an audience that is created using data you already have, including:
Website Traffic
Customer Files
App Activity
Offline Activity (in-store, telephone, etc.)
People who have visited or interacted with your Instagram page
People Who Follow or Interacted With Your Facebook Page
In this case, creating a Custom Audience using website traffic from the Pixel will show your ads to people who have already visited your website.
How it works
When a visitor lands on your home page, the Pixel will register this and will start to “follow” this visitor, taking note of everything they do.
For example, if someone lands on your home page, then navigates to a particular product and clicks the ‘Add to Basket’ button, the Pixel will gather all this information. You will later be able to create an ad targeting only people who viewed that particular product, or even target only the people who have clicked ‘Add to Basket’ on this particular product to encourage them to complete the sale. This is what we call retargeting.
The more conversions that happen between Facebook and your website, the more Facebook will improve how it delivers your ads to the people who are more likely to take action.
Setting up a Pixel
If you have access to your website’s code, you can add the pixel yourself. If not, you can send the pixel to whoever does and ask them to add it to all pages of the website.
To set-up your Pixel, you’ll need to have a Business Manager account. In Business Manager, you will find everything you need for your Pixel in the “Events Manager” section. You should then find a page that looks like this:
All you need to do now is click “Create a Pixel” and enter your website domain - Facebook will automatically create your Pixel code! If you have access to your website’s code, you can install this yourself or you can email this to a developer to do it for you.
Pixel Events
If you want to track certain actions your social audience are making, such as ‘Add to Basket’ or ‘Subscribe’, you can add standard events to certain pages of your website.
There are several Event codes you can add to your Pixel, including ‘Add to Wishlist’, ‘Search’ and ‘Add Payment Info’ to name a few. Facebook even makes choosing your Events easier by having several industries listed with appropriate Event codes.
Like your base Pixel, you can either follow Facebook’s instructions and install these yourself or you can email them to whoever has access to your website.
Installing the Pixel and finding the best ways to use the data collected can be daunting and confusing for many. Luckily, we have a team of clever Community Managers who can guide you through the Pixel process or even set it all up for you. Get in touch with us today and discover how we can help.