Facebook Pixel
The Facebook pixel is an analytics tool that allows you to measure the effectiveness of your Facebook advertising by understanding the actions people take once they get to your website via that Facebook ad. In turn, it helps to refine or optimise your Facebook advertising strategy.
In order words it’s Facebook’s way of tracking people around the internet. It’s Facebook’s way of tracking someone who visits your website landing pages and is similar to a Google Analytics code. A Facebook pixel helps you to tack when website visitors become leads or purchase items on your website, or any other specific action. In a nutshell, it’s just their way of tracking conversion.
A Facebook pixel is a short piece of code provided by Facebook to place on your website allowing Facebook to report actions made by people who visit your website and take an action like completing a purchase. It then allows you to reach that customer again through future Facebook ads.
You can use pixel data to:
- Make sure your ads are being shown to the right people
- Build advertising audiences
- Unlock additional Facebook advertising tools
Using or managing Facebook pixels doesn’t require you to be a developer or to know code.
BACKGROUND
The reason for Facebook using the word “pixel” is because Facebook started tracking people who visited different websites by giving advertisers a code for a one pixel by one pixel image (a very small image) to insert on your website. Every time someone visited a website and loaded that image (one pixel by one pixel image), Facebook would know that that person visited that particular website and so the pixel would fire and track that person around the internet. These days Facebook no longer use an actual image but the name ‘pixel’ has stuck.
BENEFITS
According to Facebook using pixels enable you to:
- Reach the right people.
- Find new customers, or people who have visited a specific page or taken a desired action on your website.
- Create Lookalike Audiences to reach more people who are similar to your best customers.
- Drive more sales.
- Set up automatic bidding to target people who are more likely to take an action you care about, like making a purchase.
- See how to optimize your ad sets for conversions.
- Measure the results of your ads
- Understand how successful your ad is by seeing what happened as a direct result. You can view information like your conversions and sales. Find out what data you can see from your Facebook pixel page.
Here’s a 20-minute tutorial on how to set up a Facebook Pixel in 2018 (Tutorial starting at01:12 min):
REFERENCES:
- Facebook (nd.) About Facebook Pixel [Online] Available: https://www.facebook.com/business/help/742478679120153?helpref=faq_content [Accessed: 05 October 2018].
