If anyone asks me what I think is the most important thing when it comes to advertising, I’d say “data”.
Nowadays when a war breaks out, the most valuable places wouldn’t be government offices anymore, they would be “datacenters” because in the digital age, companies that have the most data would have an enormous edge over their competitors.
That’s why many gigantic companies are willing to breach the privacy of their users in order to gain data (looking at you Google & Facebook) and there are sites like Duckduckgo that don’t store user data are rising.
That’s how powerful collecting and having data is.
When you advertise on Facebook, the best thing you can do for your campaign is to collect data of your target audience so you can see insights about them and decipher their behaviors and put the right offers in front of them.
That’s why today I want to be talking about Facebook pixel.
Most people think that it’s just a piece of code (which they are practically right) and they don’t care to know more about what this little piece of code can do to their ad campaign.
You can do so much with Facebook Pixel.
Table of Contents
What you will learn from this blog post
- What Facebook pixel really is
- Is the pixel really important?
- How Facebook Pixel works
- How to install Facebook pixel on your site
- How to measure results from data collected by Pixel
- Kickass conclusion of the whole thing
Now that we are on the same page, let’s understand what Facebook pixel really is and how it works.
What’s Facebook Pixel
Basically Facebook pixel is just a piece of code that you embed in your website so that Facebook can help you collect activities of your website visitors and store it in Facebook analytics for you to see.
If you are familiar with Google analytics, it works exactly the same way.
Here’s how Facebook pixel code looks like.
Then you can decide whatever you want to do with the data you’ve collected whether you want to do remarketing or anything, it’s all up to you.
The only thing you “need” to know is to embed the code “before” running your ad otherwise you’ll be missing out on a lot of valuable data.
3 things you need to know about Facebook Pixel
Now in this section I am going to share with you about what you need to know about Facebook pixel so when you do your own Facebook pixel installation, you’d know what to expect.
1.) Facebook Pixel is totally customizable
If you have a bit of coding knowledge, you can customize the pixel code to track anything you like. You just have to use their code strings and you’ll be good to go.
I am not much of a developer, I barely know any codes but I still can wrap my head around using it. So I am sure everyone can do it if they put in a bit of effort, if not you can always hire someone off Fiverr for $5 to do it for you.
2.) Facebook provides clear and insightful analytics
A couple of years ago, Facebook didn’t launch their Facebook analytics platform yet so whatever Facebook Pixel collected back then were only available to Facebook employees.
But now things have changed and you can view insightful analytics using their Facebook analytics platform. It works similar to Google analytics but much more insightful in terms of Facebook ads.
This is how the analytics platform looks like.
You can get ideas of how your visitors interact on your website and you can even set up a tracking funnel as well. Pretty neat!
3.) It allows you to do a more accurate targeting
We all know that the deeper and more accurate targeting, the better. Because advertising is basically interrupting your target audience and have them look at the ad and they’ll have to figure out if they like it or not.
The data that Facebook pixel collects is going to help you gain a better understanding of your target audience and you will see a clearer picture of who they are and what triggers them to buy.
This is all very valuable data that the Pixel can collect for you.
Now that you understand what Facebook Pixel can do and how much of an impact it can give to your campaign, we should have a look at how you can install and start using it.
How to install Facebook Pixel by yourself (Step-by-step)
Installing Facebook Pixel on your site isn’t that hard to do, follow my instructions step by step and you will be good to go.
Step #1: head over to your ad manager and then click on the 3 bar icon on the upper left corner.
Step #2: You’ll see a drop down menu that looks like this, you will see an option called “Pixel” here. Click on it.
for those of you who already have installed Pixels on your site, you will see something like this.
And for people who haven’t installed their Pixel yet, I am going to show you how to do it right now in the next step.
Step #3: If you haven’t created any Facebook pixel in your account yet, you will see a page like this instead of the one I showed you above.
What you need to do is to click on “set up pixel” to get started.
Step #4: You’ll be prompted with 3 options, use tag manager, manually install it yourself, or email it to your web developer to install it for you.
