First things first, what is a Facebook Pixel?

A Facebook Pixel is simply a string of coding that you place on each page of your website to collect data. This data then helps you to track activity on your site from your Facebook and Instagram adverts, allowing you to optimise your adverts.

Is it imperative that I drop everything and install a Facebook Pixel right away?

It depends on the type of activity that you’re running in Facebook Business Manager. If you’re using Facebook or Instagram to boost your posts, or utilising Business Manager for brand awareness or post engagement, you can probably get by without the Pixel. If you’re spending money to drive traffic to your website, then I would recommend installing the Pixel so you can get a better understanding of how your campaigns are performing. Also, the Pixel allows you to do much more than tracking, you can build audiences based on a customers activity on your site, whether they’ve already purchased and you want to encourage another sale with complementary products, or if they’ve not yet ordered, all this is available when the Pixel is installed.

How do I do it?

If your website is built in Shopify then the process of adding the Pixel to your site is really straightforward, though of course it’s something that we can help with if required. To do this yourself go to your online store preferences and follow the steps to link your Shopify store to your Facebook account using the Facebook App.

Older Shopify stores may have the Facebook pixel installed without using Shopify’s Facebook app however we recommend that these are reconfigured to use the new set up that utilises the app. In our experience the new method establishes a much more reliable connection, is easy to set up and ensures your results can be completely trusted.

If you don’t use Shopify (or a similar solution), then the string of coding will need to be manually added to each page of your site. The correct place to add this to your site is within the sites head tags, preferably as the last thing within these tags. In some cases you may well require a developer to set this up for you and to fully test the integration.

Okay, Pixel installed. What else do you recommend?

Tracking your campaigns. You can track through Facebook Business Manager, but I’d always recommend using Google Analytics, it’s free and relatively easy to understand, and it will provide you with details on all traffic to your site, so you can compare and measure more effectively.

Especially if you have multiple campaigns in Facebook and Instagram, I’d recommend using a spreadsheet to ensure you apply the same naming conventions and keep track of what you need to tag and when. This will then allow you to see how your ads are performing in Google Analytics, so you can also see things like bounce rate and pages per view as an example. Properly tagging audiences, creative content and whether traffic is coming from Facebook or Instagram will give you a fuller view of what customers are doing once you’ve got them from onto your website, and will help you evaluate and optimise your advertising spend.

If you’d like to learn more about paid social media or digital marketing, get in touch and find out how Dream Big Digital can help you to achieve your business goals.