When it comes to tracking and improving your business efforts, especially the ones for digital marketing, gathering the right data is key. That’s where tracking pixels come into the picture. Tracking pixels have different names, such as 1×1 pixel, pixel tag, conversion pixel, retargeting pixel. The name pixel comes from its tiny and invisible nature.
Tracking pixels can be used to track your website visitor’s actions. User behavior, site conversions, web traffic, and other metrics can be trackable by using it. It is placed on your website in order to collect data about the visitor while they are browsing the site. This data can be used to enhance and make more cost effective your marketing and sales campaign.
The Facebook pixel (also known as Meta Pixel) is a tracking pixel generated by Facebook(Meta). It is one the most popular ones of tracking pixels. It is an incredibly powerful tool that almost all businesses should be using on their website. It is a massive technology, with currently 6,300,959 websites using it.
At the most basic level, Facebook Pixel is just a little piece of code that you add to your website that measures how people use the website. It relies on Facebook cookies to gather data. There are tons of buzz about Facebook Pixel. But what exactly is a facebook pixel and how does it work? This article will unveil the mystery and show you why it matters.
What is Facebook Pixel?
With Meta’s own words, “The Facebook Pixel is a snippet of JavaScript code that allows you to track visitor activity on your website. It works by loading a small library of functions which you can use whenever a site visitor takes an action.”
The Facebook pixel is a piece of code which tracks the actions of website visitors. Apart from the obvious benefit of being able to determine which ads are working and which are not, you also get to analyze how many people use your website’s conversion funnel and what are the reasons why they do not fully convert.
Pixels are used to track data. You can use them to see where your website visitors came from, what kind of device they used to access your site, and what other pages they looked at on your site. Pixels can help you understand how users interact with your website in real time, telling you things like who converted and what keywords drove them to do so.
Implementing pixels seems intimidating, but it’s actually simple: just place a small snippet of code on every page of your website. This code will be unique for each platform that you want to track, usually Facebook and Google Analytics, and will link all of the data collected from those platforms back to one place.It allows you to track events and conversions.
💡 What Is Event?
An event is an action your visitor takes on your website such as viewing a page.
| Standard Pixel Events | Explanation | Standard Event Code |
| Add Payment Info | Adding payment details to a customer’s order during the checkout process. A person may, for example, click a button to preserve their billing information. | fbq(‘track’, ‘AddPaymentInfo’); |
| Add To Cart | An item is added to a shopping cart or basket. For example, on a website, clicking the Add to Cart button. | fbq(‘track’, ‘AddToCart’); |
| Add To Wishlist | The process of adding items to a wishlist. For example, on a website, clicking the Add to Wishlist button. | fbq(‘track’, ‘AddToWishlist’); |
| Complete Registration | A customer’s input of information in return for a service offered by your company. Signing up for an email subscription, for example. | fbq(‘track’, ‘CompleteRegistration’); |
| Contact | A phone call, SMS, email, chat, or other form of communication between a customer and your company. | fbq(‘track’, ‘Contact’); |
| Customize Product | Customizing a product using a configuration tool or another program owned by your company. | fbq(‘track’, ‘CustomizeProduct’); |
| Donate | A financial contribution to your organization or cause. | fbq(‘track’, ‘Donate’); |
| Find Location | When someone searches for one of your locations on the web with the purpose to visit. | fbq(‘track’, ‘FindLocation’); |
| Initiate Checkout | The beginning of the checkout process, such as when you click the checkout button. | fbq(‘track’, ‘InitiateCheckout’); |
| Lead | A customer’s input of information with the understanding that they would be contacted by your company at a later date. For instance, filling out a form or joining up for a free trial. | fbq(‘track’, ‘Lead’); |
| Purchase | The acceptance of an order, purchase confirmation, or transaction receipt confirming the completion of a purchase. For instance, landing on a thank you or confirmation page. | fbq(‘track’,‘Purchase’, {value: 0.00, currency: “USD”}); |
| Schedule | Making an appointment to visit one of your sites. | fbq(‘track’, ‘Schedule’); |
| Search | A search on your website, app, or other online product. Searches for products or trips, for example. | fbq(‘track’, ‘Search’); |
| Start Trial | The beginning of a free trial for a product or service you provide. | fbq(‘track’‘StartTrial’, {value: ‘0.00’, currency: ‘USD’, predicted_ltv: ‘0.00’}); |
| Submit Application | An application for a product, service, or program that you provide. A credit card, a school program, or a job, for instance. | fbq(‘track’, ‘SubmitApplication’); |
| Subscribe | The beginning of a paid subscription for a product or service that you provide. | fbq(‘track’, ‘Subscribe’, {value: ‘0.00’, currency: ‘USD’, predicted_ltv: ‘0.00’}); |
| View Content | A visit to a webpage that you are interested in. For instance, a product or a landing page. View content just informs you if someone goes to a website’s URL, not what they do or view there. | fbq(‘track’, ‘ViewContent’); |
Tracked events display in the Ads Manager, where they may be used to examine the performance of your website’s conversion funnels, establish custom audiences for ad targeting, and monitor the performance of your ads.
