The Facebook Pixel - What is it and why do you need it

Today, I'm just putting some training together and I wanted to share with you the importance of a Facebook pixel. 

Some of you might already be using Facebook pixels, and some of you aren't. So for those of you who are not, this article is for you. I want to stress the importance of getting your Facebook pixel and getting it installed wherever you can. 

So what is a Facebook pixel? 

Well, a Facebook pixel is a code that Facebook will generate for you, and you can put it into the header of your website, you can put it into ClickFunnels funnels. Anywhere that you can put it, you put it; so any software you are using that your prospective clients might go to, or any website pages they might visit. 

What it does is it collects data on people coming to those pages. And if it recognizes them as a Facebook user, then it identifies that that person might be interested in you and what you have to offer. 

To you put this into the header of your website, you can get plugins for that. You can put it into all of your ClickFunnels funnels so that you can track people coming through your funnels. And when you're using ad manager, it allows you obviously to get more data as well when you're looking at your KPIs and things like that. 

So how can you use this information? 

Well, basically, apart from the using it for the KPIs, what we do is we use it to create audiences within Facebook to put our ads in front of. 

When you first start testing a new campaign, often you're just testing cold audiences. People don't know anything about you and you're not quite sure whether or not this audience is going to want what you have to offer. 

If you've got a Facebook pixel, you can actually create audiences that already have been to see your website, already know who you are, and that may be interested in what you have to offer but just haven't committed yet. So it can help you bring down your lead cost or your cost per sale because it's already creating a warm market for you. 

So for instance, you can have your pixel on your website, and then you create an audience of people who have been to your website in the last 30 days. And this is a continuously rolling audience that Facebook is putting together. So you know if they've been to their audience, into your website, that they're probably interested in what you have to offer. 

But more, what you can do then, is you can actually set up an audience of people who've been there. And then when you're setting up your ads, you can exclude people who have become clients in the last 30 days. This is allowing you to put your ads in front of people who came to your website, but did not buy. 

So you're starting to see the power of the Facebook pixel. 

Now, the other thing that we can do is we can retarget people. 

For instance, if you have somebody who comes to a funnel, and you ask them to take a certain action within that funnel, and then go to the page to take that action, but then they don't take it, then you can retarget them with a different ad. And it might be a video of you talking about what that thing was that they almost took and just giving it a little bit more oomph that might make them push over the edge into doing what you want them to do, so whether that's booking onto your calendar, buying something, taking a lead magnet, things like that. 

And how you do this is you create audiences who've been to one page, but not another. So you exclude the audiences that ended up on that second page. You can say, people who came to my opt-in page, but did not appear on to the thank you page afterwards, so you know that they wanted what you had to offer enough to go check it out, but didn't commit to giving you their information, so you can create an ad that might go to them. 

There's certain software that we use that we know we can't put Facebook pixels on, for us that's ScheduleOnce calendar and Wufoo forms, things like that. But what we can do instead is we can embed those things onto our website, into our ClickFunnels funnels, and then we have the Facebook pixel there. 

Now the other thing that we do is we just run LinkedIn people to our website and basically give them away something for free without asking for anything, without asking for an opt-in. And some people would say, well, that's crazy, you shouldn't be doing that, you shouldn't be giving away something for free of value without at least getting their email. 

But what we're doing is we're giving away the Facebook pixel. And then we're creating audiences out of that. And moreover, we're creating lookalike audiences, which is one of the third types of audiences that you can set up using a Facebook pixel. 

A lookalike audience is something that Facebook can put together for you, where it is looking at a group of people and then going out and finding other people with those similarities. 

You can say, ‘Okay Facebook, I want you to put together a lookalike audience of the people who've been to my website in the last 180 days.’

Now see how I actually said 180 for that, but when I was talking about retargeting audiences, or just sending out ads to audiences, I was talking about 30 days. 

So you want to make sure that if you're actually putting an ad in front of somebody who's come to your website, you want it to be a shorter period of time, so maybe only 30 days, because they still may have no idea who you were. 

People look at so many things on the internet these days, they still may not remember you, but they've got a better chance of remembering who you were if it was within the last 30 days. Whereas when you want to create a lookalike audience, you want to give as much data as possible to Facebook for that audience for them to work off, for them to build out this lookalike audience. 

The best amount of information you can give Facebook to work off is about 1000 people. Now, normally they will be able to pick about 60% of that. So from that thousand, you might get 600 people and that's a nice base for them to create a lookalike audience from. But of course, you can do less than that. I think the minimum is 20. If you only give them 20 people though, it's not going to be a very accurate lookalike audience and your cost per click is probably going to be higher. 

So you want to make sure you've got at least a few hundred people before you create the lookalike audience off that, and that's one more reason why that we want to give them a larger date range to work with. 

We've got Facebook pixel allowing us to create audiences of people that we can just target with ads from the beginning, then we can retarget people who've done certain actions that our Facebook pixel has picked up on. And then we can create lookalike audiences from these groups of people who are coming onto pages where our Facebook pixel is installed. 

Now, I just want to say one last thing about Facebook pixels. When you install it, you want to make sure that it's been installed correctly. So you want to go into Chrome, it's called Facebook Pixel Helper, and you can get that, it's a free tool within Chrome. And once you've installed your Facebook pixel, if you go to a page within Chrome and have a look at it, at the top, you should be able to see that the Facebook pixel has been installed. 

Okay, I hope that's given you some good information about Facebook pixels and why you should be using them. Even if you don't need them now, go get it and install it, because in six months, if you decide you want to start running ads, that's six months of data that Facebook pixel has collected for you to start creating your audiences.