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https://www.wordstream.com/blog/ws/2016/10/11/facebook-conversion-tracking
Submission: On December 15 via manual from AU — Scanned from AU
Submission: On December 15 via manual from AU — Scanned from AU
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HOW TO USE THE FACEBOOK PIXEL TO TRACK CONVERSIONS ON FACEBOOK
Brett McHale
Last Updated: October 31, 2022 | Facebook Ads, Social Media
Home — Blog — How to Use the Facebook Pixel to Track Conversions on Facebook
What matters most to the vast majority of digital marketers is the ability to
see direct results and tie advertising costs back to those efforts. Simple
enough right? Well, within the past year, Facebook as a marketing platform has
become arguably the most complex and sophisticated way to track specific actions
and target individuals based on them.
In this post, I’ll not only show you how to properly track results in Facebook,
but also how to advertise on Facebook in a way that will allow you to leverage
the platform’s complexity to your advantage.
THE FACEBOOK PIXEL
If you’re thinking about driving direct results using paid media, your first
thought should be on setting yourself up for the best possible success. This may
sound like common sense, but you’d be surprised how many people cast their line
out miles into the ocean, ignoring all of the fish right next to their boat.
That’s where Facebook’s universal tracking pixel comes in – officially known as
the Facebook Pixel. It’s a snippet of HTML code that can be generated from every
advertiser’s Business Manager. The reason it’s called “universal” is the same
reason why your television remote that operates several different things carries
the same name. The intention is to place the pixel throughout every page of your
website and use it “universally” for conversion tracking and audience building.
2021 update: The Facebook pixel is losing its power due to iOS 14+ privacy
features and the deprecation of third-party cookies. Head here to get iOS14+
audience targeting tips and be sure also to implement the Facebook Conversions
API for accurate conversion tracking.
HOW DOES THE FACEBOOK PIXEL WORK?
Let’s pretend for a second that your website is a bar in the middle of a busy
city. At the front entrance, people flow in and out periodically throughout the
night. If your website is the bar and the potential customers entering and
exiting are the site traffic, the Facebook pixel would be a wristband or hand
stamp that they are instantly required to wear upon entering. When they leave
your bar at any point, they will more than likely continue wearing that stamp or
wrist band (unless they actively remove it). Once they are back wandering the
street (let’s assume it’s a strip of bars and restaurants), you can target those
people back to your bar throughout the night with specific offers or promotions
(free shots!).
What I just described through that analogy was not only the concept of
remarketing, but also the basic usage of the Facebook pixel for that purpose
(tracking cookies).
There are several methods, however, to fully utilize this pixel, so now we’ll
outline the most effective ways to fully incorporate them into your strategy.
STEP 1: REMARKETING AUDIENCES
Remarketing is the first step for setting up a proper Facebook Ads foundation.
Let’s assume that you have your Facebook pixel placed throughout your website at
this point, you can now start building audiences in a variety of different ways.
To create a remarketing audience of users who visited your website, go to the
“Audiences” section of Business Manager:
Once there, go to “Create Audience” and select “Custom Audience”:
Then select “Website Traffic”:
You should then be given the ability to build a number of remarketing audiences
to cater to your desired strategy.
TIMEFRAME
One of my favored strategies is based on how recently the user visited your
website. It’s very basic, but can be extremely effective because it can easily
correlate to their level of intent and engagement towards your brand, and can
also be tailored around your sales cycle.
You’ll want to have a healthy volume of traffic to do this in an effective
manner. Luckily for us, we are able to segment for 30-, 60-, and 90-day
remarketing segments based on the high volume of overall website traffic we
receive.
If your daily volume of traffic is currently very low or you only set the pixel
up recently, make the date range as long as needed to build a large enough
audience.
PAGES VISITED
In addition to the timeframe in which the users visited your website, you can
also segment specific pages or groups of specific pages based on their URLs:
You can also specify that the URL be either equal to or contain a variation of
what you submit:
An effective way to leverage this strategy is if you have a number of blog posts
or products related to one specific topic or customer segment that fits into a
different category than others.
For example, let’s say you sell pet products. You can create a custom audience
of people who visited your web pages related to dog products and repeat the
process for cat-related product pages. You will then be able to serve
specifically tailored ads to those potentially very different audiences.
NUMBER OF VISITS/ DURATION
Another great way to segment your web traffic is using frequency and duration as
indicators of intent and brand recognition.
When thinking about the people you’re reaching with your ads it’s important to
take both of these factors into consideration. If someone has visited your
website once for less than a second, they’re probably less familiar with you
than someone who reads your blog every day for several minutes at a time.
