The Facebook Ad Pixel: How It Works and Why You Need It
Ever wonder the magic behind successful Facebook ads? The Facebook Ad Pixel unlocks powerful solutions in digital advertising by measuring the impact of your paid promotions and ads. Facebook is undoubtedly the most used social media platform in the world and the most popular on the African continent. It only becomes imperative that marketers and organisations understand the actions people take after seeing their ads, subsequently tracking conversions and measuring the return on advertising.
The Facebook Ad Pixel is a piece of code placed on your website and works by dropping a cookie that helps optimise Facebook ads, track conversions, build targeted audiences for future ads, and remarket to people who have already taken some kind of action on your website. The Pixel makes advertising on Facebook easier and takes the effort out of creating better ads. The data gives you a wholesome picture of visitor behavior on your website and for that reason – you can install the Pixel even before you begin investing in ads. So how do you install the Pixel?
How To Install
Step 1: Visit the Ads Manager for your Facebook page.
Step 2: Navigate to the “Pixels” tab under Events Manager and click Create a Pixel.
Step 3: Name your Pixel and hit Create. You can track activity by viewing Pixels in your navigation menu and finding the tab that reads “Measure and Report”.
Step 4: The next step is to install the Pixel to your website. You can do one of three things – make use of the integration or tag manager; manually install the code to your website; or get a developer to help you install the code to your website.
To add the Pixel yourself: If you are comfortable updating your website’s code, find the <head> tags in the header template in your web platform. Next copy the entire Pixel code and paste it in the header section, just above the closing head tag. Finally, check to see if your code is working correctly by hitting Click Send Traffic and waiting for your status to say “Active”.
To have a developer add the Pixel: Navigate to the Pixels tab in Ads Manager and if you’ve already generated the Pixel, click Email Instructions to a Developer. Follow instructions to insert an email and hit Send.
The Power of Pixels
The Facebook Ad Pixel offers three main functions to help you get a better return on investment and create better and smarter ads.
Custom Audiences From Your Website
Facebook helps you retarget website visitors through custom audiences from your website. The Pixel helps track visitor paths and behaviors on your website if they’re simultaneously logged into Facebook on any device. The dropped cookie records their visit and saves pages they visit. This data helps advertise to very targeted groups of people.
Custom Conversions
The Pixel’s ability to create Custom Conversions similar to how you create Custom Audiences is one of the most exciting parts of the tool. A Custom Conversion is created by selecting a completion page and naming the conversion. Usually, the completion page is in the form of a thank-you page. This means that you can create Custom Conversions independently of your Facebook ads, and then choose when to use them in the future. You can also choose the category for the conversion and add a monetary value.
Custom and Standard Events
If you only use Custom Audiences and Custom Conversions, you’re in great shape as it is an advanced feature of the Facebook pixel. You can create Custom and Standard events with a bit of extra code. Through Custom and Standard events, you can get past your limit of 40 Custom Conversions, get more robust analytics and reporting, and have greater accuracy. While Custom Conversions are tied to a URL (usually to a completion page), Custom and Standard events don’t need to be. Instead, conversions can be tracked by adding an additional line of the code to the page of interest. This code tells Facebook what to track, and will be inserted into the Facebook pixel code — but only on the page you want to track conversions on.
Facebook adds the possibilities to use one single Pixel to do everything and a lot more. Over enough time, this simple piece of code will gather data that allows you to monitor customer behaviors and scale your ads in a smarter and more efficient manner.
Still have questions? The Tribe of Brands team is available to help you unlock the full potential of the Facebook Ad Pixel and manage conversion tracking on your website to get the most out of your Facebook ads.
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