STEP 1: The New Facebook Pixel: How to Find It and Use It to Become a Killer Ads Strategist

This blog post originally appeared as part 1 of a 13-part series on ’13 Steps to Becoming a Killer Facebook Ads Strategist.’ This series is running weekly from June 9 — September 1.

The Facebook Pixel is a piece of code added to the backend of your website. Have I lost you already? Not to worry. I’ll explain all the things you need to know to find it, install it and why the heck it’s important in creating your killer ads strategy.
 
 WHY THE NEW FACEBOOK PIXEL IS IMPORTANT
 
 What the Facebook Pixel does is track each visitor to your website. We use other tools to do this as well, like Google Analytics, but Facebook helps us track visitors to use in our Facebook Campaigns. 
 
 Once a visitor lands on our website, Facebook essentially counts them using the pixel like a teacher counting kids on the bus before and after a field trip. We can do some pretty cool things with this information. 
 
 In the past, Facebook gave us the Conversion Pixel, and we installed that onto every page we wanted to track for the different conversions we were measuring. If you’re new to pixels, don’t worry about this piece. Just know that now, Facebook is giving us just ONE pixel that we use for everything. Next week, we’ll learn about how to modify this pixel to help us track conversions from our ads, but for now I just want you to get comfortable with the Facebook Pixel, installing it on your website, and getting cozy with it as part of our ads strategy. Here we go!

WHERE DO I FIND THE NEW FACEBOOK PIXEL?
 
When you log into Facebook, you should have a label on the left side that says ‘Ads Manager.’ This assumes that you have set up an ads account with Facebook and have submitted your credit card details in order to begin placing ads. Do this first!
 
 Now that you’ve clicked on Ads Manager, you’ll see this page.

The second option is pixels. Click on that.

After you click on the word pixels, you’ll see this area. Click on ‘Actions’ and then ‘View Pixel Code.’

Now this is where you will see your unique pixel code to copy and paste in the ‘head tag’ of your website. IF YOU DON’T KNOW HOW TO DO THIS, consult your web designer. Facebook allows you to easily email this code to your web designer to begin the process of tracking visitors.

HOW DO I INSTALL THE NEW PIXEL
 
 As I stated above, you can easily get your web designer to install it for you, but if you’re somewhat familiar with adding snippets of code to your website, you’ll want to add the pixel to each page of your website between the head tags of your web pages. Every website platform goes about doing this differently, and you should contact customer support to help you. It really is easy to do. Here is what it looks like on the head tag of my weebly site. I just copy and paste the code right in!

NOW THAT IT’S INSTALLED, WHAT COOL THINGS CAN WE DO WITH IT?
 
 Now that the pixel is properly installed on your website, Give it about 2 weeks before you start focusing on the data. Once you have some traffic numbers coming from the pixel, you can turn those traffic numbers into a Facebook Audience for targeting your ads (which we will cover in this series).
 
 Before I show you what creating an audience looks like, let me share two cool things you can do with this new audience coming from your website.
 
 1) CREATE A UNIQUE OPT-IN
 
 We will be covering the 5-step Opt-in Formula in an upcoming post from this series, but here’s what you can begin paying attention to before we get there. If you see that a particular blog post is getting a lot of traffic, you can create an ebook, infographic or simple .PDF document to upgrade your content. People can then ‘opt-in’ to receive your ebook, infographic or document by giving you their email address, after which, you’ll send it to them straightaway.
 
 For instance, let’s say that you created a popular blog post on ’10 Quotes That Changed My Life.’ You could create beautiful images for each quote that people could opt-in to receive and use on all their social media accounts for free. You can continue to communicate with all of the subscribers to your images, and offer 50 more for $20 or a paid class on how to create them.
 
 2) CREATE A LOOKALIKE AUDIENCE
 
 Now that you’re tracking visitors with the Facebook pixel, you can ask Facebook to create an audience that looks just like those people. This is called a ‘lookalike audience’ and Facebook takes the unique characteristics from all your visitors and creates a larger audience based on those characteristics. *Take a deep breath! By the time you are done with this series, you’ll be an expert at all of this, so stay with me.

NOW WE’RE READY TO USE DATA FROM OUR PIXEL TO CREATE AN AUDIENCE FOR ADS
 
 Let’s head back to our Facebook Pixel page and click on ‘Create Audience.’

You’ll see the following image. From here we are going to fill out all of the information. In this example, I’m going to ask Facebook to create an audience out of all the people who visited my ‘Free Resources’ page from my navigation bar. I will target these people with a retargeting ad, inviting them to join my free resource center. *Note — when creating my ad, I will have to exclude anyone who already joined my free resource center. Don’t worry about that now. We’ll take a look at how to do this a little further down in our series. So stay tuned!

When you’re done filling that out, you’ll get a little greeting from Facebook.

Wow! You accomplished a lot today. Getting the Facebook Pixel installed is the first thing you can do to become a killer ads strategist. Next up, we’ll take a look at modifying the pixel to track certain outcomes like opt-ins, check-outs, etc. Can’t wait to see you next time!
 
 P.S. I’ve provided you with a handy .pdf on 3 Ways You Can Use The New Facebook Pixel Now. Share it with a friend and create your own blog post from it. Check out the other cool things inside the Free Resource Library here.