Facebook. The social media platform of endless possibilities, often held up as the golden standard of personal communication which allows us to connect with colleagues, clients and friends alike. Many businesses take advantage of this platform by using facebook ads, which lets you and your business share professional advertisements to specific audiences on facebook.
Sounds easy enough right? Wrong. How do businesses know how successful their adverts are with their chosen demographic? Are the adverts receiving the levels of engagement you desire? There’s one key tool you need to start using to answer these questions: Facebook Pixel
What is Facebook Pixel?
Facebook Pixel is a data-gathering tool which provides you with a wealth of data on the coverage of your social media advertising. Put simply, it is a specific code you place on your websites, which allows you to track data traffic flow conversions from facebook to your site.
Users who click on your facebook ads will then be transferred to your site, triggering the code (Or “cookies” for an all the more sweeter approach). This code, at its simplest level, will record where the user has come from, the specific link they clicked and a plethora of other useful pieces of information.
In short, whenever someone visits your site and takes any action (buying something or searching for a product), facebook pixel’s records these actions.
Conversion optimisation, Retargeting and consumer behaviour
As you can imagine, this naturally leads to Pixel collecting a rather large amount of data on your client base. Every single piece of consumer traffic and actions are recorded which, overtime, will enable you to optimise your customer audience through a process of conversion optimisation.
Conversion Optimisation is simply increasing the amount of customers who perform a certain action. In its most basic form, you could consider it as “how many customers who saw the advertisement clicked the advertisement”. If your advert is seen by 1,000 people but only 2 people click it, chances are the advertisement is not prompting engagement from your client base.
You can then tailor your advertisement and, using the feedback as a stimuli, further increase your customer engagement levels, which naturally leads to more traffic to your website and more products being sold.
For a more complex example of optimisation, consider the following. A customer has seen and clicked on your advert, browsing your product line or service. However, they have become distracted by an important real life issue and left your site. The next day, they see your advert again on their facebook timeline and reclick, finalising their purchase they were considering yesterday.
This is called Retargeting and is the art of showing customers who have engaged with your media prior similar advertisements in order to nudge them into completing their purchases. The Facebook Pixel code in your website will list these people as “retargets”, continuing to show them adverts to recapture their interest in your products, and turn a potential customer into a happy customer.
Retargeting doesn’t necessarily improve optimisation, as it relies on customers already engaging with your website. You should consider it as a safety net, to ensure as many potential customers are turned into actualised customers. As such, it’s best employed as an additional marketing strategy on top of a more broad digital approach.
Therefore, you can clearly see how the use of Facebook Pixel can drastically increase the amount of data that you have on your consumer’s behaviour. Having access to who clicks on what media is a crucial component to revising your marketing approach and optimising consumer traffic. If you want to separate pet owners from non-pet owners, perhaps for your veterinarian or other pet oriented business, being able to use Facebook Pixel to define who sees what will allow you that precision method to control the flow of traffic into your website.
As any good business owner knows, targeting the correct audience is crucial to success, and Facebook Pixel makes this process significantly easier.
How to enable facebook Pixel?
Pixel is a relatively simple piece of base code to add to your website. For more information on the process, make sure to read Facebook’s business advice on the installation process, which you can locate right here.