Yes, yes you do.
What is the Facebook Pixel?
The Facebook pixel is a piece of code that you place on your website. This is the “base” code, that if installed correctly, automatically gets added to every page of your website, so you can track everyone who visits. In addition, you have extra “event” codes that get added to specific pages on your website to track any and all conversions that occur.
Example Event: Add to Cart
After installing the base code, you’ll need to add the FB event code “Add to Cart” on your website (you may want to contact your web developer for help if you didn’t build your website yourself). This will track how many people in a given time period are starting a purchase. By the way, you don’t even need to create any ads to see this information!
Now if your plan is to run ads to cold traffic, and you want to see who is taking an interest and taking action, you can choose to run a conversion ad tracking this event. You have the option to select “Add to Cart” as the conversion metric while setting up the campaign. This will now adjust the metrics so you can see how many people are adding to cart based on your ad, and how much each “Add to Cart” costs.
Other examples include website visitor, purchase, completing a lead form, or any other custom event you want to keep track of.
Why Would You Want to Use The Facebook Pixel in Your Ads?
There are so many reasons to implement the FB pixel on your website. For now, I’m just going to discuss three of them below.
Tracking the specific actions people take on your website allows you to optimize your ads, build targeted audiences for future ads, and retarget qualified leads—people who have already taken some kind of action on your website.
1.Optimize Ad Performance (Save $)
Running a website visitor ad is great for getting traffic to your website, but running a conversion ad simply allows you to take it one step further and track the actions that people take once they get to your site. What does this mean for you?
When running a campaign and testing multiple audiences, you now have the conversion data available to compare each ad set against the other. If one ad set is costing 2x the price to add to cart, then you might want to shift budget to the other audience that’s performing at half the cost to get the most add to carts per dollar spent on ads.
You’ll also now be able to gain a general understanding of what type of content your audiences respond best to. Test different ad iterations using copy changes, creative changes, and placement changes. So maybe you’ll find out that you get the most leads from Instagram placement with a video ad and long copy, and you get the most ad to carts on Facebook feed placement with a single image and short copy. This is where you get to be creative and get to know your audiences.
RECAP
- Turn off ads/ad sets that don’t perform as well as the others.
- Turn up spend on best-performing ads/ad sets where people are converting more.
- Gain a general understanding of what type of content and where your audiences respond best to.
2. Build Targeted Audiences For Retargeting
With the Facebook pixel set up on your pages, you can now create custom audiences that are constantly updating in real time. This allows you to keep all of the people interacting with your site categorized by their level of interest in your product or service. What is amazing to me about this, is people could be coming from ANYWHERE, and you’re still able to retarget them if Facebook can pixel them. They don’t need to have visited your site from Facebook to be trackable and targetable!
Once your audiences begin to populate, you now have the ability to send specific ads with targeted ad copy to each group based on their interest in your product or service.
Example: Abandoned cart audience.
- Send an ad featuring an exclusive promotion to prompt this group to finish their order.
- Send an ad letting this group know that your team is here to help and answer any questions.
- Send an ad with a testimonial or review highlighting the effectiveness of your product or service.
Recap
- Use pixel data to create custom audiences.
- Categorize people interacting with your site by their level of interest.
- Send them custom messages.
3. Duplicate Your Best Customers and Leads
Other than retargeting website visitors by action, the pixel is helpful for another reason… assisting in the creation of lookalike audiences!
Facebook has the ability to look at the behaviors and qualities of people in a custom audience, say for example, all people completing a purchase or a download, and then makes an audience of others who are like them. These traditionally perform really well, and are a standard must in the ads we run in our agency for our clients!
