This was pulled directly from our friends over @Shopify | Jump Suit Group proud to be a Shopify Agency partner
What is a Facebook pixel?
A Facebook pixel is a killer analytics tool that you place on your website to help you track visitors. The pixel lets you know what pages someone visited and where they came from. This gives you an inside scoop on what content you can feed these visitors. Insights into what people are interested in means you can target them more effectively.
How do Facebook pixels work?
They work by creating audiences of people who have visited your site. You can create audiences of people who have viewed a specific page on your site, have watched 50% of the video on your site or have been to your site multiple times.
1. Custom audiences from your website
Custom audiences let you retarget visitors or people who have interacted with your content. It tracks their movements so you can create segments later. It will record which pages on your site they visit, which pages they don’t visit, and when they visit. Using this info, you can now advertise to very targeted groups of people :)
To clarify, you wont know their names right away, but the whole idea here is to use these audiences to narrow down users into leads. Here are some examples of things you will know.
- People who have visited your website in the past 24 hours.
- People who have visited your website in the past 180 days but have not been back in 30 days.
- People who have visited a specific page on your website.
- People who have visited a specific page on your website but not another specific page.
Audiences and ads are different from each other. You can use the same audience across multiple ads to learn which ad resonates best with them.
2. Custom conversions
Custom conversions are SWEET.
A custom conversion is created by telling facebook "hey, when a user reaches this page, count it as a conversion/lead/etc.
For example:
- Thank you for shopping, your order is on the way.
- Thanks for signing up, you’ll receive your first email from us shortly.
- Thanks for your comment, here’s your free download.
This means that you can create Custom Conversions independently of your Facebook ads, and then choose when to use them in the future.
Because the tracking pixel already fires on all your website pages, it can easily track when someone visits a completion page — especially people who have clicked on your Facebook ads.
You can assign monetary value to a custom conversion. For example, if you have a custom conversion set up when someone buys your lemonade, you can assign $4.99 to that conversion and FB will track your ROI in real time!
- Add Payment Info
- Add To Cart
- Add To Wishlist
- Complete Registration
- Initiate Checkout
- Lead
- Purchase
- Search
- View Content
The radical part about Custom Conversions is that once it’s created, it’ll to all of your ads, whether you choose to optimize for it or not. All Custom Conversions are always live.
And then you can create reports with all of this wonderful conversion data! Mwahahaha
Pro Tip: To do this, choose “Website Conversion”, type in your site, and then select the one you’re looking for.
Summary
If you can take one thing away from this article, it's that Facebook pixel lets you target prospects with unrivaled precision. We're big fans of the pixel and have seen awesome success with campaigns we've run with paid promotions on Facebook.
For more info, drop us a line, we're happy to talk strategy!