How to install and use Facebook pixel

Why Facebook pixel?

Facebook pixel is an awesome tool. And the reason why it’s awesome is because it gives you a great insight into your audience and the performance of your ads. It helps you understand the actions people take on your website, and that is something you should take into consideration when creating your campaigns, ad sets and ads. Another great thing about Facebook pixel is the ability to create your retargeting audiences. Imagine serving your ads to people who already visited your website.
Cool, right?

How do I get, create, install Facebook Pixel?

Go to your Adverts manager.
Go to the drop down menu in the upper left corner.
Under Assets, choose Pixels.
Click “Create a Pixel”.

Then you’ll see this:

Now, the standard way of creating a Pixel is the lower option “Copy and paste the code”. But this is something you can’t do without a developer. Unless of course, you are one. But if you think you can do it by yourself… try. J
This method requires copying the Pixel base code and pasting in the header code of every page on your website.

The code looks something like this:
But it doesn’t end here.
After the base code, comes the event code.
Based on what kind of website, or business for that matter, you have different options for the events you’d like to track. There is also an option for custom events if none of these are suitable for your needs.
There is a different code for installing every option.

So, this is the hard way of doing things.

The first option; “Use an integration or tag manager”, gives you the ability to install your Pixel through the variety of platforms:

It’s simpler, and there is no need for a developer.
Instruction guides are different for every platform, so there is no need we explain every process.
It’s simple, like I said.

I did it! Now, what can I do with my Facebook Pixel?

Well, most people create a Pixel because they want to do remarketing campaigns and for that you need to create remarketing audiences. Serving ads to people who visited your website. You want to show them some new product you launched, or the discount this summer… Again, go to the upper left drop down menu and under Tools, select Audiences.

There you can create 4 different lists of people:

1. People who match your customer file. (Upload your customer information. You can do this manually or by Mailchimp)
2. People who visited your website or took specific actions.
3. People who launched your app or game.
4. People who engaged with your content on Facebook.

The second option; “Website traffic” is a list you create with the help of Facebook Pixel. The other 3, you can create without.

This is how it looks like when you choose “Website traffic”:

Choose which people you want to track: anyone who visited any web page, those who haven’t visited in some period of time, those who visited specific web pages, or the others who visited those pages, but haven’t others.
Cool, huh?

You can also set the time window of those visits. Think this through, how much time should pass before you won’t consider the visitor for your campaign.

Later, when you are creating your new ad set, you can find these people under Custom Audiences.

Conclusion

Facebook Pixel is a very useful tool, with a similar use to Google Analytics. It’s a first step to advanced Facebook advertising and we recommend you start using it. It has many other useful features, which we will mention in our other blog posts. The most important ones are conversions, so make sure you tune in because next post I’ll bring to you will cover this particular topic.