The Facebook Pixel – Why You Have to Use It

It’s no secret that Facebook advertising is starting to become one of the best ways to reach, engage and grow your audience online. So maybe you’ve jumped on the train – boosting a post every once in awhile and maybe you even launched a follower campaign. Now is the time to start driving that train and get a little more advanced.

The Facebook Pixel is a piece of JavaScript code that Facebook Ads Manager generates to work as a tracker on your website. If you have the Facebook Pixel installed, you get access to a plethora of useful data on users that have clicked on your Facebook ads.

Implementing the pixel on your website allows you to:

1. Track Conversions 
   The FB Pixel will let you set up and track certain actions that users are taking on your website. This ranges from page views, form fills, adding to cart, making purchases, and more. Tracking conversions obviously results in better awareness of your ROI from the ad spend, but it also allows you to accumulate an audience of users that visited your site. One amazing feature here is that you can track these conversions for up to 28 days – so if users leave your page and come back later to purchase, the Facebook Pixel will track that as a conversion from the Facebook ad that user initially clicked on.
2. Build Custom Audiences
   This is the best part about the Pixel. You can start by building these audiences that have taken certain actions on your website (adds to cart or visitors to a certain product/page) and accumulate a group of users for retargeting campaigns. On top of that, you can use the Facebook Pixel to create lookalike audiences.Q. What’s a lookalike audience?

   A. A group of users not already connected to your page that are similar to your existing custom audiences.

3. Optimize Ads for Conversions
   The pixel will keep track and accumulate an audience of users that are likely to convert/take action. When you use the pixel in conjunction with the ‘Optimize for Website Conversions’ campaign objective, Facebook automatically shows your ads and content to users that will likely convert.

Still not convinced? Come on, bro. This is the best marketing tool since some dude came up with the idea of putting up billboards.

Let us give you an example of how this worked for one of our clients from start to finish.

Facebook Pixel Case Study: Vitamin World

Challenge/Goals
Vitamin World launched a new line of Precision Engineered Biological Protein Powder. Our challenge was developing a comprehensive social media marketing campaign with multiple elements in order to gain mass exposure, awareness, traffic to product pages, product conversions, and positive sentiment towards the new line.

Implementing the Facebook Pixel
One element of the campaign was utilizing the abilities of the FB Pixel. We implemented the Facebook Pixel to track conversions  in the form of  page views/visitors to the web pages that featured the new products or information about the new products.

Retargeting Audiences Using the Facebook Pixel
The FB pixel provided us with a list of users that have already looked and are at least somewhat familiar with the new line of products. We took that list of users and created Facebook ads with messaging and content that spoke directly to the needs/wants of those users – less informative about the product, and more aimed at bringing them back to the site. After the products were live on the site for about a month, we had a list of 3,600 users that visited the specific product pages.

Creating Lookalike Audiences Using the Facebook Pixel
We took the audience that we accumulated with pixel and created an additional matching (lookalike) audience. The potential reach of this list was at 1,970,000 people. We then created a separate ad campaign to target these users with different, more informative messaging. We also added more targeting options; users that have expressed interest in protein powder, lived an active lifestyle, were likely to purchase items online, and who followed pages similar to Vitamin World.

Results:

We then ran ad campaigns on Facebook and Instagram for two months targeting the audiences we discovered though Facebook Pixel and achieved the following KPI’s:

• Product Exposure & Awareness – KPI – Reach & Impressions: Reached a highly targeted audience of 268,313 users on Facebook & Instagram with a total of 354,787 impressions.
• Positive Sentiment Towards Product – KPI – Engagement:  Ad campaigns lead to 764 new Vitamin World followers on Facebook. In addition, there were 7,824 ‘Likes’ on the ads, 158 ‘Shares’ of the ads and 98 comments on those ads.
• Increased Traffic to Product Pages – KPI – Clicks: We saw a total of 7,396 clicks on the ads sending users to those product pages on the site.
• Product Conversions – KPI – Makes Purchase and/or Initiates Checkout: Using the conversion tracking feature from the Facebook Pixel, we were able to see that a total of 153 people initiated checkout and/or made a purchase from the Facebook Ads. 

Those are some pretty incredible results from just one part of their campaign to promote the new line of products – all made possible with the implementation of the Facebook Pixel.

So – wtf are you waiting for?

How to Get Started with the Facebook Pixel: 

1. Implement the Facebook Pixel on your website
2. Set Up Custom Conversion Tracking and User Action Event Tracking
3. Start building Custom Audience based on your buisness/brand goals or current promotions
4. Create Lookalikes of those Audiences
5. Compile all the audiences you created and create segmented audiences with additional demographic and behavioral targeting options
6. Develop and Launch Facebook & Instagram Ad Campaigns that are optimized for website conversions with messaging and content catered to the different audiences you created
7. Monitor and adjust ads and ad strategies based on relevancy scores, CPC’s, CTR’s, CPE’s, result rates and frequency.
8. Start to realize you don’t have time to do any of this.
9. Panic.
10. Contact us to do it for you.