Facebook Pixel: Why is it so important?

You go to a mall. As soon as you enter, you see the security guard greeting you and clicking on a device within his palm as you go inside.

If you closely look at the device, you might see a stopwatch-like machine with numbers on it.

If you ever wondered what it is, its called “People-counter” device(The technology is far advanced now).

Why does he do it? Quite obviously, to have a track of the number of people who visit the mall on a daily basis.

But do you think there’s anything much they could do with just the numbers? I think not.

Whereas on your website, it’s easy for you to track people who have visited it. And you could do a lot more.

That process is aided with the help of analytics tools like Facebook Pixel, Google Analytics etc

Let’s talk about Facebook Pixel since that’s the thing I’m most familiar with :)

What is a Pixel?

A familiar word in photography, it almost implies more or less the same meaning here.

A pixel is a piece of code that you place on your site. It loads as a small microscopic square(a pixel) on your website every time someone visits.

Technically it works by placing and triggering cookies on the website to track users as they interact on your website.

And this tracks the data of the number of visits you get on your site on a daily basis, the pages they visit, set of actions they do on your website etc.

Interesting, right?

The good news is, the pixel also knows who has visited your page :)

What can Facebook Pixel do for me?

With the data your pixel has collected, you can reach out to those people who are already aware of your product/service.

With Pixel, you can create custom audiences on different levels, lookalikes(I’ve talked about these enough in my previous article)...

...with which you can easily retarget your existing audience and create a lookalike(similar) audience of people who are very similar to the ones who have interacted with your business.

How do I set up the pixel?

Go to the Ads Manager menu, select the Events Manager, and every instruction the page gives you will guide you to set up the pixel.

You just need to copy the pixel code and paste it on your site and it will start tracking the actions on the site.

What can I do with the Facebook Pixel?

Once you start building an audience with the pixel, you can create plenty of custom audiences. Let me give you some examples below

• People who visited my website in the past 180 days
• People who visited a particular page
• People who made a purchase on my site in the past 30 days
• People who added to cart but did not purchase

And many more…

Wait! I just taught you about installing a piece of code…

But how will that track things like purchases, Add to carts etc?

To do that, you have the following options

1. Standard Events
2. Custom Events
3. Custom Conversions

1. Standard Events: It’s again a piece of code which you can use on the website to track a specific action.

For eg, you are running ads for a product. Let’s say you don’t wanna miss out on people who Add your product to the cart. What you can do is, you can add the “Add to Cart” standard event code on the button so that it gets tracked as soon as someone clicks it.

In this way, you know who are the people who came very close to purchasing, and you can retarget this set of the audience alone for better sales :)

2. Custom Events: Custom events are almost as same as Standard events, except for the advantage that you can define your Currency and Product value here :)

For eg, when someone makes a purchase on your website and you have used the custom event code, Facebook knows what the purchase value is and you can have real-time tracking of the money you earn and the money you spent.

Custom events are a lot advanced than Standard Events and have much more options :)

3. Custom Conversions: If you find both the above to be too technical, Facebook makes it easy for you to track a conversion based on the URL people visit through custom conversions :D

Let’s take the above example.

You have installed the pixel on your site but finding it difficult to install these event codes.

What you can do is, you can create a Custom Conversion where you instruct Facebook that when people visit this particular page, track it as a purchase. Facebook will do that for you.

Here too, you can define the product value and currency for better conversion tracking :)

The advantage:

The biggest advantage of the Facebook pixel is “Conversion Optimization”.

Once Facebook records the value of conversion or gets enough data, Facebook itself will optimize for the best possible results :)

And as I said above, you can retarget audiences on different levels using the Facebook pixel.

And also create similar audiences using lookalikes.

Though the above example I gave is for an e-commerce product, you can use the Facebook pixel to track conversions for almost anything like Webinar registrations, Course sales, Applications, Leads etc.

Remember, without the Facebook pixel, you are limiting the possibility of reaching out to the people who already know about your business or similar people who are most likely to interact with your business.

If you haven’t installed Facebook pixel on your website, app, landing page, course site or whatever, please do it right away :)