Advertising with the new Facebook Pixel
We’ll start with the good news, Facebook advertising is getting a lot easier and cost effective.
When you start advertising with Facebook, it can be quite overwhelming at the very beginning. You have a huge number of options, and if you use the Power Editor, it is extremely complex at first glance.
One such complex (and sometimes frustrating) thing is “the Pixel.”
What is a Pixel?
Pixels are often used across ad platforms. A pixel leaves a “Cookie” from your website on your visitor’s computer. From now on, you know who your visitor is and can re-target them.
The Pixel can also be used to study browsing/purchasing behavior, and measure the effectiveness of your ads.
The Facebook Pixel explained
Before :
Facebook used a custom audience pixel that allowed re-targeting, this along with a conversion pixel (to measure online sales, for example) . Each ad account could only use one custom audience pixel, but you could create as many conversion pixels as you wanted.
The Facebook Pixel now :
Ever since 2015, Facebook has been working on the new Facebook Pixel.
One pixel to replace all others
This pixel will be the only one you still need, it provides retargeting, optimization and follow-up at the same time.
If you are already using the older pixel(s) do not fear, currently they remain usable. The audience pixel is automatically upgraded along with the new version and the conversion pixel will do the same in the fall of 2016.
How to use the new Facebook Pixel (for maximum results) ?
The Facebook pixel provides a huge value-add to all Ecommerce stores, and it has 3 basic features that provide fantastic ROI.
1. Website specific audiences
In other words, “Website Custom Audiences” is Facebook’s way of helping you reach back to visitors after they visit your website (if you’ve installed the pixel correctly, of course).
This tracks everything your visitor does on the website if he is also logged into Facebook at the same time. With this data, you can start advertising very specifically to certain groups of people.
To be clear, Facebook does not show you personalized ads targeted to 1 specific person. This would violate that person’s privacy.However, it does create groups of similar individuals with similar browsing behavior.
Some examples of groups :
- People who have been on your website in the last 24 hours
- People who have visited your website multiple times but have been absent for 30 days (You can use a 180-day time frame)
- People who visited a particular page
- People who have not visited certain pages
2. Chosen conversions
This is one of the hottest new additions to the new pixel, you can create personalized conversion groups the same way you create a general audience.
So you can start targeting people who have already completed certain steps on your website. For example, if you know that someone has made a request for information, you know that person is interested. You can show these multiple times a day an ad of your product or service but now with some specific promotion attached to it to persuade the visitor.
There is one small drawback, you can only run 20 different conversion pixels at a time.
3. Standard Events
This is already a slightly more advanced feature of the new pixel. “Default events” work the same way as the old Facebook pixel. They require a bit of code to work properly, but they are a good way to get around the 20 conversion pixel maximum.
While the conversion pixel is linked to a URL (such as a thank you page), this is not necessary for standard events.
There are 9 different standard event codes that tell Facebook what to follow.
