The Facebook Pixel is arguably the most powerful marketing tool on the internet today, tracking consumer behaviour at every turn through our social media and Facebook profiles.
Fifteen years ago companies would hire expensive marketing agencies to learn important consumer information.
Companies were dire to learn the process of how people made decisions, their motivation, ability, and opportunity people had to purchase their products or services.
How would product exposure, attention, and perception change our behaviours to convert that targeted advertising into a sale?
Often things such as social class, household influences, personal values, personalities, and lifestyles are analyzed and tied into our consumer behaviour.
Fifteen years ago companies and services would pay top dollar to gather this information, helping them to better understand how they could advertise to their direct consumer.
Today, all you have to do is install a Facebook Pixel onto your website.
How does Facebook Pixel work?
In short, Facebook Pixel (or conversion pixel) is a short piece of coding placed on one or more locations on your website.
The tracking pixel registers data based on the actions someone takes on the website.
The Facebook pixel data is linked to a person’s Facebook ID so you can later show them advertisements on social media.
The Facebook audience pixel a seriously powerful marketing tool that can help you target direct customer audiences, website visitors, and potential customers alike.
A Facebook Pixel events can be as easy or complex as you’d like. Use the pixel on one or more locations on your website and begin measuring cross-device delivery conversions, ensuring your ads are being shown to people that are more likely to convert into a real business.
The conversion pixels allow taking action in your business while learning about valuable website traffic information when using the Facebook Pixel dashboard in your Events Manager.
From an advertising perspective the Facebook pixel does three things exceptionally well. It can track conversions, allowing you to optimize Ads, and create custom retargeting Ads.
What are conversions? And why Facebook pixel ads reign superior.
Conversions have come to mean many different things since the beginning of internet marketing. Fifteen years ago an online ad campaign would be judged successful based upon the number of “clicks” an advertisement received.
Companies would simply track the success of a marketing campaign based upon the number of people that clicked on the ad, telling them that the ad converted and the correct audience was reached and engaged.
Today Facebook pixel code quietly tracks which pages of a website are being viewed. Whether we are reading about politics, or shopping for our favourite clothing brand.
Facebook pixel is collecting data based on our website activity for future advertising opportunities, with success being measured by the actual conversion ratio of audiences we reach.
A conversion opportunitytoday can be best explained as a completed action by an individual on your website. That completed action can be defined by you by using the tracking pixel data.
As already mentioned, early internet marketing tactics viewed the click as being a conversion. However today we are able to define what a conversion is by using the tracking pixel data.
A conversion can be someone visiting your website, searching your website, when something is added to a shopping cart, added to a wish-list, if they initiate to checkout, or complete the final purchase.
All these tasks can be tracked as conversion opportunities. Allowing us to gather much more accurate data on our custom audiences or consumers than ever before.
All this information then helps to optimize a Facebook ad, target our direct market, and understand click versus conversion ratio better than ever before.
Consider this example.
Last year you advertised your copywriting services for $50 per email online. You paid $400 to run an ad, and were given details that it reached 400 individuals, for a cost of $1 per individual. Of those 400 individuals, 200 clicked on the ad.
That would be considered successful, wouldn’t it? A 50% conversion ratio in early internet marketing terms.
Well maybe not.
What if I told you using the Facebook pixel instead, the data told you of those 200 who clicked on the ad, only TWO people actually signed up for your services.
That would actually translate to a 1% conversion rate, and a return of only $100 in business for that $400 investment, or a $300 loss! Pixel is a wizard in showing you this critical information.
One of the most important functions of a Facebook pixel is its ability to track these conversions.
Inside your ads manager, it will tell you how many people converted or clicked on a particular ad, and the cost per conversion. This helps you find out immediately if you are wasting money earning clicks that don’t go anywhere like traditional marketing tactics.
Install the Facebook pixel on each and every webpage on your website you wish, it’s that simple. Creating website custom audiences, or an ad campaign with true custom conversions for specific individuals has never been so easy.
How using a Facebook pixel code lets you optimize Facebook ads
The flexibility that Facebook Business Manager gives you in optimizing ads is incredible. If you are serious about online marketing, this is a must-use tool for Facebook advertising.
It allows you to automatically improve and manage your ads, showing them to a custom audience of people that are more likely to convert into a possible lead or sale.
Use the Facebook pixel to create custom advertisements based upon your website visitors, their onsite behaviour, and most importantly Facebook user profiles.
In Facebook’s own words, the pixel “is an analytics tool that allows you to measure the effectiveness of your advertising by understanding the actions people take on your website”
When you create a pixel id and install the pixel onto a webpage on your website, it creates the perfect environment to gather customer data, store that information, and ultimately target the exact audience or customers you wish with a Facebook ad.
For example, a shopper visits your website browsing all of the products or services you offer, and puts something in the website shopping cart. The shopper then leaves the site without completing the purchase.
If you have a Facebook pixel installed, it is quietly sitting in the background and gathering data on the visited pages.
The pixel is synced with Facebook and knows from the data when the shopper jumps back onto Facebook or Instagram.
As an advertiser, we can now send ads to that same shopper that left the website without purchasing what was added to the cart.
This keeps your brand in front of the shopper and allows you to send specific ads to them based on the actions they took on your website.
