When creating a business, we need it to be an efficient one as we want as much profit as possible. Nevertheless, with offline businesses, it doesn’t really matter. If you open an establishment in a crowded place where thousands of people go by every day, the flow of customers will be huge. But don’t expect a lot of customers if you’re in the outskirts.
In online businesses, everything is confusing. Even a small microblog potentially has access to hundreds of millions of users at the same time. Even expensive hosting, a domain in the .com zone, and an attractive website won’t guarantee a big flow of users. The most optimal solution would be advertising, but showing ads is also not enough. That’s where the Facebook Pixel becomes vital. It will not automatically start directing clients to your website, but it will help you interact with your audience easily.
What is a Facebook Pixel?
A Facebook Pixel is basically JavaScript. It tracks the user’s actions, the pages it visits, the forms filled out, and how much time it spends on the service. After adding it, a one-pixel dot will appear somewhere, that is effectively the Facebook Pixel and where the tool had its name.
Is more than a tracker, it allows you to find out everything about your audience and customize it. Is not just a liaison to the advertiser account. It takes into account the audience’s behavior when analyzing the data, based on data from the Facebook userbase.
For example, if a user is searching for any product in your store, Facebook will show him an ad reminding him about a pending purchase. Or, it will show him a banner promoting similar products, or it will shame the ad of the product to users with similar interests.
How the Facebook Pixel actually works
The FB Pixel is a script, which is basically a small application that is executed by the browser when the user visits the website. It reads information from the browser Cookies, which is used to identify Facebook users (thanks to an ID).
The code contains tracking features. If a user performs one of the tracked actions, the Pixel records it and sends the information to the Facebook Ads Manager and you can view the statistics.
Basic Pixel features
The value of the Facebook Pixel is that it identifies users from different social networks and lets you set target-based actions, behavior actions, and taking into account interests and information collected. The Javascript code keeps track of which buttons are pressed by the user, the page it views, what products has studied, and which ones were sent to the cart.
The actions get sent to the account, which means you can:
- Perform retargeting.
- Optimize the advertising.
- Collect a similar audience.
- Remove the non-important audience.
Remarketing: Retargeting, is showing advertising to visitors who have visited the website in the past but didn’t take a particular action.
Ad optimization: You can review how your audience behaves after visiting the website along with from which devices the conversion rate is the highest.
Look-a-Like Audience – Pixel allows you to find people who are similar to your customers. They can be the same age with similar hobbies, level of education, and GEO location.
Removing non-relevant audience: You can remove users who visited the website or saw the ad and went to the landing page, but only spent a few seconds and didn’t do any action, basically, you can exclude users with a high bounce rate.
What can be set up?
Events are the actions of visitors in an online store. The following list is the ones pre-designed by META, but you can create your own or combine them:
- Fill out a form with payment information.
- Adding products to the cart.
- Registration and contact information (mail, phone);
- Donations.
- Search for a location on the website;
- Order placing.
- Lead generation.
- Purchasing.
- Purchase planning.
- Search on the website.
- A Trial period starting.
- Pre-ordering
- Paying a subscription.
- Viewing a page.
How to Install a Facebook Pixel
Connecting an FB Pixel is not as really difficult, you don’t need any programming skills. In fact, some services like Tilda, and Shopify offer you one-click integrations. Nevertheless, if you have no idea what is HTML or PHP, you would need to reach out to the developer who developed the website. The process for creating and installing the pixel shouldn’t take more than 3 minutes:
Go to the Facebook Ads Manager, open the main menu, and select the “Events Manager” section.
If this is your first time, a message will show up asking you to connect your information. after that, you will be redirected to the Manager page, where you can view the running Pixels or add a new one, click on the “Connect Data” button.
Select a data source, it can be a website or an application. If it’s a website, select the “Internet” option.
In the next section, put the name you want, we suggest you call it FB Pixel so it can be tracked easily in other campaigns.
After that choose a connect method. It could be a Conversion API and Pixel or just the Pixel. The first option has to be done with a complex API integration, which must be done by a programmer or if you already have a tool for it. If you don’t need to integrate an API, just select the Pixel option.
Now, In the Pixel installation method, there are two options: Copy-paste the code, or the “Affiliate Integration”. This is one is good if the website was created using WordPress, Shopify, Joomla, or another similar platform. After that, all you need to do is copy the code.
If the website was built manually or the quick integration method is just not an option, select the “Install code manually” option.
After copying, open the HTML code editor in your CMS or website builder. (or edit the HTML of the website if it was built manually), then add the Facebook pixel script to the header before the closing tag and that’s it.