💡 What is Conversion?
Conversion is an aimed action your visitor takes on your website such as adding an item to cart.
=>Learn to conduct A/B tests for sustainable success.
🦄 What is Custom Conversion?
Custom conversions are conversions that can be edited in the Meta event manager to track events other than standard events and be used for campaign optimization. For example, you can define a conversion such as shopping for t-shirts over 400 TL to your account.
⇒Personalize your digital experience.
A simple pixel code looks like these:
<!-- Facebook Pixel Code -->
<script>
!function(f,b,e,v,n,t,s)
{if(f.fbq)return;n=f.fbq=function(){n.callMethod?
n.callMethod.apply(n,arguments):n.queue.push(arguments)};
if(!f._fbq)f._fbq=n;n.push=n;n.loaded=!0;n.version='2.0';
n.queue=[];t=b.createElement(e);t.async=!0;
t.src=v;s=b.getElementsByTagName(e)[0];
s.parentNode.insertBefore(t,s)}(window, document,'script',
'https://connect.facebook.net/en_US/fbevents.js');
fbq('init', '{your-pixel-id-goes-here}');
fbq('track', 'PageView');
</script>
<noscript>
<img height="1" width="1" style="display:none" src="https://www.facebook.com/tr?id={your-pixel-id-goes-here}&ev=PageView&noscript=1"/>
</noscript>
<!-- End Facebook Pixel Code -->
Requirements for adding facebook pixel to your website:
- You need access to your website’s code base.
- You need your Pixel’s base code or its ID.
- You need access to the Facebook Ads Manager.
- You may need permission due to general data protection regulation.
🛡️General Data Protection Regulation and Apple’s App Tracking Transparency
Apple’s new App Tracking Transparency (ATT) architecture allows Facebook Pixel to track conversion events in a new way by leaving permission responsibility to app developers. If you’re on iOS 14.5 or later, you’ll need to opt-in to ATT’s tracking of your behavior across multiple apps and websites. As a result of these changes, measures of ad performance and user interactions will be limited.
However, Facebook Pixel developed Aggregated Event Measurement.
💡What is Aggregated Event Measurement?
Aggregated event measurement is a protocol which was developed by Meta due to the data loss in conversion events of Facebook pixel after Apple’s App Tracking Transparency update which sourced General Data Protection Regulation. Aggregated event measurement. Aggregated event measurement keeps tracking 8 conversion events while supporting Apple’s latest updates.
Aggregated event measurement protocol restricts a single domain-associated pixel or pixels to 8 conversion events that can be prioritized. 8 conversion events can be ranked based on business goals, with the shopping event necessarily in one of the top four rows. When measuring and optimizing ad performances, only the higher priority conversion events from a single user will be counted. For example, if your 6th conversion event is adding to cart and your 2nd conversion event is adding payment information; the user who adds an item to the cart and adds payment information will only be counted as adding payment information. In other words, even if the conversion events that occur through your ads are more, they may appear less in the ad reports.
What To Do With Facebook Pixel?
🏁️ Gather information about visitors. This means collecting information about visitors, such as where they came from, what device they’re using, and other related data.
📈 Analyze user activity. Discover how visitors engage with your website, such as if they add items to their cart or visit a certain product page.
🚀 Make an audience. Build lookalike audiences, custom audiences, and more using the data obtained from Pixel events.
🔍 Evaluate the situation. Analyze conversion events to create and optimize the most effective Facebook ad campaigns for your business.
Some recommendations for train your Facebook Pixel:
Adding a standard event to your conversion funnel is a must to optimize your ads and audiences by using Facebook’s data. Think of standard events as a way to tell Facebook what you want to show and whom you want to show via pixel data.
After the first 50 conversions in your ad set, Facebook will be able to optimize your ad. That’s why the most cost effective campaign management way is to create an ad set for your top of the funnel for beginning, and then create an ad set for further stages in funnel with the help of pixel data, and go a little narrower every time; instead of creating a purchasing campaign right away with your 20 days old account. And that’s also why you should be patient and see data as valuable as sales for sustainable success.
