As marketers, we spend a lot of time optimizing our client’s digital campaigns to reach the best audiences. Implementing a Facebook pixel early on can help capture one of the most active and willing audiences for your business – your website traffic. Leverage Facebook’s machine learning capabilities and use them to deliver even more timely and relevant content to those already watching.
What is the Facebook Pixel?
The Facebook Pixel is a snippet of code that you place on your website to collect data on your website visitors. It’s free to use, along with Facebook Business Manager, which allows you to measure user activity, and understand user behaviors.
Think of your website as a brick and mortar store. As a new customer comes in, and you get to know more about them and what they’re looking for, you can start to speak to their needs. Putting the Facebook Pixel on your website is your way to do that in the digital space. It collects anonymized data about the users visiting your site and the actions that they took so that you can speak to their needs.
Retarget Your Website Users.
The Facebook Pixel becomes your most intuitive salesperson by building on the relationship a user has already established with your business. Inside Facebook Business Manager, you can start out by building custom audiences of people that have interacted with your website and then take it a step further by using additional event information gathered by the Pixel.
When you separate audiences by actions they took on your website, you can, for example, target users that expressed interest in an event you’re hosting with different creative than you would use for users that were interested in ordering products from your online store. Adjusting your creative to speak to the needs of your users improves conversion rates.
Improve Cold Leads with Lookalike Audiences.
When you implement the Facebook Pixel on your own website, you gain access to an extensive network of information that Facebook collects from all websites. With access to such vast data sets and advanced algorithms to make sense of all that information for you, you can tap into a matrix of information, and let Facebook find you qualified leads to show your ads.
You can use your Pixel to create Lookalike Audiences in Business Manager. A Lookalike Audience uses a seed audience of your website visitors and, using machine learning, builds a Lookalike Audience of users it has flagged as being similar in interests or behavioral patterns to those that have already visited your website. This is a powerful tool to reach a new audience of people likely to respond to your brand and should be used in context of a larger marketing strategy, like how Garmin used Lookalike Audiences to help generate a 9.7X return on ad spend.
Track a User’s Website Actions.
Facebook will automatically track a user’s journey on your website. You can use Business Manager to see your most typical user funnels – how a user goes from arriving on your site to how they leave it. Using this information, you can see at which point in your funnel your users tend to leave without converting and direct your marketing towards closing the sale.
For example, say you’re running an online course and a user clicks on a button to receive more information. They read your pitch but they don’t sign up for your course. You can use that event to target this audience that has shown interest in your course but haven’t yet booked their place.
No one likes it when they’ve bought a product but are still being targeted with (now outdated) ads. Exclude audiences that have already converted – there’s no point wasting marketing dollars when you’ve already made the sale! Use this as an opportunity to up-sell your products to this already engaged audience.
Connect the Facebook Pixel to Shopify
Facebook has partner integrations that work with your ecommerce catalogs, such as WooCommerce or Shopify. This allows you to retarget your users with Dynamic Ads that reach people with personalized ads that include products they’re most likely to buy by showing them the products they’ve been eying on your website. If you choose an ad campaign optimized for a specific outcome (conversions), Facebook will select the products from your online inventory that will generate the best outcome (sales!). And through this partnership, Facebook knows when certain items are out of stock and does not show them items in ads.
Improve Ad Delivery
Not all impressions are created equal. And if you’re paying for it, you want your ads to reach the right eyes so that you can focus on making conversions, not just impressions. With the Facebook Pixel, there are countless ways to continually keep improving your ad delivery:
Keep your brand on their mind. Retarget the people that have expressed interest in your product or service but haven’t yet completed a desired action.
Use Lookalike Audiences. Let Facebook find a new, likeminded audience of consumers that would be interested in your brand.
Work with Facebook to find the right traffic for your campaigns. Let Facebook optimize the delivery of your ads for clicks or conversions
Complete the sale! Use dynamic ads to retarget users that have looked at product pages or added items to cart but haven’t bought anything.
Up-sell. Keep users that have already converted engaged by cross-selling products that compliment their purchase, or up-selling them goods or services.