Create Custom Audiences using the Facebook pixel data in ads manager
First, let’s look at what I mean by creating custom audiences.
For example, you sell athletic apparel including bike shorts. The Facebook pixel will not only register which people browsed your web pages for bike shorts but when they did.
You could then create a custom audience for people who landed on your bike shorts page in the last 90 days.
You would then create Facebook ads to retarget these exact customers with a bike short advertisement the next time they access social media.
Custom audiences allow you to target people who have already come to your website and converted a purchase.
Only with custom audiences can you track “big spenders” who already landed on a thank you page.
Choosing to show Facebook ads to that segment of people who have spent money on the more expensive items on your site. Creating custom ad campaigns is simple with pixels.
What are Lookalike Audiences?
The next best thing about Facebook pixel and ads is the ability to create “lookalike audiences“.
In short, this function allows you to target Facebook profile users that closest align with your best customers.
Facebook pixels can identify people in their algorithms that share similar traits and interests.
So if you find that “bike short” customers that purchase on your site are often women between the ages of 20-25 and live in urban regions, you can create a similar audience that has the same traits as the purchasers on your website.
You can send ads to the new Lookalike Audience with a better conversion chance because the Facebook pixel and algorithm knows what a purchaser looks like now.
Optimizing your advertising has never been this simple. Marketers should love Facebook ads because it allows you to increase overall brand awareness by targeting the direct people that are likely to pay attention to them.
While the reach with Facebook ads is endless, it all depends on the budget you put forth for your campaigns.
Facebook pixel allows you to transform your company with smarter advertising measurements than ever imagined. More and more businesses are finding the exact consumer audience they wish, all thanks to the using Facebook pixel.
Conversions come easier with retargeting ads through Facebook pixel
Facebook pixels and retargeting is a breeze with the tracking of both “standard events” and “custom events“.
Standard events are things that Facebook pixel tracks automatically once installed. They include website actions that people take and include page views, add to cart, view content, contact, donate, lead, search, and subscribe just to name a few.
When these events take place on your webpage by a visitor, the Facebook pixel will report that information, creating a perfect database of website traffic and visitor actions to better understand consumer behaviour for preciously curated retargeting ads.
Custom events on the other hand are just this, events you decide to design and track yourself. This can best be described as giving you the ability to track more granular data around events that take place on your page.
This can take form in several things, but for example, you can measure the depth to which a page visitor scrolls, or how long into a video they get before closing.
All this data can be extremely valuable in learning how to convert that potential visitor into a customer, or one-time customer into a repeat brand loyal consumer.
41 different studies found the average online shopping cart abandonment rate is just under 70%. Which means roughly seven out of ten online shoppers do not complete their transaction.
This percentage is alarming for all e-commerce businesses.
It means one simple thing, if you want to grow your business, website, or page, retargeting ads are necessary.
As I touched upon above, a Facebook pixel can help any website grow with their advertising optimization.
Retargeting is arguably the last and most important channel when using Facebook ads.
25% of online viewers enjoy seeing retargeting ads. {Source: CMO}
Picture this, you are scrolling online retailers for a new vacuum cleaner. The current one you have is junk.
After doing hours of research and reading reviews on the best of the best, you land on a site selling them. After adding the product to your cart, your laptop dies.
You decide its almost dinner time, you’ll continue with the purchase later, saving more money never hurt anyone.
Well, weeks go by and you open social media and see a Facebook ad for that same vacuum cleaner. Instinctively you click on the ad after remembering how the current one you have is junk, and decide now is the time to replace it.
This is why 25% of online viewers enjoy seeing retargeting ads. Facebook pixel and retargeting remind us of the purchases we were planning on making before life took over.
It pulls the consumer back in to make the purchase.
Haven’t we all used the add to wishlist, add to cart, or add payment info for a product and then gotten distracted? This is why you should create and install the pixel, it helps you get started in converting more online visitors, to happy paying customers.
People who see retargeting ads are up to 70% more likely to convert. {Source: Kenshoo}
Potential customers are everywhere online. They stumble upon your page, are likely to take a while browsing the website, but leave before checking out!
Retargeting ads with Facebook pixel recaptures the consumer’s interest and brings them back to complete a purchase.
This is a huge marketing opportunity as the Facebook pixel can recognize each page, and offer a discount code to specifically those customers during their next shopping experience.
The advertising opportunities with Facebook pixels are endless.
In general, only 2% of shopper convert on their first visit to an online store. The goal of retargeting is to bring back the other 98% {Source: ADROLL}
Facebook pixel can help any business with conversions, or any page or site grow by using pixel tracking.
As consumers today we are tied to our smartphones, and with 7 out of 10 American’s having a Facebook profile, the data being collected by pixel is astounding.
This means that those conversions have never been easier than they are today.
Unlock potential customers by installing the Facebook pixel on your page, and stop foregoing valuable information.
By now you should understand that reaching your business advertising goals has never been easier with the addition of tracking data. It is a no brainer to create a Facebook pixel and install that pixel on your site or landing page.
Now is the time to leave the guesswork out, let our team at Swan Media Solutions Inc. help you reach the true potential of your business with a Facebook pixel.
Understanding how Facebook pixel works is simple, but creating Facebook ads and campaigns is real science.
Let us do to heavy lifting, we can’t wait to help you reach growth you never imagined.