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What is Facebook Pixel?
A Facebook pixel is an analytical tool, based on complex algorithms, that tracks everyone who visits your websites, your landing pages, people who become leads, people who purchase items on your site, and so on. It is just Facebook’s way of tracking all the people that are on Facebook who visit your website. There is one Facebook pixel per one Facebook ad account.
The reason for the word ‘pixel’ is because way back in the days, what they used to do to track people that visit different websites was to make a very small image that was one pixel by one pixel and throw it on the website. It was so small that you cannot even see it. But every time that someone visits the site, the pixel will fire and they used it to track visitors and actions they take on your site. Examples of actions can be making a purchase or adding an item to their wishlist or shopping cart and so on. All these actions can be viewed by the site owner in his Facebook pixel page on the Events Manager.
Even though Facebook pixel is not an image anymore, but given the history, the name was still carried on and is still used to track visitors and their actions.
The Facebook pixel allows us to ensure three basic things:
• To Ensure that Our Ads Are Shown to the Right People: You will find new customers of people who have landed on a specific page on your site or people who have taken a certain action on your website.
• To Drive More Sales: This allows us to set up automatic bidding to reach people who are more likely to take an action you care about, like purchasing a product or patronizing your services.
• To Measure the Result of your Ads: This helps to understand the impact the ad is having on people and what happens when they see our ads. With that you will have the options to reach those customers again through future ads.
Now let me show you where to go in your Facebook Ads Manager to access how to create a Facebook pixel for your website and how to go through and use it with your different websites and landing pages.
From your Facebook Ads Manager account menu, as shown above, under Event Manager you see Pixels (arrow 2). Click the Pixels and the page below will open. Alternatively, from your Ads Manager, locate the search box above and type “pixels” and press Enter; the same page as shown below will load.
Just follow the walk through prompts to set it up by clicking Create a Pixel button. When that is done, you will see a pop up requesting you to give the pixel a name. You may decide to name it anything then click Create. Thereafter, the options as shown below will open for you to select the type of installation you want. As seen in the first option (arrow 1), many popular CMS like Magento, Shopify, WooCommerce, and so on, already have a mechanism for integration of Facebook pixel. That makes it easier to install on your store built on any of those.
You may also select the third option (arrow 3) of Email Instructions to a Developer if someone is managing your website. But for the purpose of this article, we are selecting the option 2 (arrow 2) to manually install the code yourself. Thereafter, you will see a picture as shown below with the pixel base codes prompting you to copy the code.
Copy the base code as advised and paste it just before the closing tag of your HTML header in your website source code. As shown below, we are going to use a WordPress website to illustrate how this can practically be done. Nevertheless the same manual installation applies to any other CMS based platform you may be using. When you log into your WordPress CMS dashboard, follow the steps in the image below to enter into your WordPress Theme Editor:
When you enter Theme Editor as shown below, locate the header file of your WordPress theme where the HTML can be found. Just before the closing tag of the head, insert the Facebook Pixel base code you copied earlier and click Update File.
On the Facebook Event Manager page where you copied the base code, click Continue to get to the next phase which has to do with event code registration as shown below.
Event Code Setup
The event code lets you track specific actions that happen on your website in order to utilize them in future advertising. There are various event codes for different actions that a customer might take on your website. The picture below shows different types of specific events or actions that a customer might take on your website and their corresponding codes.
You can configure each of these events that you deem relevant to your business to any of the webpages on your website that you want to track by using the codes given. Simply add the particular code of the event you are interested in just before the end tag (before the closing tag of the script) of the Facebook base code as shown below.
From the image above, we added an event code of wishlist as an example of how and where to add event codes. It can be observed that when a customer adds an item to his wishlist, the event code for the wishlist which we just added will trigger. Hence Facebook will record that customer in our list in Event Manager in order for us to be aware of his interest so as to promote the right products to such ones.
Testing for the Facebook Pixel
When you are done installing the Facebook pixel on the website, you need to check to ensure the pixel is recognized on your website. In order to do that, you need to download and install a Chrome extension called Facebook Pixel Helper. As shown below, simply go to Google and search for that keyword and chose the option as shown in the image.
When the page opens, click on Add to Chrome as indicated and the extension will download and be added to your Google Chrome browser.
At the top right of your Chrome browser, you will see the icon of the Facebook Pixel Helper. To implement it, open your website where you have already installed the base code of the Facebook pixel, then click on the Pixel Helper icon extension on the top right of your Chrome browser as shown below. You will notice that the Pixel number will be shown to indicate the Facebook pixel was already installed on that website.
Following the above procedures will help you install Facebook Pixel on your website in order to track the visitor’s actions on your site and use the information to optimize your promotions. For more information on how to set up Facebook targeted ads read this article here.
