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Facebook Pixel: What is it and should you be using it?

Facebook Pixel is an analytics tool designed to help you measure the effectiveness of your advertising on the social networking site. It highlights exactly what actions people take on your website and can be used to make sure your adverts are being shown to the right people, generate advertising audiences and to unlock extra Facebook advertising tools. To utilise the tool, you need to add a code into the header of your website.

How will it benefit my business?

When someone visits and takes action on your site, for example if they make a purchase, the Facebook pixel is triggers, and the action is reported. This means you know when a customer takes action and you can reach this customer again through future Facebook adverts. For example, if you know someone has filled their basket but hasn’t completed the purchase, you can target them as they are very likely to be a potential customer. When selecting your target audience for your advert you can also choose to exclude certain emails, allowing you to exclude those who are already paying customers.

The pixel can be used to optimise your advert for conversions as it will tell Facebook to deliver your advert to people who are most likely to visit the checkout page of your website.

How do I set it up?

In order to utilise the tool, you need to place a pixel code into the header of your website. You will need to create a pixel on ads manager and you will need to have a website for your business and be able to update the website’s code. Follow Facebook’s set up guide for more information on how to implement the code into your site.

If you want to track more specific actions on your page you will need to update the code to tie an event to an action. There are nine standard events that you could track: view content, search, add to cart, add to wishlist, initiate checkout, add payment info, make a purchase, lead and complete registration. These are actions that happen on your website as a result of an advert or organic search and Google pixel allows you to track them.

You can also create custom conversions by adding the URL that represents your custom conversions and adding the specific code to the header. You could use a URL that contains /thankyou/php for a thank-you page after a form has been filled. This is particularly useful for sites which do not have a purchase page but do have a form for customers to fill in. If you know a customer has filled out a form, you might choose to exclude them from your targeting of your advert as you know they are already engaging with you. You can create 100 custom conversions per ad account.

How to check if my pixel is working?

In order to check if your pixel is working, go to the page you have installed the pixel on, and if it is working, the pixel will automatically send information back to Facebook. Go to the Facebook Pixel page in your Ads Manager and make sure the pixel status is set to active. The main graph shows total pixel traffic over time (regardless of whether they were associated with an advert) so you can compare this with the results from your website analytics. You can see both standard and custom events in the events tab below the traffic graph.

Keep in mind, if you are using Facebook Pixel you will need to update your privacy policy to clearly reflect this. Find out more information here.

For marketing help, don’t hesitate to contact the Webahead team today.

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