It’s no secret that Facebook has become one of the most efficient ways to advertise online. However, when launching ads through Facebook, many people tend to focus on the reach of their posts, rather than what’s most important; engagement. Reach is used to measure the total size of your potential audience, while engagement is used to measure who is actually interacting with your ad. The Facebook pixel directly reports engagement and can help create more opportunities for your business.
What is it?
The Facebook pixel is an analytics tool that allows you to fully measure the effectiveness of your ads by examining the actions people take on your website. It’s simply a short piece of code placed onto your website that allows you to track conversions, optimize ads, and create retargeting ads.
How the Facebook Pixel Works
The Facebook pixel is made up of a Base code, and a Standard Event code. The Base code identifies your Facebook account, and is placed on every page of your website. This code does not change. The Standard Event code specifies the action that you are tracking for, and is placed on the corresponding pages of your site. This way, the Facebook pixel will only be triggered when someone completes the action you’re tracking for. For example, if you are tracking sales, place your “Purchase” Standard Event Code on the thank you page.
With your Facebook pixel, you may track up to 9 standard event actions, including: View Content, Search, Add To Cart, Add To Wish list, Initiate Checkout, Add Payment Info, Purchase, Lead, or Complete Registration.
Once the Facebook pixel is triggered, the information on who engaged with your website will be sent back to Facebook using the visitor's Facebook ID. Now, you know what types of customers are taking action, what pages they are looking at, and even what devices they’re viewing your website on. To help drive more sales, you’re able to set up automatic bidding to target those more likely to make a purchase.
Additionally, Facebook can take the people who have visited your website and build a new audience of similar types of people, based on the data that they know about their users, and then show advertisements to these people. This very effective strategy is called "Lookalike Audiences." Read more about lookalike audiences here.
These elements of the Facebook pixel make up the perfect recipe for retargeting ads, and launching effective Facebook ads geared toward your active, intended audience. One statistic to remember is that retargeted customers are 70x more likely to make a purchase.
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Creating a Facebook Pixel
The process of creating a Facebook pixel is fairly straight-forward.
Directions can be found in Facebook’s Pixel Implementation Guide.