In this guide, we’ll stick with “manual installation”. So choose “Manually Install the Code Yourself”.
Step #5: Scroll down a little bit and you will see this piece of code. Copy the whole thing.
And place it in your below the closing of your header tag (/head) and that’s it.
Now for people who use WordPress and not as technical like me, I’d recommend you to use a plugin instead.
Instead of copying the whole piece of Pixel code, all you need to do is to copy the number over here where we’ll use in the next step after installing a plugin.
Now that you should head over to your website and go to your WordPress backend and then add a new plugin. Search for “Facebook Pixel” here in the search bar.
After you’ve installed the plugin – you are almost done. You should be prompted with a page where you can input your Pixel number like this.
Just paste the number that you’ve copied into the field here.
And then you have to wait for awhile for the pixel to be fully installed and when it’s installed on your site correctly, you will see this on your Pixel page on the “ad manager”.
It’s not hard, right? After you’ve done it a couple of times, it’d only take you 2 minutes max. to do all of this.
How to check if your Pixel is installed correctly
You might want to know if the Pixel has been installed correctly on your website and I am going to show you what I like to do to check it.
Assuming that you use “Google Chrome” there’s a good extension called “Facebook Pixel Helper” created by Facebook to help people like us check if the Pixel is installed and collecting data.
Head over to Chrome web store to search for “Facebook Pixel Helper” and you will find an extension that looks like this.
Now all you need to do is to go to your website and click on the extension icon and it will show you if the website has Facebook pixel installed.
If you don’t use Google Chrome, that’s okay – you just have to wait for awhile for Facebook to collect some data and then check back to see if you see any stats on your Facebook analytics account.
How to optimize your Pixel for better performance
This is only for people who like to tweak and optimize things to their liking, but to me, I don’t normally do this because I think that whatever Facebook has created is already working fine for me.
But for the sake of making this guide as valuable to you as possible, I’ll show you what you can do to optimize and tweak the pixel to your liking.
Here’s a list of standard event code strings that you can add to your pixel
All you need to do is to add the parameters to the already existing pixel code and you are good to go. Note that I am not much of a technical person so you can correct me if I am wrong about coding. Haha.
How Pixel can help you create better ads
As I told you before that advertising is all about collecting data and utilize it to create better ads for your target audience, especially when you aim to do remarketing as well.
You can also use Facebook Pixel to help you collect data from your A/B tests to measure which ads work best for you.
The example below shows that Etsy uses the data collected by Pixel to do a remarketing campaign that targets only people who’ve watched more than 75% of the webinar length.
How you can go see analytics that Pixel’s collected
I already mentioned a little bit about how Pixel collects and displays the data for you to see, unlike a couple years before when advertisers were kept in the dark.
I really like the new analytics that Facebook has launched called “Facebook analytics” – the analytics that it shows are specifically made to better understand your customers to use for Facebook ad campaigns.
I see that it’s definitely not a competitor to Google analytics because they display different types of data from each other.
You can easily go to see your analytics by going over to Facebook analytics and then log into your account and you will see this.
And then you will see this page where you can see all of the analytics of your visitor’s activities on your website, their countries, web referrers, web browsers, genders, age and so on.
The analytics seems to be a lot more accurate than Google analytics (in my opinion).
There’s a lot to talk about Facebook analytics, if you are interested in it, I would consider writing a separate blog post detailing how Facebook analytics works and how you can get the best of it.
Conclusion
Pixel is your best friend when advertising on Facebook because you are going to need data to better understand your target audience and serve them the right kind of ads with the right offer.
You will get to learn what triggers them to buy and what makes them ignore your ads completely. All of that data will be collected by Facebook pixel.
When you have enough data, you can create a great list of Lookalike AudienceĀ where you can scale your campaign from 100 orders a day to 1,000+ order a day with no extra work at all.
So my last words for this blog post is “always collect data” because sooner or later you are going to badly need it.
Good luck for today š