Setting Up Facebook Pixels For Ad Campaigns

The Facebook pixel is a piece of code you place at the back end of your website to track and understand the behaviors and actions taken by visitors on your site.

It allows you to run targeted ad campaigns, monitor how successful your Facebook ads are, giving you more accurate conversion stats and they allow you create custom audience based on site traffic.

The code embedded in the website links visitors’ on- site behavior to Facebook user profiles. The sync between a website visitor and the Facebook account enables the social media platform to retarget those individuals with relevant ads and also to track the actions individuals take when they return to the website.

Have you ever added a product to your cart on an online market place such as Ali Express and Jumia without completing the purchase only to see that same product now appearing on your social media new feed?

Or probably you checked out an online course with an online academy which you haven’t checked out before only to start seeing ads on that course on your social profiles like Instagram and Facebook.

This is exactly what Facebook Pixels do.

How Facebook Pixels Work

Facebook pixel is a transparent 1×1 unique image files which is embedded on pages outside Facebook. This file sits on Facebook servers and each time it is loaded, it increments counters on Facebook’s end.

Whenever a user accesses Facebook using a web browser and an IP address, a signature is generated that Facebook matches to the user. No matter what browser or device this user uses, it can still be associated to him/her.

This is because every time the pixel file is being seen by a user, Facebook servers can see the browser, the machine and IP address.  As long as a user accesses the page that has a pixel in a way that they used once to log on Facebook, they can be identified and matched to a Facebook ID.

When this pixel is seen, the Facebook sever knows what page the user is on and the information from the page can tell what actions the user takes on that website.

So from this, Facebook knows all the actions that have been taken on the website. Incomplete orders, email subscriptions, amount of time spent on the site, bounce rates and lots more.

The data picked up by the pixels is valuable for the following reasons;

1. Tracking of website traffic and conversion from Facebook ads enables business owners measure ROI of their Facebook campaign.
2. Through targeting, a custom audience can be created based on who is visiting the site and who is converting and you get use this data to retarget specific audience and to create lookalike audience.

Installing And Setting Up Facebook pixels for Ad Campaigns

Each ad account gets to use only one pixel. The code embedded in a website consists of two main parts;

• The pixel base; this tracks all the traffic you get on your site
• The event codes are additional codes you can add under the default pixel code on specific pages of choice on your website. This code allows tracking of actions taken on those particular pages.

Every single pixel has its own unique 15 digit ID which you can install on every page on your site that you want to track.  You can easily generate your pixel code using Facebook Ads Manager or Facebook Business Manager.

Facebook Ads Manager;

Open up your Ads manager and click the top menu button and an asset column appears, click on Pixel and then a new page appears, click on “create a pixel” and give your new pixels a name.

Facebook Business Manager;

On the business manager home page, navigate to pixel in the left menu and click “create new pixel”, you also have to give the new pixel a name. With Business Manager, you can create up to a 100 pixels.

After creating a pixel, you assign it to an ad account. Remember one ad account gets only one pixel.

Installation

Now you have created a pixel, the next step would be to install it.

Once you have created the pixel, Facebook will automatically show you ways to choose from to install pixel.  You can install the pixel manually, you can also install it through your Shopify store.

Manual installation;

After creating the pixel on the Ads Manager, you’ll immediately find a call to action button to finish setting up pixels.

If you haven’t installed pixels yet, click on the “set up pixel” button as shown below

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After hitting that button, you’ll be given a list of options, click on the option that says. “Manually Install the Code Yourself”. You can also click on the option that says, “Use an Integration or Tag Manager” that is if you are using a third party website that supports this kind of integration.

Clicking the manual install option gives you an option to copy and paste the code. If you aren’t skilled in doing this or feel nervous dealing with codes, you’ll also be given an option to email the code to your web developer.

If you are installing it yourself, pick the copy and paste option. When you select this option, you’ll see the install Pixel Base page. Click the code box to copy the code to your clipboard.

The next thing to do is to paste in the copied code to the header tags of your website under the SEO settings. Your web host should have instructions on how to do that. This also applies if you are using third party service.

Installing the Event Code

Event codes allow you track actions that are taken by individuals on your website. These codes are usually used by e-commerce stores to track what customers do on their web store.

After installing the Base code, click on “Next” to get another snippet of code for you to install on your website. You then select the event code you want, click the code box to copy then go ahead to paste on the website page of choice.

There are different types of event codes for different purposes, tracking different types of visitor actions; the types and functions are listed below;

1. Search: you place this code on the search results page on your site to track search actions.
2. Add to Cart: you place this event code on the add to cart page to track visitors who added items to their shopping carts but didn’t finish the purchase.
3. Add to wishlist: place this event code on the wishlist page to track the items people want most.
4. Initiate Checkout; this code is to be placed on the page where someone begins a checkout process.
5. Add payment info: this code is triggered when someone fills in their payment information.
6. Purchase: placed on the page that displays after someone has finished a purchase like the thank you page.
7. Lead: this is placed on the appreciation page after a visitor signs up for your newsletter or webinar
8. Complete Registration: used to track registrations to webinars and events.
9. Custom: this allows you to customize events based on the conversion you want to track. To get this going, you’ll also need create a custom conversion related to the event.

The idea is to choose the one that best suits the actions and conversions you want to track.