What Is A Facebook Pixel In Digital Marketing?

Digital marketing comes with many tools to help businesses and advertisers drive amazing results. But while these tools can accomplish a lot, it’s important to understand their limitations. In this article, our Facebook Ads Experts will explain deeply about Facebook pixel in digital marketing.

Take Facebook advertising, one of the simplest and cost-effective ways to get your products or services to an audience of people. But, if you’re running Facebook ads without installing the Facebook pixel, you are only leveraging part of what this advertising system truly has to offer.

You might also be interested in  IS IT WORTH IT TO ADVERTISE ON FACEBOOK?

The Gap in the Facebook Ads Funnel

Facebook gathers a lot of information from its users, and all this information can be tapped into by advertisers looking for their target audience.

You can tailor your ads to great lengths, choosing not just location, but also gender, age, interests, and even certain behaviours.

The problem is, while Facebook can tell you a lot about what people do on their platform, right down to when they are most active and what device they use, they have no idea what goes on outside of it.

Consider this scenario: you run a Facebook ad looking to sell more of one of your products. Facebook shows this ad to the people you want, and it can tell you how people interacted with it on the platform. It can show you reach, impressions, and the number of clicks to your landing page.

But clicks aren’t what you’re looking for. What you want is for people to buy your product. Say you see 1000 people clicked on the landing page, but only 10 bought the product. What now?

Well, Facebook has no idea what happened on your landing page because they have no way to track conversions on your site. You can maybe see this information in your Google Analytics and deduce certain reasons why visitors did not purchase the product, but you’ll still have some missing puzzle pieces.

But by installing the Facebook pixel, you allow Facebook advertising to track the user after they leave the social media platform, and get to see what actually happened on the site, such as the fact that they did initiate checkout, but did end up converting all the way.

What Is the Facebook Pixel?

All pixels are essentially snippets of code you can install on your website to allow the advertising platform you use to track user behaviour on your site. Google also has its own pixel to allow you to better track the journey of a potential customer coming from Google Ads.

Pixels work by tracking specific events or actions you are interested in, such as add to cart. When you’re running an ad campaign to increase sales, it can be quite beneficial to have the Facebook pixel tell you more information about why a potential customer who engaged with your ad did not complete the purchase.

How to Leverage the Facebook Pixel?

The Facebook pixels need you to establish an event you want to track.

First, you have standard events, which are a list of common types of conversions a lot of businesses want to track, such as:

• Add to cart
• Add payment info
• Completing a purchase
• Add to wish list
• Donate
• Initiate checkout
• Start trial
• Submit applications, etc.

But, there is also a custom events option you can use in case there is a specific action not included in the standard event you really need to track. You can also use custom events to tailor a standard event to your specific needs and optimise your tracking.

Below, let’s consider some of the best ways any brand can leverage the Facebook Pixel and make sure their Facebook marketing efforts pay off big time:

1. Facebook conversion tracking

So the pixel lets you see how people interact with your site after viewing and clicking on your ad. One of the biggest perks here is that Facebook allows you to track cross-device usage.

Meaning perhaps a user first visits your site on mobile, then comes back on desktop to complete the purchase. Facebook won’t count this as two separate users, meaning your data will be a lot more accurate.

To optimise this approach, you can also create Custom Conversions which will allow you to create certain rules for the events. For instance, let’s say you are only interested in users who have brought version A of a product because you want to gather more information on them to improve your ads later on. You can create a custom conversion and rule out those who bought versions B, C, D, and so on.

2. Facebook retargeting

Say a potential customer visits your site, hits ‘add to cart’, but for some reason didn’t complete the process. Without the pixel, that’s a kind of opportunity you likely won’t get back.

But with the Facebook pixel installed, you can reach that potential customer again because Facebook knows exactly who they are, the products they added to their carts, and they can find them again with a reminder to go back and finish the process.

Retargeting is an amazing way to increase conversions. A lot of people don’t finish paying for a product not because they changed their minds, but because something happened. Maybe their phone rang, battery died, or they generally got distracted. Instead of relying on them to remember to come back and finish the conversion, you take matters into your own hands.

3. Create lookalike audiences

So you have information about the types of users who’ve bought a specific product. You know who they are and can retarget them with complementary offers later on.

But, if you want to extend your reach even further, you should create lookalike audiences. This option takes the audience base you want (such as people who’ve bought a product), and then looks for new users with similar characteristics.

The thought process is that similar people tend to like similar things. So if a lot of women, aged 20-35 who like vintage shoes brought your product, Facebook can take your ads to a similar group of people, without you having to manually create the audience like you would for other ads.

The Facebook pixel significantly cuts down the time and effort you would need to manually look over your audience, identify any patterns or major commonalities between the users, and then create the audiences.

Leverage the Facebook Pixel Even Further with AIAD

Installing the Facebook pixels is one of the best strategic moves any Australian business can make to enhance their digital marketing efforts and generate a lot more revenue for this social media platform.

But if you really want this effort to pay off, the Facebook marketing team at Australian Internet Advertising is ready to assist you. We can help you create a strong Facebook ads strategy and utilize the Pixel to its full potential.

If you want to learn more about your services and our process, reach out to us online, or call our team at 1300 304 640 for a chat.