You can create an audience based on frequency by selecting “Custom Combination”:
Then by specifying the page (or number of pages) and then including the “at
least” or “at most” number of times they have visited the page(s):
To create an audience based on time spent on web pages, select the “Based on
time spent on your website” option:
Once there, you have the option to choose your most active site users, whether
they’re within the top 5%, 10%, or 25%.
Creating and testing these options against each other could potentially unveil
some hidden insights into the level of engagement and their capacity to convert.
Unfortunately, this option isn’t currently available for specific URLs, but if
you really wanted to, you could make audiences of the web pages you DON’T want
to include and choose to exclude those from your ad set. I’ll explain further…
STEP 2: EXCLUDING WEB AUDIENCES
Any audience that you create using the universal tracking pixel can be used as
an exclusionary audience.
For example, if you’re creating an ad set and want to target a 90-day
remarketing audience but also want to exclude the 60-day segment, you would do
the following within the ad set creation.
Choose the 90-day audience:
Now choose “Exclude”:
Find the audience you want to exclude:
Be wary of the audience definition meter, because if you don’t have a large
enough base audience or the one that you are excluding is a majority of that
audience, you could run into the problem of creating an audience that is too
specific. Luckily, that wasn’t the case for this example:
‘CUSTOM’ CONVERSION TRACKING
An essential part in all of this pixel work, and the reason you’re marketing on
Facebook, is to drive results or conversions. The fastest and most efficient
way to track conversions is – you guessed it – the Facebook pixel.
Going back to the assumption that you have the Facebook pixel placed on ALL of
your web pages, you can easily create conversion events using URLs.
In your Business Manager menu, select “Custom Conversions”:
Once there, select “Create Custom Conversion”:
Here you are brought to a very similar menu as before:
The concept behind using URLs to track conversions works only if individuals are
taken to a “confirmation” page after completing the desired action. An example
of this would be if someone filled out a form on your website and submitted it.
Upon submitting the form, they’d be taken to a page saying “Thank You!” For that
specific conversion, you would place that “Thank you” page as the custom
conversion URL. This tells Facebook that once people reach that page, they’ve
converted.
URL Contains: You would use this is you had multiple promotions with the same
conversion value. Say you have content downloads and they all use the same form
information – the URL can “contain” the necessary parameters that all of those
pages share, and they can all have a unified conversion event for the sake of
simplicity.
URL Equals: If your conversion event is unique and specific – use this.
Event: Events are related to the coded pixel that is actually placed on your
site, as opposed to URL parameters. For the sake of not diving too far down the
rabbit hole, you can learn more about these here.
Once your custom conversions are created, you can view their performance through
the conversions dashboard or directly in your campaigns.
Dashboard:
Campaign level:
You can also create conversion events for other actions on your website. The
idea behind this would be to see the impact that your paid advertising efforts
have on what happens on your site. Essentially, this is creating would I refer
to as a “view-through” conversion event. This could be as simple as a site
visit, but it will give you increased visibility. People may see your ads and
not act on them, but search for you later and visit your site. Setting this up
would allow you to see that.
HOW TO OPTIMIZE FOR THE CONVERSIONS YOU WANT
When you’re building campaigns intended to drive conversions, it’s extremely
important to do it correctly. Make sure that when you get started, you choose
the “Website Conversions” objective:
When you get to the ad set creation, you can choose which conversion you want to
optimize for:
This will allow the Facebook algorithm to properly serve in favor of your
desired conversion.
HOW TO BUILD A LEAD NURTURE FUNNEL
Conversion Audiences: Once you start receiving conversions you can build usable
audiences out of them using either their URLs or their standard events:
This feature is used best in two different ways:
1. Nurture – You can nurture the current conversion audiences with further
promotions or move them down the sales funnel. You can create extremely tailored
messaging for these individuals that could increase the probability of another
action in the future.
2. Exclusionary – Just like any other custom audiences, you can exclude these
conversion events from your ad sets. A great example of this would be to exclude
people who have already converted from seeing your ad again (and thus wasting
your spend):
In this example, I’m targeting a remarketing audience and the goal of the
campaign is to drive content downloads. I’ve excluded “Downloaded Content” so
that when users convert, they’re removed from the audience.
USING THE CONVERSION TRACKING RIGHT TOOLS
Keep in mind that Facebook and Google Ads are essentially marketing tool boxes.
Inside each are the individual tools necessary to create and build a strong
business, brand, and customer base. If you know how to use these tools, the
entire process becomes a lot easier.
Setting up proper tracking is an essential tool to ensure that you’re being
smart about who you’re reaching with your ads. The easiest way to waste money in
Facebook is to advertise to those who aren’t going to convert.
MEET THE AUTHOR
BRETT MCHALE
Brett McHale is the founder of Empiric Marketing, a digital marketing agency
dedicated to scaling startups through paid search and social.
See other posts by Brett McHale
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