Facebook Pixels: A Guide for Remarketing and Conversion Tracking

facebook-pixels-remarketing-conversion-tracking-guide

In previous posts about Facebook advertising, I’ve mentioned the Facebook pixels that you can use to create custom audiences and conversion tracking. Facebook has recently updated their pixels so that you can use one pixel for all of your advertising needs: audience retargeting, lookalike audience creation, conversion tracking, conversion optimization, and more. If you’re looking to get more out of your Facebook ads, then you’ll want to know the full range of benefits and uses for the new Facebook pixel. In this post, I’ll explain how the new Facebook pixel works and how to use it to improve your Facebook advertising strategy.

What You Need to Know Before Getting Started

Whether you plan on using your Facebook pixels for remarketing or conversion tracking – or both – there is something you should know. You can only have one Facebook pixel per Facebook advertising account for remarketing and conversion tracking. This is not a problem if you only have one website to work with. But for those with multiple websites, you have two options to choose from. Your first option is to use one Facebook pixel across multiple domains and use rules to distinguish them. For example, if you are using a Facebook pixel for remarketing, what you would do is install the Facebook pixel code on all of your websites in the <head> section. Then, you would use rules to create Custom Audiences to distinguish the traffic between each website like this.

Facebook Pixels

For each website, you would create a new Custom Audience with rules and a name that distinguishes the traffic for each domain to be used in your advertising. Alternatively, if you have multiple domains that all relate to each other, you can create one Custom Audience for website traffic to all of your websites so you can run the same ad to anyone who has visited any of your websites. For conversion tracking using one pixel for multiple domains, you would use custom conversion tracking to distinguish conversions from a specific domain. You can create up to 20 custom conversions per Facebook ad account.

Facebook Pixels

I’ll go into more details about both remarketing and conversion tracking later in the post. Your second option is to create multiple Facebook advertising accounts. The advantage to this is that you would have one advertising account and thus, one Facebook pixel for each domain. This can come in handy if you want to use different forms of payment for each domain’s ads or add additional people in specific roles to manage your ad account for a specific domain only. For example, let’s say that you have a personal website and a business website, both of which you do advertising for and make money from. You may want to use your personal account to pay for ads for your personal website and your business account to pay for ads for your business website. Additionally, you may want to give one or more of your employees access to your business website advertising account, but not allow them access to your personal website advertising account. The downside to having multiple accounts is you would have to keep switching from one account to the other to create ads, modify pixels, and review your ad analytics. Also, if you wanted to advertise something to all visitors to all of your domains, you would have to go into each account to create a new ad.

Installing the Facebook Pixel

To get started with remarketing and conversion tracking, you will need to create your Facebook pixel and add the Facebook pixel code on your website(s). Do this by going to your Facebook Ads Manager and selecting Pixels under the Tools menu. Then click the Create a Pixel button.

Facebook Pixels

You can give your pixel a specific name or leave it as the Default Pixel. Then you will be given code to add to all pages on your website(s) between the <head> and </head> code.

Facebook Pixels

We’ll talk about the Conversion Tracking options later in the post. If you have a WordPress website, this may be as simple as finding the option for your theme’s header and footer settings. You can also install the Header and Footer plugin which will give you a place to enter any codes that need to be added to the between the <head> and </head> code. You can also find directions on how to install the Facebook pixel using Google Tag Manager. If you are using Stealth Seminar, just contact us and we can help you install the Facebook pixel on your website and webinar registration, confirmation, and replay pages. Once installed, you can use the Facebook Pixel Helper extension for Google Chrome to see if your pixel is installed correctly. Or you can go to Pixels under the Tools menu in Ads Manager after a day to see if there is activity.

Facebook Pixels

Using the Facebook Pixel for Remarketing

Facebook pixels have two main uses. The first use is for creating Custom Audiences to use for remarketing ads. To do this, you will go to your Ads Manager and click on Audiences under the Tools menu. Then you will click on the Create Audience dropdown to create a new Custom Audience.

Facebook Pixels On the following screen, you will select Website Traffic.

Facebook Pixels

Then you will configure your Custom Audience. You can choose to create a Custom Audience for all of your website visitors, visitors who visit a specific page, visitors who visit one page but not another, or visitors that have not been to your website in a certain amount of time.

Facebook Pixels

You can set your Custom Audience to remember visitors to your website for up to 180 days, including past traffic. Note the past traffic only counts visitors you have received since you have installed the Facebook pixel.

Facebook Pixels

Here are a few ideas on the types of Custom Audiences you can set up from your website traffic for remarketing.

