The Facebook Tracking Pixel Is One Of The Most Powerful Marketing Tools Ever Invented
Have you ever heard of the Facebook Pixel? Do you know what it is? What it does? If your answer to any of these questions is “No”, then you MUST read on.
In a nutshell, the Facebook Pixel is a small snippet of code (AKA: a cookie) that you place on your website. Once active, it collects data that will help you track conversions and re-market to your website visitors via Facbook Ads. But its real power is how it can be used to create extremely powerful targeting and audiences for your ad campaigns.
Like other cookies, it works by tracking users as they interact with your website as well as your Facebook ads. Here are just some of the things your Facebook Pixel Will Do:
Track Conversions
When you run a Facebook Ads Campaign, you can track just about anything you want to in order to see how well your ads are performing and how profitable, the campaign is including:
- Website Purchases
- Form Fills
- Add Products To Shopping Cart
- Donations
- Initiating The Checkout Process
- Views of Specific Content
- Leads
- Location and Directions Requests
Armed with this tracking data you can refine your ad targeting, creatives, messaging etc further optimize your campaigns and make them more profitable.
Audience Targeting And Optimization
The real power of the pixel is in its ability to optimize ad campaigns, and find audiences for your ads that will be more likely to convert. As your ad campaigns run, the pixel gets “smarter and smarter”. It uses the data collected to seek out other people who are mathematically more inclined to become your customer based on profiles of those people who have already done so.
In essence, the pixel narrows down the field of potential customers to those who have a much greater chance of taking action, and eliminates those who are less like to buy or sign-up or whatever it is you are trying to accomplish.
Create Re-Targeting Audiences (Follow People Who Have Been To Your Website With Ads).
We all know what re-targeting is by now: Someone visits your website, a cookie is placed on their browser and you can follow that person around the web, showing them your ads for as long as you wish or until they clear their cookies in their web browser.
But Facebook allows you to do much more — You can segment people based upon how they interact with your ads on Facebook. For instance, lets say you had a video in your ad – You can set up a custom audience to re-target only those people who watched at least 50% of the video with an ad offering a special offer. You may set up a second audience made up only of people who watched at least 90% and re-target them with a different, more urgent ad, perhaps with a more enticing offer.
You can also create an audience made up of just the people who shared or liked your ad and market to them differently as well. Want to set up a separate campaign just for people who added products to your shopping cart but didn’t make a purchase? You can do that too. There are literally a million ways to slice this cake.
This article is not meant to be a tutorial, I simply wanted to alert you about the benefits and power the Facebook Pixel provides and to urge you to take full advantage of it. I suggest you install the pixel on your website even if you are not currently running any Facebook ad campaigns. This allows you to begin collecting precious data starting now and have a head start when and if you decide to launch your ads.
Here is a good video I found that explains then benefits and uses of the pixel in much greater detail.
