Facebook advertising has come a long way over the years. The social media platform has long moved on from its initial purpose of helping people connect with their childhood friends and show pictures of babies.
Now, the Facebook Business Manager is one of the most important tools for digital marketing we have. When you run a Facebook campaign, you can potentially:
- Increase your brand awareness
- Sell more products
- Get more valuable leads
- Nurture an audience, etc.
But as the needs of marketers increase, Facebook ads become more and more complicated, with tens of different features which promise to deliver amazing results. But not all these features are mandatory to running an ad that delivers great results, while some require a bit of understanding in order to truly leverage.
Case in point, the Facebook pixel. Do you need it, or is just a marketing fad?
Technically? No. But You May Still Want It
Facebook allows you to run quite extensive campaigns without requiring the Facebook pixel. Still, in some cases, marketers may have more to gain from it than they think.
Let’s consider how Facebook marketing works. You create an ad with a specific purpose in mind, be it getting more page likes, link clicks, or even purchases. You run your campaigns on Facebook, using their audience base and trying to convince them to convert.
If your idea to convert is to like your page, then you can easily see if the ads paid off in the end. Facebook is able to track every single move done on their platform and provide advertisers with essential data they can use to optimise their ads.
But what if the conversion takes place out Facebook’s site, on your landing page? Facebook, on its own, can tell you what the user did up until they click on the link, but once they reach your landing page that’s it. Facebook cannot continue to track those users.
But if you install the Facebook pixel, the platform can continue to track data from those user’s behaviours and give you a better overall view of their journey to converting, or identify the reason why they didn’t.
Benefits of the Facebook Pixel
The Facebook Pixel is a piece of code you get from your Ads Manager and copy-paste to your website. With it, you can set up different events to track on particular web pages you’re interested in and improve your marketing strategy for the future to get even better results.
If your goal is to get people to leave Facebook and land on another page, where they need to perform a certain action, then having the pixel installed could be very beneficial.
Here are some of the main benefits of installing the Facebook pixel.
1. Getting to Know Your Audience
The Facebook pixel tracks user activity on your site. This is an incredible advantage because you can gain a lot of insights into your current and potential audience.
You can:
- Understand how cross-device promotion influence conversion
- Optimise ad delivery
- Create custom audiences from website visitors
- See how people use your websites
Knowing all these aspects of your audience is essential to increasing your conversion rates.
2. Use Retargeting
Do you have a lot of people who click on the add to cart button, but don’t finish their purchase? Well, through the data collected with the Facebook pixel you can reach those people again and remind them they have some items in their cart.
Some users may go through different stages of the funnel, and just when they’re about to convert something happens and takes them away. But though remarketing, you can get in contact with these users and bring them back to your site.
Remarketing has some of the best conversion rates of any form of targeting out there because you’re dealing with users who’ve visited your site and have gone through most of the actions you wanted them to. Oftentimes, it just takes another ad for them to go back and finish their purchase.
3. Create Special Offers
While the Facebook pixel tracks users activities, you can then retarget those users with additional ads. This is not retargeting per se because they are users who’ve technically converted.
But say you have a lot of users who’ve bought a particular product, and you also have a complementary product they may be interested in. If the Facebook pixel tracks the purchases of that product, you can then target these buyers with an ad for that complementary product, and maybe even provide a discount or a special offer to sweeten the deal. This helps move one-time buyers to loyal customers.
You can also create custom conversions and tell the pixel to track very specific types of conversion. Maybe you don’t want all people who’ve bought a particular product – maybe you just want those who’ve bought at least two items of it. You can tell Facebook to track that specific event and use it to create a custom audience based on that criteria.
4. Create Lookalike Audiences
You can create lookalike audiences based on the one you form through the pixel data. Facebook can take a custom audience from the Pixel and target users who are similar in behaviour, interests, and demographics but have never visited your site before.
Lookalike audiences is one of the best strategies you can adopt to increase your reach and get new potential customers on your site.
5. Optimise for Conversions
Without the tracking pixel, Facebook ads can only be optimised for link clicks, which may not be your goal. That can lead to higher campaign costs because Facebook is not targeting the right audience for you, meaning that segment of your target audience most likely to perform the action you want.
Facebook knows which of its users are likely to react, click links, and buy products. But to reach those people, you need to tell it what your goal is.
With the pixel, your cost per click lowers because Facebook will follow along your conversion requirements, and get your ads to users who are likely to convert.
6. Gain Access to Better Tools
Your ad account already has some metrics to check on your Facebook ad campaign performance, but again – it’s just what is tracked on the site. With the Facebook pixel, you can access a lot more information about the overall campaigns performance, including the cost per lead or the cost per conversion, which you cannot find in your Ads Manager.
Improve Your Facebook Ads with Us
A well-designed Facebook ad campaign can present a lot of opportunities for businesses big and small, but to reap the benefits you first have to start with a good foundation.
If you want to leverage Facebook Advertising and start growing your business, we can help you build that foundation. Book a free session with Australian Internet Advertising now to get started on your Facebook ads strategy!
