make the most of your ads with the facebook pixel

When you invest in digital marketing, you want to be able to tie results back directly to your efforts. One of the top benefits of social media advertising is the ability to target, track and optimise your ads for maximum impact.

Facebook has become one of the most sophisticated and complex social media advertising channels of them all. When using Facebook ads, there’s one tool in particular that will help you make the most of your social media budget: the Facebook Pixel.

what is the facebook pixel?

Pixels are common on most advertising platforms. Used to place a cookie that will track visitors on your website, they allow you gather valuable data and advertise to that same user at a later date.

The Facebook Pixel acts in this same way. It’s essentially a piece of code that you place on your website. Collecting data that helps you track your Facebook ads conversions, it allows you to optimise your ad campaigns, create targeted audiences for future advertising and remarket to those who have already engaged with your website.

This analytical tool can measure how effective your Facebook ad campaigns are by monitoring the actions people take on your site. It can track interactions such as:

• purchases

• page views

• time on page

• cart additions

• scroll depth

how to use the facebook pixel?

This is a technical bit of kit but how it works can be broken down into six main areas:

• installing the pixel: Adding the tracking code snippet to your website allows the Facebook Pixel to start doing its thing.

• collecting insights: Once the tracking code has been added, you’ll start receiving insights about visitors including where traffic is coming from, what device the user is on and other demographic information.

• behaviour analysis: With this insight, you can start to build a greater understanding of how people act on your website, whether they explore a specific page or if they’ve put something in their shopping cart.

• build your audience: Using the data collected, you can create Facebook Custom Audiences, and Lookalike Audiences before building ads tailored to those users.

• make the most of your budget: Optimise your bidding to spend your budget as efficiently as possible. By taking advantage of the lowest cost bid strategy, you can aim to reach users who are most likely to convert.

• test and learn: The aim of Facebook Pixel isn’t just to get your users to convert. This analytical tool also offers the means to assess conversions, helping you create the highest performing Facebook ads strategy for your business going forward.

Tracked conversions appear in the Facebook Ads Manager and the Facebook Analytics dashboard. Within these dashboards, you can analyse the effectiveness of your conversions and calculate the ROI of your ad spend.

what does the facebook pixel allow you to do?

The Facebook Pixel itself doesn’t actually do the targeting. But it lays the foundations for you to target effectively:

• lookalike audiences: You can build Lookalike Audiences to reflect the characteristics of your best customers. As the Facebook Pixel code knows who did what on your website, Facebook can use that data to identify people who share similar traits to these visitors. These high value prospects form a key part of your social advertising strategy.

• standard events: Standard events are predefined visitor actions. There are nine standard events that the Facebook Pixel automatically tracks, and these link to common, conversion related activities. This could include actions such as add to cart, viewing product purchases, product IDs, the number of items purchased and categories.

• custom events: Custom events are the more evolved version of standard events. These are visitor actions that you have defined which can be used to build custom audiences for ad optimisation. These events could include all types of different activities such as button clicks, video tracking, time on page and scroll depth.

• Custom conversions: Custom conversions are created by choosing a completion page such as an ‘order confirmed’ or ‘thank you’ page post-purchase and giving a name to the conversion. If the thank you page is the only webpage you have with ‘/thank-you’ or something similar in its URL and you’ve installed the pixel on that page, anyone who views it will be tracked using that custom conversion. Once this has occurred, data from custom conversions can be fed into building your custom audiences and optimising your ads.

why should you use the facebook pixel?

Using the Facebook Pixel allows you to dive into the world of Facebook ad tracking to understand how your ads fit into your overarching marketing strategy. This tool creates a number of benefits including:

• optimise your strategy by finding out how many conversions you’re receiving thanks to your Facebook ads, which ads are generating the most traffic and clicks to your website and the amount of money you’re making per conversion.

• generate a clear understanding of your ROI by tying your Facebook advertising spend back to exactly how many conversions the ad has driven. With this insight, it’s much easier to display the value behind your efforts and gather further investment.

• show your ads to the right people who have a higher potential of converting with you. Don’t waste time taking a stab in the dark with your advertising. Facebook Pixel allows you to find new customers or target those who have visited your website already.

• increase your sales with the help of automatic bidding. With Facebook Pixel you can reach people who are more likely to convert with you and engage them at the optimal spend.

• measure the success of your ads with the pixel’s analytical features. Better understand the impact of your ads and what happens when people see them before using this insight to improve your advertising strategy going forward.

so, why aren’t you using the facebook pixel?

This data-gathering tool is a no brainer if you want to make the most of your ads across Facebook. It’s not enough to create your ideal audience using the platform’s targeting tools or optimise your ad creatives to perfection. To really get the most from your Facebook ads you need to track the exact return they are generating for your business.

If you want to get the most out of your social media advertising budget, the Facebook Pixel can help. With this snippet of code, you can build and optimise highly targeted audiences for your ad campaigns. The result? More conversions, more revenue and a higher ROI – all the while saving you time and money.

Contact us to find out how the Facebook Pixel can improve your social media advertising.