What is Facebook Pixel and Why It is Important – 2020 updated

Facebook Pixel is a central part in Facebook Advertising because of its exceptional functionalities. Today, most advertisers use Facebook Pixel with their Facebook Advertising campaign to better deliver ads, reduce marketing cost, and get the most of ROI.

What is Facebook Pixel

Facebook Pixel is a tracking code embedded into a website which allows you to monitor the effectiveness of your marketing efforts. Facebook Pixel collects data from visitors’ interactions on the website by placing and triggering cookies.

The data collected from Facebook Pixel is always securely hashed on your browser and never be shared with other parties unless you give them access.

Why Facebook Pixel is Important

Facebook Pixel is a key tool on Facebook Advertising giving you the most out of your marketing budget. Information collected by Facebook Pixel helps you to make the right decision and improve your marketing effectiveness. Here are few benefits of using Facebook Pixel

Receive Insights

Facebook Pixel gives you information about user’s interactions on a website, their demographic information, their devices they use, etc.. These useful insights help you make better decisions and optimize your marketing activities.

Focus on Your Website Visitors

Information collected from Facebook Pixel can be used to create Custom Audience used in your advertising strategy. Custom Audience matches people who visit your website with people on Facebook. If you want to show your ads on Facebook to the people who previously visited your website or people who took specific action on your website, Facebook Pixel and Custom Audience are solutions.

Find More Customer

If you want to find more customers who have some specific characteristics, you can create a Lookalike Audience. The process of creating the Lookalike Audience is that you provide Facebook the customers’ characteristics you want to target, then Facebook will scan their billions of users and find the best match for you.

When you have Facebook Pixel embedded on your website, you can collect the characteristics of your potential customers. From that information, you can create a Custom Audience which becomes the seed audience for Facebook.

Remarketing

Remarketing is a marketing tactic that you reach people who already know you. Remarketing requires you to have data about people who have engaged with your business. This data can be from your Facebook page, your apps, your off-line store data, your CRM, or your website. Customer data from a website can be collected by Facebook Pixel.

Next, you need to specify what people you want to retarget. Custom Audience on Facebook Ads Manager will help you store the customer pool who have specific actions on your website. For example, you might want to create a Custom Audience who viewed your products but didn’t make a purchase. This customer pool can be retargeted to remind them to make this purchase.

Analyze the Sales Funnel

When you understand the customer journey, you can analyse the sales funnel. For example, you can compare the number of products viewed and the number of products added to cart. If there is a huge difference, you can focus on refining the sales funnel.

Optimize Facebook Marketing Efforts

Data from Facebook Pixel gives you understandings about customer behaviours and sales funnel. From these insights, you can optimize your marketing activities to gain the most value and align more closely with business goals.

How Facebook Pixel Capture Actions

Facebook Pixel can capture specific actions that happen on your website by event code embedded on Facebook Pixel code. There are three different kinds of event:

Standard Events

Standard events are predefined actions which are recognised and supported by Facebook. These actions are: add to cart, complete registration, contact, search, ect. When using standard events you insert event code in your website’s header. Here is the list of events supported by Facebook.

Custom Events

Custom events are actions that fall outside the list covered by standard events. You can create and add custom events similar to standard events.

Custom Conversions

Custom conversions allow you to segment your event information by creating rules and parameters for events. When defining rules, you can measure more specific customer actions. For example, you can filter all purchases over $20. Custom conversion is created within Events Manager.

How to Create Facebook Pixel

Facebook Pixel is a code that you embed in the header of your website code source.

Before installing Facebook Pixel, you will need:

• Business Manager set up
• Business website.
• The ability to access website’s code

After you meet these requirements, follow this step

Step 1: Create Facebook Pixel

From Business Manager, navigate to Event Manager > Data Source. Click Get Started next to Facebook Pixel.

Enter the Name and Website URL (optional). Click Continue.

You can create more than one pixel per ad account on Business Manager. When you name the pixel, remember the name should represent your business.

Step 2: Add Facebook Pixel to Your Website

To let Pixel collect information from your website, you need to add the code into your website’s code. There are three ways to install Pixel code to your website:

Option 1: Connect a Partner Platform. Some platforms partnered with Facebook for pixel integrations. When you find your platform, you automatically launch their unique setup process. This option helps you install Pixel without touching to website’s code.

Choose your website platform and follow the instructions.

Option 2: Manually install. You copy the entire code and paste in the header of your website.

To make sure you install Pixel correctly, you can check the status of your Pixel.

Option 3: Email instructions to a developer. If you work with a website developer, you have an option to email him/her the instructions to add Pixel code to your website. Enter the email address of the person you’d like to send instructions to.

Step 3: Setup Events

To track actions on a website, you need to set up events. There are three types of events: standard events, custom events, and custom conversions.

Choose the events that matter most to your business and add them to your website’s code. Standard events and custom events can be added in between your Pixel code.

If you want to use custom conversions with rules and parameters, you can create within Events Manager.

Step 4: Confirm Your Facebook Pixel is Working

If you use Google Chrome browser, you can install Facebook Pixel Helper to check if your Pixel code works on that website.

Visit the page with Pixel embedded, if Facebook Pixel Helper can find Pixel on this page, your Pixel code works properly.

In conclusion, Facebook Pixel is a powerful tool for your Facebook marketing efforts. There is no reason to deny that you don’t need Facebook Pixel for your Facebook Ads, unless you want to miss out these benefits. Install Facebook Pixel now to get most of these advantages!

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