It’s time for another dose of Measurement Magic, with the Data Fairy!
And today’s topic is Facebook pixels.
What on earth are they, and why would you even want one?
There’s two really important things that having a Facebook pixel on your site can do for you, but you’ll have to watch my video, or read the transcript below, to find out what they are!
So do you have a Facebook pixel set up on your website? And are you collecting a custom audience for your website?
Let me know in the comments below.
Video Transcript
Hello! I’m Nikki, the Data Fairy from MeasureWhatWorks.com and it’s time for another dose of “Measurement Magic” and today’s topic is Facebook pixels.
What are they and why would you even want one?
So, what the heck is a Facebook pixel? A Facebook pixel is a fancy name for a piece of code.
When you set up a Facebook ad account, Facebook gives you the “pixel code” which is a script. It’s a piece of code that goes on your website and it loads on every page when someone visits your website.
If they’re also signed into their Facebook account, it sends data back to Facebook about them and their activity on your site.
So that’s what a pixel is, a piece of code.
What does it do and why do you want one?
So when someone visits a page on your site and they’re doing things on your site, they’re sending data back to Facebook and if they’re logged into Facebook, it’s connecting up with their account and Facebook is saying, well this person visited this page, this person visited this page, this person did this, this person did that.
So the primary reason why you’d want one is if you’re doing Facebook ads.
And there are two things that having the pixel installed on your website can do for you if you plan on running Facebook ads either now or at some point in the future.
So even if you plan on doing it at some point in the future, it’s probably worth still having the Facebook pixel set up.
The first thing is, is that it actually allows you to track the performance of your ads, on Facebook.
So if you have a conversion objective for your campaign, so you’re actually wanting people to go to your site and buy something or complete some kind of sign up process – signing up for a newsletter, signing up for a webinar, signing up for an appointment – you can set up a pixel to actually send data back to Facebook about that event, that conversion.
And so if you’re paying for ads, Facebook uses that data to then show your ads to people who are more likely to convert on your website.
So having that pixel on your website allows you to spend your money more wisely when you’re running Facebook ads for a particular outcome, on Facebook.
The other reason is… audiences.
I love audiences because it means you can actually collect a list of people who have been to your site.
Custom audiences are what they’re called in Facebook and you can go to your Ads Manager, to the audience section, and set up custom audiences based again on the behaviour of people on your website.
So let’s say you’re running a campaign to get people to sign up for a webinar.
You can create a list of people who made it as far as say, the landing page of the webinar but didn’t make it to the thank you page, and you could target ads at them subsequently.
It’s called retargeting because you’re targeting them again, to say “Hey, I noticed you were interested in my webinar but you didn’t sign up. Are you interested in something else that I do?”
Or if you want to you can run ads to people who did sign up to your webinar to then sell them something further.
Anyway, so the point is that having that pixel in place allows you to collect audiences, groups of people on Facebook who have performed certain actions on your website, and one of the really powerful things about them also is that you can then use them to expand your audience using something called a look-alike.
So, a look-alike audience takes your existing list of people who’ve been to your website and then within the country that you’re interested in targeting, will find a number of people who look a lot like the people have already been to your website, using all of the demographics that Facebook have.
And it can be really powerful because you’re basically saying to Facebook, “Find me more people like this” and that’s what they do.
So those are the two main things that you can do, having a Facebook pixel on your site.
Tracking conversions for ad campaigns and making custom audiences.
So now you know, the Facebook pixel is just a piece of code that sends information back to Facebook about what people are doing on your site and that having it there allows you to make better use of your ad spend and to create audiences that are ideal for running ads to in the future.
So, now I’d like to hear from you.
Do you have a Facebook pixel installed? If you don’t, I highly recommend you go and do it and then come back here and let me know that you’ve done it.
And if you do have the Facebook pixel installed, have you set up a custom audience to collect the visitors that are coming from your site?
The sooner you start, the sooner you’ll build a list that’s big enough to actually using in a campaign. If you haven’t, I recommend you go and do that and come back here and let me know.
I hope you found this useful and I will see you in the next video.
Have a great day!
Nikki, The Biz Pixie
