June 11, 2020

What Is a Facebook Pixel & Why Is It Important for Your Business?

When it comes to social media advertising, Facebook is the number one choice amongst business owners because of its flexibility, capabilities, and inexpensive nature.

However, if you are currently using or planning on using Facebook Ads for your business, we highly recommended that you use the Facebook Pixel.

This tiny piece of code can help you measure, optimize, and build your audience for your ad campaigns, allowing you to get the most out of your social media advertising budget.

Without it, you cannot optimize or track your conversions.

With this said, let’s take a little bit of time to understand what the Facebook Pixel is and the reasons that make it critical for your business.

An animated representation of a facebook pixel implementation on a website

The Facebook Pixel - What Is It, What Does It Do & How Does It Work?

Glad you asked. It’s not quite as magical as it might sound, it’s just a tiny piece of code that you place onto your website, which allows you to monitor the conversions you get from your Facebook ads.

It helps you optimize your ads and build targeted audiences for future advertisements based on those who have already interacted with your website (retargeting marketing).

The Facebook Pixel works by using cookies to track visitors on your website so that you can re-target them later on.

If you have ever looked for something online, then hopped on Facebook or Instagram and seen exactly what you were looking for from the company, you have had an experience with a tracking pixel.

In addition to this, you can use the Facebook Pixel to track website visitor behavior, ultimately finding out which advertisements are the most effective for bringing visitors back to you. 

How Does It Work?

Every single time someone clicks on one of your advertisements that links to your website and purchases a product or service, the Facebook Pixel will trigger, and a report will be made for the action that has taken place.

The Facebook Pixel will track and trigger for every action that is taken on your website, allowing you to see who is buying, who is abandoning the cart (for e-commerce), and who is showing initial interest but then bouncing away.

This collected information will allow you to better understand your audience, re-target those who have an interest, and allow you to improve your Facebook Ad conversion rates.

Even if you do not have any Facebook Ads, you can install the Facebook Pixel on your website and start collecting data right away.

That way when you are ready to LAUNCH with digital marketing, you have an audience. 

Why Is The Facebook Pixel Critical For Businesses?

Understand What is Relevant Engagement

Facebook Pixel generates signals that will help you retarget buyers with ads of your business’ products or services that they have browsed, clicked on, or shown interest in. You can market similar items that previous buyers have purchased based on their purchase history with you.

Your retargeting can be tailored to exactly what that person was looking at on your website!

You Can Create Lookalike Audiences/Custom Audiences

You can use the targeting data from the Facebook Pixel to help build up a custom audience or lookalike audience, which are people who have similar likes, demographics, and interests to those who are already interacting with your website.

This expands your current customer base while staying within an audience that has already shown interest in your business.

You Can Optimize Ads for Conversions & Value

You can see how much your customers are spending and who is spending the most, allowing you to automatically retarget customers who are the most likely to make high-value purchases.

You can also optimize your Facebook ads for specific conversion events that you have set up on your website, such as specific purchases or signups, whereas, without the Pixel, you can only really optimize link clicks.

You Can Use Dynamic Ads!

These are critical for businesses that have hundreds of products to offer as creating individual ads based on specific pages that customers have visited or have taken action on is not reasonable.

With the Facebook Pixel, you can set up standard events with dynamic ad templates, ensuring that the ad that shows will be dependent on the user behavior.

Your Facebook Pixel & Your Facebook Ads

Your Facebook Ad is always set up with a goal- whether it’s just to get more eyeballs on a post, or to get new leads, or to send traffic to your website. The Facebook Pixel’s job is to track interactions between the Facebook Ad and your website.

It’ll give you, and your marketing agency, insight into who is clicking through, who is buying and who is visiting your website and then clicking away.

It makes your Facebook Ads perform better because they learn from this behavior and start delivering the ads to people who are more likely to actually buy, based on the massive amounts of data that Facebook has.

Why does it make Facebook Ads better?

We’ve all been there- you hire an agency and they do a ton of work for you and then at the end of the month, they tell you that all that work and money you spent resulted in… 50 likes on your Facebook posts! You can’t pay your bills with that.

That’s why it’s essential to track conversions, and the Facebook Pixel makes that possible.

Not only does it track results, but it also IMPROVES them, by making the Audiences you choose to target more like your actual target customers.

Convinced you need this yet? Let’s get that Pixel firing!

If you’ve been overwhelmed by the process of setting up a Facebook Pixel in the past, that’s why we’re here!

Our pros at Digital Space Marketing will set up and optimize your Facebook Pixel so you can take advantage of all of this.

We want to track who’s viewing and responding to your ads right from the start, to make sure you’re getting the best value for your ad spend.

The Facebook Pixel is a super powerful tool that helps us work smarter for you.

Give us a call today and we will check free of charge if you have a pixel and what the process would be to place one into your code on your website.

Free 30 minute session with a marketing expert.