Out of all of the incredible tools Facebook has created for marketers, perhaps the most useful is the Facebook Pixel. The pixel allows you to monitor how successful your Facebook Ads actually were—giving you more accurate conversion stats—and create custom audiences based on site traffic. Anyone running Facebook Ads should absolutely, without a doubt have the pixel installed.
Benefits of Facebook Pixel
In simpler terms, if you’re sending traffic to your website the Facebook pixel is the difference between success and failure. The Facebook pixel gives you powerful audience building and tracking options, plus a few more benefits including:
- Track the number of conversions like newsletter signups or purchases, the cost per conversion (CPA), and the conversion rate (CVR).
- Revenue reporting: most e-commerce carts can pass the actual order value back to Facebook. This allows you to measure return on ad spend (ROAS).
- Analyze your sales funnel. In e-commerce you would look at the number of products viewed and compare to the number of add to carts, the number of checkouts initiated, and the number of purchases. If the conversion rate is lower than expected at any stage that’s where you can focus your efforts when refining the sales funnel.
- Build website custom audiences (WCAs) of all website visitors for retargeting.
- Create audiences of people that have taken the desired action (leads, purchases, etc) to exclude from retargeting. This saves you money and stops leads and customers from getting annoyed.
- Create lookalike audiences in seconds. These pixel-based lookalikes will dynamically update over time so they will always be relevant when using them in cold traffic campaigns.
- You can optimize for conversions. Simply put, the pixel allows you to get the same results for $1,000 that you’d get by spending $3,400 on ads when not using the pixel
- Dynamic product ads can be created, allowing you to retarget recent website visitors with the exact products they viewed.
Keep in mind that the pixel can’t work retrospectively; it can only create audiences and track conversions going forward once it has been installed. With increased concern about user privacy, an increasing number of changes on and off-Facebook are impacting the pixel’s true reach. We’ll look at this more later on.
How to Create a Facebook Pixel
Each pixel has its own unique 15 digit ID, which you’ll install on every page you want to track on your site. There are two ways to generate your unique code: Through Ads manager and through Business Manager.
Through the Ads Manager
- Click on the drop-down menu in the top left corner once you’ve navigated to the Ads Manager, and click on “All Tools” at the very bottom of the options.
- Then select “Pixels.” Facebook’s manager showing the “Ads Manager” highlighted
- Tap “Create a Pixel,” all you’ll have to do is name the pixel in order to create it.
Through your Business Manager
- Go to Business Manager and navigate to the pixel section on the left-hand menu and create a new pixel
- Just as with the ads manager option, give your pixel a name.
Finally, you’ll want to assign the pixel to certain ad accounts so that it can be used in your ad campaigns.
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