Facebook has created many tools to help marketers better optimize their business, and one of these tools is their Pixel. Advertising on Facebook can be overwhelming with all the features, but pixels help ease the situation. It makes advertising on their platform much easier by tracking conversions, optimization and remarketing. There are pixels for Google Analytics to track conversions on your website for other campaigns, but Facebook created one specifically for their ad campaigns.

Since Facebook advertising has become so prevalent, adding pixels takes your campaigns to the next level. If you have a website for your business and your audience is on Facebook, pixels are a must.

What is a Pixel

Pixels help you measure how your ads are performing. The official definition is that a Facebook pixel is an analytics tool that allows you to measure the effectiveness of your advertising by understanding the actions people take on your website.

Adding pixels to your site can help you determine how well an ad performs, optimize the ad, re-engage users and make sure you’re making the most of your ads.

How to Set Up the Pixel

You can either the set the pixel up yourself or have your web developer do it. In Ads Manager found on the Facebook Business portal, go to Create Pixel and give your pixel a name. You only need to create one pixel per ad account. After you’ve created the pixel you can add the pixel to your website. This is where you can take the task on yourself or have a web developer do it for you. Facebook allows you to email the instructions to a developer or Facebook walks you through performing the task yourself.

To install yourself, find the header code of your website. Copy the code Facebook generated and paste it in the bottom of the header of your website. Once this has been completed, make sure the pixel is working by clicking “Send Test Traffic.”

How to Use the Pixel

After the pixel has successfully been installed, you can start creating campaigns and events to track. Events are actions that happen on your site such as someone completing a purchase. Navigate back to Pixels in your ads manager and click create event. You can choose from things such as purchase, add to cart, view content and more. If none of the events fit your needs, you can create custom events and track specific actions that are best for your business.

Use the standard or custom events to track what potential customers are doing on your site. You can use this information to determine how to best target customers later, change ads and more. For example, you can create ads to bring them back to the site if you know they left their cart empty. Create messaging that speaks to them if they leave their cart or other action on the site.

You can set events to take place if they land on a specific page of take a certain action such as clicking a button. Besides tracking the events, you can dive deeper into these actions. To set event parameters, copy and paste a new code into the header of your website.

If you want your code to fire on certain actions, you need to specify this and add that specific tag to your code.

To ensure that your pixel is working correctly after you’ve created events, you can add a tool to check your work. The tool only works in Chrome so you need to have this browser before moving forward. Once you’re in Chrome, navigate to the Chrome store and add the Facebook Pixel Tool Helper. After it’s successfully installed, you can find the tool in the address bar. It will let you know if a pixel is found on your site and if it’s working correctly. If there are no issues, you can begin to create Facebook ads and targeting customers more effectively.

After the Pixel is Installed

Once you create ads and can start tracking traffic and actions on your site, you can create custom audiences or custom conversions. A custom audience is taking all the data from website visitors that have landed there from a Facebook ad and using that information in your strategy. You can use these audiences to have Facebook find similar users that you can target as well.

A custom conversion is taking the data from users that took an action on your website after they clicked on a Facebook ad. These actions could be events that you set up, web pages they visited or some other action. From here, you can view your report and optimize your ads to enhance your marketing.