  • If you are using the Facebook pixel for multiple websites whose visitors you would like to target with one ad, you can create a Custom Audience using the option for Anyone who visits your website.
  • If you are using the Facebook pixel for multiple websites, you can create Custom Audiences for all traffic to each of your websites using the option for People who visit specific pages and entering your domain (like geoffronning.com) in the URL contains field.
  • If you are using the Facebook pixel for one website, you can create a Custom Audience for all traffic to that website using the option for Anyone who visits your website.
  • If you are using the Facebook pixel for one or multiple websites, you can create a Custom Audience for all traffic that visits a blog post using the option for People who visit specific pages and entering the URL of your post (like geoffronning.com/custom-audiences-precision-marketing/) in the URL contains field.
  • If you are using the Facebook pixel for one or multiple websites, you can create a Custom Audience for all traffic that visits a webinar registration page but does not register for a webinar using the option for People visiting specific pages but not others. Include the webinar registration page URL (like geoffronning.com/webinar-registration/) in the URL contains field and exclude the webinar confirmation page URL (like geoffronning.com/webinar-registration-confirmation/) in the URL contains field.
  • If you are using the Facebook pixel for one or multiple websites, you can create a Custom Audience for all traffic that watches a webinar but does not make a purchase using the option for People visiting specific pages but not others. Include the webinar replay page URL (like geoffronning.com/marketing-webinar/) in the URL contains field and exclude your product purchase confirmation URL (like geoffronning.com/thank-you-for-your-purchase/) in the URL contains field.
  • If you are using the Facebook pixel for one or multiple websites, you can create a Custom Audience for all traffic that makes a purchase using the option for People who visit specific pages and entering the URL of your purchase confirmation page (like geoffronning.com/thank-you-for-your-purchase/) in the URL contains field.

As you can see, using the above as Custom Audiences for website traffic will allow you to target ads to specific visitors – all visitors, visitors who read a specific blog post, visitors who came to a webinar registration page but didn’t register, and visitors who watched a webinar but didn’t buy. All of these will help you boost your advertising results as you will be advertising to people who you know are interested and just need a little nudge. In addition to Custom Audiences, you can use your website traffic to create Lookalike Audiences. This is Facebook’s way of taking the data from your website visitors and using it to match to others on Facebook who are similar. For example, let’s say you want to advertise a webinar to people who are similar to those who have purchased your product. You would go to your Audiences under the Tools menu in Ads Manager, click on the Create Audience dropdown, and select Lookalike Audience. On the following screen, you would select the Custom Audience you created for those who purchased your product.

Facebook Pixels

Now, you can advertise a webinar to the people who are most likely to convert into paying customers. Whenever you start to create remarketing ads, you can use your Custom Audiences by including one or more of them or excluding one or more of them when configuring your ad audience.

Facebook Pixels This would allow you to do things like create an ad for a webinar targeted to your customer’s lookalike audience that excludes people who have recently purchased the product. Note that the Custom Audience from your website traffic only includes visitors from up to 180 days, so if you have customers from earlier, you may want to create a Custom Audience using your customer email or phone number list instead.

Using the Facebook Pixel for Conversion Tracking

The second use for the Facebook pixel is conversion tracking. Conversion tracking in Facebook can help you in two ways.

  • It makes your Facebook advertising analytics more valuable as Facebook will be able to link your conversions from ads inside Facebook Ads Manager.
  • It allows you to create ads that are optimized for the people most likely to convert.  

You can set up conversion tracking using two methods.

Facebook Pixels

The first method is Standard Events. Start by going back to your Pixels under the Tools menu in Ads Manager, click on the Actions dropdown, and select View Pixel Code.

Facebook Pixels

On the following screen, you will see your Facebook pixel code followed by Standard Events conversion tracking code. These snippets will need to be placed on the pages on your website where the conversions occur.

Facebook Pixels

If you are using your Facebook pixel on multiple websites, or you would prefer not to go in and add these snippets of codes on specific pages (which can be time consuming), the alternative is to use the second method, Custom Conversion Tracking. This allows you to enter the URL which signals a conversion has occurred, such as a thank you or confirmation page.

Facebook Pixels

When you click next after configuring the conversion, you can specify a name for the conversion as well as assign an optional value to it to further enhance the value of Facebook conversion tracking.

Facebook Pixels

You can create up to 20 Custom Conversions for your account. In addition to the Standard Events shown above, you can create Custom Conversions to track the following.

  • Webinar registrations via the webinar registration confirmation page.
  • Lead form submissions via the contact form thank you page.
  • Purchases of a product via the order confirmation page.

You can see and edit your Custom Conversions by visiting Custom Conversions under the Tools menu in your Ads Manager. There, you will also see the number of conversions you have received since setting up the conversion tracking.

Facebook Pixels To use conversion tracking as a goal for your ads, select Increase conversions on your website, enter the target URL for the ad, and select the conversion goal for your ad. Facebook Pixels

Then make sure your ad is optimized for conversions as is recommended by Facebook.

Facebook Pixels

Once you start running ads, visit your Ads Manager often to review the analytics for each of your ads. Be sure to customize your Ads Manager analytics by adding Total Conversion Value as a column if you specified a conversion value with your conversion tracking to quickly see your ROI from this screen.

Facebook Pixels

In Conclusion

As you can see, Facebook pixels allow you to get a lot more value from your Facebook advertising in a number of ways. Be sure to add remarketing and conversion tracking into your Facebook advertising strategy today. Even if you don’t use them for ads now, you will have ready to go for future ads!

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