If you are buying advertising on Facebook and Instagram, you are probably familiar with the Facebook pixel, a snippet of code that Facebook recommends you place on your site for tracking. It can be easy to dismiss this step if you’re in a hurry or don’t understand the advantages, but if you’re not maximizing the capabilities of your Facebook pixel, you are missing out on great benefits, including much better campaign performance, tracking and attribution models.
Standard/Custom Conversions
By installing the Facebook pixel on your website, you can use Facebook’s standard conversion events to track user activities through the sales funnel down to purchase; those events include but are not limited to content views, cart additions, checkout initiation, addition of payment info, purchases and leads. By placing these conversion events on the pixel, this allows Facebook to optimize toward the purchase conversion and really hone in on your target audience and who will buy product on your website — eliminating waste and bringing down the overall cost per purchase.
Outside of standard e-commerce shopping conversions, the pixel really shines when you create your own custom conversion events for any actions you want a consumer to take on your site. For example, if you want someone to fill out a form on your site, you create a custom conversion event for clicking the submit button on the form, and then Facebook will optimize toward getting that form submitted at the lowest cost possible. By doing that, you’re not just sending traffic to your website and hoping for the best, you’ll actually be optimizing toward your interested consumers. Plus, you can set a bid cap on how much you want to pay per conversion, so you will not overspend.
Tracking/Custom Audience Capabilities
If the Facebook pixel is placed correctly on your website, it’s easy to retarget consumers who’ve been to your website in the past, up to 180 days from their last visit. Custom audiences can be created to capture all people you’re sending to your website and get in front of them with another message. It is also possible to retarget specifically from one or multiple URLs on the website versus the entire website, so you can serve different messaging to consumers based on the content of the pages they’ve visited. For example, if you’re a financial institution, you can retarget consumers who visited your mortgage page but did not fill out a lead form. In addition, you can create a look-alike audience mirroring your website traffic, leading to better targeting.
Dynamic Catalog Ads
By having the Facebook pixel installed on your website, you can serve product catalog ads to your targeted consumers. These ads automatically pull products into the creative based on the consumers’ behaviors, both on your website and on other websites with the Facebook pixel installed. You can serve ads to consumers who viewed a product or added it to their shopping cart but did not purchase. You can also cross-sell products, which means Facebook will evaluate the types of products that the consumer has viewed or purchased in the past (on your website and on others) and will show them products they believe the consumer might be interested in purchasing. Further, you can set up a custom selling event, which allows you to use actions taken on your site when deciding which consumers to include or exclude when serving products.
These are just some of the best ways to use your Facebook pixel for better results. The Brandon Agency is officially part of the Facebook Marketing Partner program. Need help navigating paid social or other paid media for your brand? The Brandon Agency can help with all of your media-placement needs. Contact us to get started.
Courtney Olbrich
Media & Analytics Director
Courtney is our Media & Analytics Director, located in our Myrtle Beach office. She has over 20 years of experience in marketing and advertising, with a wide variety of clients. Hailing from Metro Detroit, Michigan, it comes natural that she is an avid sports fan. So much so that all of her pets are named after professional baseball stadiums!