With more than 1 billion active daily users, Facebook has become a staple of many people’s daily lives. As an eCommerce business today, the social network is virtually impossible to ignore and doing so can significantly impact sales and performance. 2018 statistics show that more than 93% of marketers use Facebook for advertising and more than 3 million businesses use Facebook to promote their services or products. Facebook has taken notice of these statistics as well and it has taken the immense amount of data it collects to help advertisers market their products and services to their ideal customers at the ideal time. Read on to learn how the Facebook Pixel is essential for businesses looking for eCommerce success on Facebook.
What is the Facebook Pixel?
With more than 2 billion monthly users, the chances of reaching your ideal audience on Facebook are high. But, as all marketers know, reaching your customers is only half the battle. You also need to be able to serve them with the correct marketing message at the correct time. That means using analytics to know what products and services matter to them most, when they’ve added products to their cart but failed to check out, and more.
Enter the Facebook Pixel. Facebook created the pixel to provide marketers with a way to track the performance of their advertising efforts. More importantly, the pixel tracks the actions users take after clicking on an ad on Facebook. The pixel is simply a piece of code that gets added to every page of your website. The pixel is simple to install if you are comfortable working with your website’s code. Otherwise, a web developer can easily help complete the task.
Once installed, the pixel is triggered when someone visits your website and takes an action(s). It then reports this action. These actions are important in two ways:
- They allow you build custom audiences that help you find more potential customers and clients
- they allow Facebook’s algorithm to become better and better at serving your ads to people that will be more likely to take certain actions. Some of the actions you can track include pages/products viewed, items added to cart, abandoned carts, checkouts, and more.
As a marketer, having access to this information should put a giant smile on your face.
What Can The Pixel Do?
As we mentioned above, one of the greatest features of the Facebook Pixel is the ability to create custom audiences, and by extension lookalike audiences. Because the pixel can track several actions, it gives marketers the ability to create highly targeted visitor segments and serve them ads tightly tied to the actions or products they have interacted with. That alone would be an incredible advantage for marketers.
However, because Facebook has collected so much data from its users, it can also use custom audiences to find other people with the same likes, interests, and characteristics. These audiences are called “Lookalike Audiences” and can help you reach millions of additional potential customers.
Can you see how helpful that is to marketers constantly on the lookout for new customers? Marketing strives to create a personal connection with potential customers and having the ability to cut through the noise with targeted messages is a tremendous advantage.
The real beauty of the pixel, however, is in its ability to track your visitors’ actions. The pixel allows you to dynamically target users with ads for the exact products or services they were viewing. You can target users who placed items in their cart but did not checkout with special offers to entice them to come back and complete their purchase. You can even walk a potential client through your entire funnel by setting up the pixel to track their actions on your site.
What If I Use A Software Platform Like Shopify or Magento?
Luckily, because the pixel is a simple piece of code, it can work across a wide number of websites.
If your business runs on a popular eCommerce platform like Shopify or Magento, the process is even easier. As preferred partners, both Magento and Shopify make it even easier to install the Facebook Pixel and start collecting data.
Magento offers a plugin that quickly and easily adds the pixel. For a step by step guide to installing the pixel, you can visit Facebook’s own support page.
Shopify’s installation process is even simpler.
Regardless of your website’s backend, there is no reason not to have the Facebook Pixel installed and collecting data.
Conclusion
As we hope you can see, the Facebook Pixel is a powerful piece of code that can help supercharge your business. With the help of the pixel, through custom or lookalike audiences, reaching your target personas and fine-tuning your targeting helps maximize marketing budget and minimizes wasted spend. Once you’ve reached your target audience, the pixel takes things a step further and allows you to target them with messages that address the actions they have taken and interests they have shown on your website. For marketers, this combination should be too good to pass up.
At ATAK, we understand the incredible advantage the Facebook Pixel provides and so we ensure pixel tracking is implemented across all our client’s websites and eCommerce stores.
We hope we’ve given you a good idea of what the Facebook Pixel is and why having it installed on your website is non-negotiable. If you have any questions about the pixel, feel free to reach out. We’d love to chat!