How to set up the Facebook Pixel for your business?

One of the main reasons that businesses don’t use Facebook ads is that they may have played around with boosting posts or targeting a broad, cold audience in the past and seen little to no return. It’s a bit like asking a stranger to marry you, without even taking them on a date first. To increase the chance of success you need be specific with your audience selection and targeting and then take them on a journey to becoming a customer.

But how do you know your precise audience, without breaking down the information you receive from every paying customer? You probably know who your broad target markets are, but that isn’t enough to dig down to the specific people who want your service or product….

What is the Pixel Code?

The Facebook Pixel is an analytical tool in the form of code that you place on every page of your website. This code is triggered every time a visitor takes action on your website. The Facebook Pixel tracks when users respond to a Facebook ad, what actions they take on your site, the pages they visit and the length of time they spend there. All of this information, in addition to the Facebook user information already available, gives the audience targeting algorithm a significant amount of data about the people that are interested in your service or product.

What Does Facebook Pixel do?

There are four functions that the Pixel code performs:

1. Track conversions/events

When sending traffic to a landing page, or to your website, FB pixel allows you to track when people are taking actions, based on predefined rules, to let you know if your ads are actually working.

2. Create custom audiences

The pixel allows you to create retargeting audiences based on people that have visited your website.

When a visitor lands on your website, the pixel fires and tracks them.

You can then go into Facebook and create what’s called a ‘custom audience’ for people that have visited your site in a certain timeframe.

The pixel holds the data on website visitors for up to 180 days, meaning if someone visited your website 180 days ago, you can still target them with an ad. You can go as specific as you want with this, for example, you can target people that have visited specific pages on your site who visited in a specific timeframe, targeting them with an ad that speaks exclusively to them.

3. Optimises ad targeting

Another reason to use the pixel is it helps with optimising your campaigns.

The Facebook algorithm is smart, and the more conversions you get (and therefore the more data the pixel acquires from your site) the smarter Facebook gets.

Which means, when you’re running ad campaigns, Facebook has a better idea of who to serve your ads to.

4.Website visitor insights

Finally, you are able to get a great representation of who, when, and where people are landing on your website, and the specific actions they are taking, which can be useful in informing your marketing but also your website functionality and design.

Why do you need the Pixel?

Even if you’re not planning to advertise yet, I would still recommend installing the pixel because it allows you to begin the process of gathering data, which will help your advertising in the future.

Here are a few reasons, just to make the case clearer:

1. Reaching the right people.

How many times have you been targeted with an ad on Facebook, that has absolutely no relevance to you?

Well, as a business, If you’re targeting an ad to people that aren’t your target audience, your ad campaign is going to flop.

When you target someone that’s never heard of you before (a cold or uninterested audience), you will find it much harder to grab their attention because they have no trust in your brand (yet). You’re interrupting them as they scroll their feed.

When we use the Facebook Pixel on the website, we can track visitors who may have chosen to visit your site organically, or found you through another platform like Google. Once they land on your site, for various reasons they can drop off.

By retargeting them on Facebook with the Pixel data, we can remind them to come back. Because they already know who we are (they are now a warm lead), they are much more likely to take the action we want them to take.

2. Lookalike Audiences

One of our favourite features of Facebook ads is lookalike audiences. Lookalike audiences are created from our custom audiences.

We take our custom audience (such as website traffic) and ask Facebook to go out and find more people that match the same characteristics as those who visited our site (or ‘look like’ those people). And Facebook works it’s magic to go and find those people for our ads targeting, increasing the likelihood of people being interested in our ad and taking the action that we want them too.

How do you install the Facebook pixel?

Firstly you need to head to facebook.business.com

Within the settings you then go to ‘events’, then ‘data sources’, then ‘add new data source’ and finally ‘Facebook pixel’ 

The pixel code goes in between the <head> tags on your site.

And there are some easy ways to get it installed, without having to edit the code, or even understand code.

If you have a web developer, Facebook gives you the option to send the instructions direct to their email address making it super easy.

There are 3 ways to install the Facebook pixel:

-Using Google Tag Manager

-Editing the header code

-Using a WordPress Plugin

But again, if you have a go to developer, then you don’t need to worry about this.

If you want to check whether your pixel has been installed properly (or if your competitors have a pixel installed), we use a Chrome extension tool called Pixel Helper which you can download here

Our closing advice, is do not spend a penny on Facebook Ads, before you have the Pixel installed. Advertising on Facebook is a data game, and you need to have the foundations in place to give yourself the best chance of the data working in your favour.

If you are looking for a chat on plotting your way to advertising success, then it may be worthwhile having a coffee with our ads team. Just email us at [email protected] for more info.