HOW TO USE THE FACEBOOK PIXEL FOR YOUR ONLINE STORE

If you’re using Facebook ads or thinking about it, you need a pixel. Fact.

I know, I might be teaching some of you to suck eggs, but I’m still amazed how common it still is to come across business owners who don’t know what a Facebook pixel is.

Let alone what it actually does when they have one.

Even if you vow never to run Facebook or Instagram ads, you may be curious to learn more about the traffic coming through your website. You don’t have to run Facebook ads to get hold of that data.

As a product based online store owner, you’ve got enough things on your plate, but let’s stop the pixel from being one of your 99 problems. Cool? Cool!

So…what is a Facebook pixel?

It’s a FREE analytics tool that helps you measure if your advertising is effective, and the actual pixel itself is a small piece of code that you put on your website.

In its most basic form, the pixel will fire to track people when they visit your site.

It’s all very well listening to me harping on about having one, but when you understand the power of the pixel, it can do these types of things:

Find your target audience – it can help you can find new audiences with ease and identify visitors to your website who have landed on a specific page or performed a specific action (such as viewing your new collection). From that, you can build lookalike audiences of people who have similar demographics and interests of those people who are interacting with your website.

Track conversions – it allows you to record how people behave on your website after landing on your page when they’ve interacted with one of your ads.

Are they curious and poking around pages or bouncing off quickly as if they’ve seen one of their exes?

You can even track them across devices; so you will be able to see if they have visited from an ad via desktop and finally made a purchase via mobile a couple of days later.

Armed with that kind of data will help to define your overall strategy.

Retarget visitors – If you have the pixel installed you can retarget visitors to your site with further ads. You might retarget people who have abandoned their cart at checkout or show them your latest collection running dynamic ads if they have been looking at particular items.

Increase sales – Yes, really. When you set up automatic bidding you unlock the power to target specific people who are most likely to perform an action, like get out their credit card and buy from you!

BUT… if you don’t have the pixel on your website, you can’t do any of those things (sad face)

Hands up if you want a piece of that action?

All you need is your own website to pop your pixel on, and you can do it yourself or get someone to do it for you, like me if you are tech challenged and can’t be bothered with all of that (if you are looking for pixel setup or troubleshooting help drop my agency a message here)

Here is the official guide from Facebook themselves on how to get your pixel installed: https://www.facebook.com/business/help/952192354843755

The real power of the pixel is unleashing Custom Conversions and Standard Events. What they do is allow you to track and optimise actions across your website.

Stay with me now, things are about to get a bit “techy”…

The difference between the two is Custom Conversions are easy to set up and are created in Ads Manager using URL rules. This is perfect for you if you want to avoid adding any further coding to your pixel and are happy tracking actions when people visit and load different pages.

Standard Events give you more features and is created by adding to the Facebook pixel base code and customising with parameters (exactly WHERE your traffic is coming from) and more importantly as an online store owner, you can run dynamic product ads. You can see more about dynamic product ads here.

Let’s take a closer look at the features Standard Events have.

When you are setting up your pixel, Standard Events give you all kinds of event scenarios to track specific actions people perform on your website, such as

  • Purchase – For confirming a purchase and collects data about people who have bought from your website and the value
  • Lead – For recording when someone has filled and sent information through a form on your website
  • Complete Registration– This is just like the Lead event, but can be used for membership sites
  • Add Payment Info – When someone adds their payment method, this event can be triggered
  • Initiate Checkout – When someone initiates the checkout. The event should be placed in the page where the user is redirected when initiating checkout.
  • Add To Cart – When someone adds an item to the cart. This is an example when you would “track event on inline action” as you are not likely to track that action as a page load(see below). If you are continuously sending people to their basket every time they add to cart, it’s bloody annoying and they may abandon your website altogether. Yes, they’ve really thought of everything!
  • Add to Wishlist – When someone adds an item to their Wishlist. Just like add to cart, you want this to “track event as inline action”
  • Search – When someone is searching on your website. Typically if you provide a search engine
  • View Content – When someone views a specific page or item. For example a landing page or a blog post on your website

That’s a fair few Standard events! But as someone goes through your website, how do they trigger?

By using Page load or Inline Actions.

You have the option to “track event on page load” which tracks people when they land on a certain page, for example, the thank you page. And there’s the “track event on inline action” which is tracking clicks like the buy button or add to cart.

If you are tracking purchases, it’s recommended that you add event Parameters which add your conversion value and currency to give more information about the overall event you are tracking (for example you’ll be able to track the sales revenue attributed to a specific ad)

Once you’ve set this up, you can copy and paste the completed pixel code to your relevant page or modify the code if it’s already on your website.

The Facebook pixel is not just a pretty piece of code. It’s vital if you are looking to successfully implement, track scale your campaign performance and ROI.

Shameless plug alert! If this has already gone way over your head by now, my agency offers this service and we’ll do it for you. Even if you’re starting from scratch or looking for something super advanced with your pixel such as getting it to fire on specific button clicks (yup, we get deep like that). >> Click here to drop us a message <<

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