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The #1 Secret to Successful Facebook Advertising Campaigns

I feel like I am always singing the praises of Facebook ads to my clients. You can create campaigns tailored to your needs, get super specific with the audiences you target, and achieve excellent results with a low monthly budget.

Want more Facebook page likes? No problem. Set up a campaign for $150 a month and watch your followers grow.

Is your goal to drive traffic to your website? Create a traffic campaign and sit back as more and more users explore your website, for as little as $0.15 per click.

Need to generate new leads to reach out to? Develop a lead generation campaign and have new potential customers sent straight to your CRM.

If you’ve never experimented with Facebook advertising before, and you’re interested in getting started, start by reading our blog post all about why Facebook ads can be beneficial to your business. If you have run paid social in the past and need help taking your ads to the next level, keep reading for my biggest and best Facebook advertising tip: the pixel.

What is a Facebook Pixel?

In simplest terms, a Facebook pixel is a piece of code you generate through Facebook and place on your website. It helps you achieve three main goals:

  1. Conversion Tracking
  2. Remarketing
  3. Optimization

Let’s break this down one-by-one.

1. Conversion Tracking

Basically, this is what helps you go above and beyond in measuring the success of your ads. Sure, the Facebook Ads Manager interface gives you important metrics like your click-through rate (CTR), cost per result (like how much you paid for each click to your site, for example), reach, impressions, ad relevancy score, and more; however, you can’t exactly measure ROI and pinpoint how your ads are attributing to sales…and that’s the reason you spend money on advertising in the first place, right?

A Facebook pixel helps you track what people are doing once they reach your website from your Facebook ad. Where are they going? Which pages are they visiting? Are they on a desktop, iPhone, or Android? Are they taking action (making a purchase, filling out a contact form, etcetera)?

There are two things you can do with your pixel to track conversions.

  • Set up standard events. Facebook pixel events help you track certain actions people take on your site. There are nine different events you can set up: view content, search on your site, add to cart, add to wishlist, initiate checkout, add payment info, make a purchase, identifies themselves as a lead, and complete registration.
  • Use custom conversions. With custom conversions, you get to input your own URL that you want to track. You can get even more specific with these and track things that the standard events can’t track. My favorite thing to do with custom conversions? If your site has a contact form, followed by a “Thank You!” page after a user fills out the form, I’ll input the URL to the thank you page as a custom conversion. That way, I can see how many people are filling out the contact form as a direct result of a Facebook ad. Yeah…it’s pretty awesome, and very simple to set up.

2. Remarketing

Remarketing. If you don’t already know, this is the word for when you view a pair of shoes on Nordstrom and then that exact pair of shoes shows up on your Facebook timeline. Creepy? Yes. Good for selling your product or service? Absolutely. Facebook pixel tracking data allows you to retarget people who have interacted with your website in the past.

3. Optimization

With Facebook ads (and any type of advertising in general), it’s of the utmost importance to ensure you’re targeting the right people. Facebook lets you target by location, age, gender, language, and other details like income, job title, interests, behaviors, and other demographic and psychographic information. But, the #1 secret to optimizing your target audiences is by creating custom audiences and lookalike audiences based on the custom audiences you create.

Once your pixel collects data from 100 website visitors from your ads, you can create a lookalike audience based on the type of people who are interacting with your website. This way, you can target people who are most likely to visit your website, thus helping you to expand your customer base.

This is so cool! I’m ready to get started with my pixel!

Ready to get going? Check out this quick guide from Facebook that outlines the steps you should take to set up your Facebook pixel. As always, we can meet you wherever you are in your Facebook advertising strategy to get you where you need to be and to achieve your business’s goals. So, if you’d like a little extra guidance, drop us a line.