Facebook Pixel is a free tool offered through the megagiant social media channel. And whether you run Facebook ad campaigns or have your own website, using the Facebook Pixel feature is invaluable. 

In a nutshell, Pixel allows you to understand how people are interacting with your ads or website and use it to attract new customers. As a business owner, this is likely one of your top priorities. 

But many wonder how to use Facebook Pixel correctly and how to get started. Don’t worry, we’ve got you covered as we look at the ins and outs of this free marketing tool. 

What does Facebook Pixel do?

Before you jump into downloading Facebook Pixel, let’s run through the basics of this add-on feature from Facebook.

Pixel is an analytics tool that serves multiple purposes for your Facebook ad campaign or website. Pixel has the ability to:

Show your ads to the right customers. Pixel allows you to find new customers, or people who have visited a specific page on your site and taken some sort of action. The action could be clicking on a “learn more” button or downloading a how-to guide.

Drive more sales. Pixel allows you to set up automatic bidding for your ads. In turn, you can reach people who are more likely to take the action you want, such as making a purchase or registering for an event.

Measure results of your ads. Pixel gives you better understanding of the impact of your ads and what people are doing once they see them. For instance, if your Facebook ads specifically ask users to download the how-to guide, then pixel provides the data as to who is downloading the guide. 

Once you install Pixel, you have a wealth of information at your fingertips. Imagine how much more you can do with your ads when you find out how people are interacting with them.

Once installed, a pixel “fires” when there is an action taken on your site, according to Facebook. From there, you decide the next steps, such as targeting specific Facebook ads to those who have taken action. You would never have this insider knowledge without the Pixel installed on your site.

How to use Facebook Pixel

Now that you’re convinced you need Pixel in your life, you’re probably wondering how to use it. The first step is to install it. 

Install Facebook Pixel

Before you install, you need a website for your business and you must be able to manually update your website’s code. 

To install Pixel, follow these steps:

• Go to the Ads Manager tab under your Facebook profile
• Click on Events Manager (located in the shortcuts) 
• Click Connect Data Sources and select Website, although you can also add an app
• Select Facebook Pixel and click Connect
• Give your pixel a name
• Enter your website URL to check for easy setup options
• Click Continue
• Add the  pixel to your website —  you can either manually add the pixel code to your website or use a third-party for this step

Once installed, you set up events to measure the actions (your goals), such as when someone makes a purchase. 

You are also able to add more than one pixel to a website, which is helpful if you’re running multiple ad campaigns. Or you may choose to add one pixel to only one specific web page on your site. 

Use Facebook Pixel to grow your business

Once you’ve installed Pixel to your site, it’s time to learn how to use it to its maximum potential. The best part of Pixel is, there are several ways to use it to grow your business. 

Create custom ads for potential customers

Retarging, or remarketing ads are simply ads targeted towards users who have already interacted with your site or Facebook ads at some point. Whether these customers signed up for your newsletter or browsed through your website, Facebook Pixel tracks this interaction. Then you use it to create custom ads.

Think about how much easier it is to convince someone to purchase something from you when they’ve already shown some level of interest. 

Because Pixel tracks any Facebook user that interacts with your website, you receive valuable insights such as page visits, time spent on page, the depth of scroll, and other important actions. 

From here, you can advertise and target ads towards these specific groups of visitors. So if you want to only send ads to those who visited your site in the last 24 hours for instance, then you can choose this option.

To do this you:

• Select “Add People to Your Audience”
• Select the days you want to target for Website Visitors
• Choose a name for this audience
• You can exclude certain audience members, such as those who already made a purchase

Once you’ve created your custom audience, you send out Facebook ads addressing the action this custom audience took. Sticking with our audience example of those who’ve visited your site in the last 24 hours, your ad could say something like “See something you like?” or whatever you feel is appropriate.

You can also save this custom audience for later. You don’t have to send ads right away and instead can choose to target this audience at a later time.

Create custom conversions

Where Pixel lets you create custom audiences, it also allows you to create custom conversions. What does this mean? It means you have the ability to build ads for someone who completed (or converted) an action. 

There are several actions, or conversions, you can target, including:

• Add Payment Info
• Add To Cart
• Add To Wishlist
• Complete Registration
• Initiate Checkout
• Lead
• Purchase
• Search
• View Content

Track different types of events

When working with Facebook Pixel, anytime someone interacts or takes action, it’s referred to as an event. 

These events are divided into two categories:

• Standard
• Custom

As the name suggests, standard events are pre-defined by Facebook. This includes the following interactions:

• Add payment info — When someone inputs their payment information
• Add to cart  — When someone adds an item to their shopping cart
• Add to wishlist  — When an audience member adds something to their wishlist
• Complete registration
• Contact  — When someone fills out your contact or request form
• Customize product  — When someone customizes an item on your site
• Donate
• Find location  — If someone searches for and finds a location
• Initiate checkout  — When someone starts the checkout process
• Lead  — When the customer submitted their information for contact
• Purchase
• Schedule  — An appointment is scheduled
• Search  — Someone searched for something on the website
• Start trial  — Someone starts a trial
• Submit application  — An application was submitted
• Subscribe  — Someone subscribed to an email or mailing list
• View content  — When someone visits a page on your site

But then, if the interaction you need isn’t listed here, you can create a custom event for the pixel to track. An example of this would selecting customers who have purchased in the last 24 hours.

Custom events allow you to collect more specific information about a customer versus what the standard event would show you.

The event type is important because it allows you to target your audience at the most detailed level. When you’re armed with this information, your Facebook ad campaign becomes highly targeted. 

Create dynamic ads

You might be interested to learn about creating dynamic ads as you’re learning how to use Facebook Pixel and if you happen to be an ecommerce store owner. This feature is sometimes referred to as Catalog Sales.

This is a useful option if you have a potential customer who comes to your site and browses a few products. But then for whatever reason, they leave your site without completing a purchase.

A dynamic ad from Facebook Pixel would target these specific potential customers who browsed without purchasing. But you take it a step further by adding pictures of your products within the ad. It’s a not-so-subtle way of reminding them what products they interacted with. 

This works great if you have a limited number of products on your site. Obviously this could become quite time consuming if you have thousands of products and numerous visitors browsing. But Pixel is still helpful in this case — you can create a template of products to use for your catalog sales ads. 

The template then goes to the potential customers automatically, based on the behaviors you selected as the parameters.

To choose the dynamic ad option, you select Catalog sales under Campaign Objectives.

The bottom line

Learning how to use Facebook Pixel takes practice. But once you understand the power behind this tool — and remember, it’s a free tool to use  — you’ll see there are multiple ways to take advantage of this power.

Facebook has created Pixel to give you insights to your site or app that you might not otherwise have access to. By taking advantage of this, you can target your Facebook ads and create meaningful campaigns for people who have shown interest.  

If you’d like to learn more about Facebook ads, check out our course, Facebook Side Hustle