Facebook Pixel: What Is It & Why Do You Need It?
May 5, 2020
Author: Georgia Townshend
Reading Time: 2 minutes
Do you run ads on Facebook? Or are you thinking about Facebook ads? Then you need to know about Facebook Pixel – to reach the right people, drive more sales, and measure the results of your ads while making the most of your social media budget.
What is Facebook Pixel?
It’s an analytics tool that helps you be smarter with your advertising dollar by tracking the performance of your Facebook ads. It’s a code that’s placed on your website that collects conversion and audience data to see how people interact with your website after clicking through from your ad.
Why do you need Facebook Pixel?
Facebook Pixel provides important information you can use to create better Facebook ads, and better target your ads.
Facebook Pixel data helps Facebook make sure your ads are seen by the people who are most likely to take your desired action, be it website views, making purchases and so on. This allows you to improve your Facebook ad conversion rate and get better ROI.
Even if you’re not using Facebook ads yet, you should install the Facebook Pixel now. It will start collecting data right away so that you don’t have to start from scratch when you’re ready to create your first Facebook ad!
How can Facebook pixel improve your Facebook marketing results?
Conversion tracking
Pixel allows you to see how people interact with your website after viewing your Facebook ad. For example, you can track customers across their devices, do they first view on their mobiles and switch to a desktop before buying? Or, maybe it’s the other way around. Either way this information lets you know your site needs to be optimized for mobile, which can help you refine your ad strategy and get the most out of your ad spend.
Retargeting
Pixel data allows you to show targeted ads to people who have specifically already visited your site. For example, you can show people an ad for the exact products they abandoned in their shopping cart or added to a wishlist on your website.
Retargeting is one of the best ways to bring back customers, and they are 70 times more likely to buy from you, because they’ve already shown interest in your products or services by visiting your site in the past.
Create lookalike audiences
Facebook uses targeting data to help you build a lookalike audience – an audience of people who have similar likes, interests, and demographics to those already interacting with your website.
Optimize Facebook ads for conversions
You can use Pixel data to optimize your Facebook ads for specific conversion events on your website like purchases and sign-ups. (Without Pixel, the only conversion you can optimize for is link clicks.)
Key Takeaways
Facebook Pixel provides a wealth of data at a granular level not available on most advertising platforms, with the power to increase website traffic, get more leads and ultimately generate more sales. So if you’re already spending money on Facebook advertising and don’t have Pixel, you’re missing out on all that Pixel has to offer.
