The Facebook Pixel: How and Why You Should Utilize It
Understanding all features of Facebook Business can be daunting. With its complexities, there are many features offered that some advertisers and marketers know about, but don’t understand to their full extent. Measuring advertising performance is a key advantage of utilizing Facebook Business and in taking a deeper look at your advertisement's full performance, the Facebook Pixel is a key tool to use.
The Facebook Pixel is a unique tool offered specifically through FB Business. As an advertiser, you can track not just your advertising performance, but your website traffic. Pixel data details website usage, like where users are clicking, what content they’re viewing, how far they got through making a purchase — and if they did, what was the pattern of getting to that final checkout? There are many unique features the Pixel tool offers, and we focus on key analytics at Optimize Social Media. In a two-part blog series, we will be covering what the Pixel is and why it’s beneficial to use. But before we get deeper into details, let’s start with setting up a Pixel.
Facebook gives detailed steps on how to set up a Pixel, but in short: it’s a base code that is added to the header of a website used to track website traffic coming from a Facebook source (post or advertisement), direct source, search engines, and referrals.
Events Manager is where the Pixel information is housed, and where you create your Pixel code; Analytics is where you access all the Pixel data and results. The Pixel code is specific to an ad account and website but can be detached from one ad account and attached to another.
In our second blog post, we will get deeper into Events and Analytics, but let’s focus on why the Pixel is beneficial to us.
As mentioned, the Pixel is used to track total website traffic, but it also breaks data down to understand the clicks and processes of users visiting your site.
From a business owner standpoint, when a user visits your website with an active Pixel installed, any clicks, page views, content views, and submissions will be tracked. Meaning, if a user visits your Home page, then clicks into your Services page, then goes to the Contact page to call you, it will track this. The Pixel data offers a great overview to learn how many website visits you’re receiving per week, month, quarter, or year, and what content is being viewed most on your site. We can then use this information in strategizing alternative marketing plans or revamping current ones.
From a user standpoint, you may ask: what does the Pixel do for me? Essentially, if you visit, subscribe to, or contact a business through their website that has a Pixel installed and active, this information is remembered and used to further attract you to the website again. As we know, Facebook users see paid advertisements daily. When visiting a site with a Pixel, this allows the ads that show up on your Facebook-owned platforms to be more relative to you and your interests.
Visiting a website with an active Pixel means that if that company or business is currently running paid advertisements and you are within their specified target market, those may show up on your Facebook-owned platforms, including in your feed, videos, stories, messages, articles, etc. Because of the metadata tracking, Facebook aggregates user activity metrics to optimize your browsing experience and essentially remembers that you, as a consumer, are interested in the content, services, or anything else that business has to offer; it then knows to potentially start showing you those ads, thus furthering your attraction back to the site.
A few real-time examples are as followed.
A few days ago, an employee at OSM visited the website of MN Roofing Co. Now, advertisements for that company have shown up on the desktop Facebook feed of said employee.
24 hours later, the same advertisement showed up within that employee’s the Instagram feed.
One last real-time example includes real estate and scholarship searches. An OSM employee has searched for both scholarships and real estate. Local real estate agency ads promoting scholarship programs showed up on the feed of said employee multiple times per week.
From both a business and user standpoint, the Facebook Pixel offers many benefits in providing data and customizing your feed to align with specific interests. In our second blog post, we will dive deep into Events Manager and the features of Analytics.
Optimize Social Media provides social media & reputation solutions that evolve with our clients. As social media experts we manage Facebook, Twitter, Google, Yelp, YouTube and Instagram accounts for our clients on a daily basis. We help the modern business owner implement a specialized social media strategy so that they can make more money in real life. Enjoy our blog.
