For marketers running ad campaigns on Facebook or Instagram, one tool is vital for measuring users’ reaction to social media adverts – Facebook Pixel. This is an analytics tool that measures events (or actions) taken by users who see the ad and engage with the campaign.
A Facebook Pixel allows you to see their behaviour and understand how well your ads are perceived. You can track past advert performance and make an informed decision for future campaigns to tweak and change details where necessary.
To utilise the Facebook Pixel tool, you need a website for your business with editable code and a Facebook Ads Manager account.
Install the Facebook Pixel on your website
To create your Facebook Pixel, click on the ‘Pixels’ tab in your Facebook Ads Manager. Select the green ‘Create a Pixel’ button. This will generate a line of code that you need to paste into the header of each page of your website 6to track your visitors’ behaviours. Here’s how:
- If your website uses a tag manager or is hosted on a web platform such as Wix, you can select the ‘Use an Integration or Tag Manager’ option.
- If you manage your own website, select the ‘Manually Install the Code Yourself’ option and paste the Pixel code at the bottom of the header section (just before the closing tag) of each page of your website. To test if the Pixel is working, click ‘Send Test Traffic’ and if your code is installed correctly, your status will say ‘Active’.
- If someone else manages your website, select the ‘Email Instructions to a Developer’ option. Enter your dev’s code and let them take care of the rest.
Tracking events with Facebook Pixel
Once the code is installed on your site and the Pixel is activated, you can start tracking your users’ actions on your site. But first, you need to install more code on your site so that Facebook knows when the user has taken the desired action.
To install more Pixel code (you should already have your Pixel open from installing the base code to your headers), click ‘Continue’ and then choose the events that you’d like to track from the list. You can toggle these events on and off by activating the blue slider switches. For each of these events, you can set further parameters that will generate unique codes.
Once you’ve activated certain events, you are then given two options for tracking:
- Track event when page loads – This is the best option to choose if you are tracking an event that involves a user landing on a certain page. The code generated from this option must be pasted just below the closing header section of that specific page.
- Track event on in-line action – This option is used if the action you are tracking requires the user to click on something (such as a ‘subscribe’ button or an ‘add to cart’ button). The code created by this option needs to be pasted between script tags, next to the action you want to take.
You can repeat these tracking steps numerous times to record multiple events. Tracking these events allows Facebook to show you people who are likely to buy your products or entire audiences that have taken a specific action on your site.
You can see who has added products to their shopping carts but not yet purchased, who has clicked on your subscribe buttons, who has actually purchased a product and many more events such as these.
Check that your Pixel is working
The best way to see if your Pixel is working is by installing the Chrome plugin called Facebook Pixel Helper. This plugin allows you to see if a Pixel is successfully installed on a website and what errors it may have.
Visit a webpage that you want to check and click on the Facebook Pixel Helper icon – it will show you what actions are working on the page. Your ad blocker needs to be disabled when using the plugin otherwise it will block the Pixel.
If the Pixel Helper plugin says that your Pixel is working properly, you can start creating dynamic product adverts and tracking events on your website.
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