What is a Pixel?

The Facebook Pixel is a SUPER powerful piece of code that can be installed on your website or landing pages.  If you are running ad campaigns on Facebook or Instagram without this piece of code, then STOP EVERYTHING YOU’RE DOING RIGHT NOW and get your pixel installed immediately.  

Here’s Why:

The Pixel is essentially how you track every single move that your audience makes on your ads, on your website, your videos and even on posts.  You can track people that have visited your website, create hyper-targeted audiences based on website and landing page traffic AND use their data to create entirely new audiences so that you are constantly growing your social following and keeping that sales funnel what we like to call “evergreen”.

Meet Jenna

Say, Jenna visits your website from a PPC campaign or organically via SEO.  She lands on a page that promotes a specific product or service and finds that your brand truly resonates with her needs.  However, Jenna has a very lively French Bulldog puppy named Bubbles. Bubbles is pretty high maintenance and quickly distracts Jenna from continuing to browse your website with a plea to go outside.  Naturally, between Bubbles’ off-the-charts cute factor and the dwindling attention span of 99% of our population today – Jenna quickly forgets about your website and never gets to the point of actually contacting you for more information.  Now from here, two things could happen – depending on whether or not you have the pixel installed.

Without The Pixel:

When Jenna recalls her need for your product/service, she hops back on Google and starts to research your competition.  Turns out, it’s pretty competitive out there and sadly Jenna does not remember the name of your business, so she ends up making her purchase with one of your competitors.

With The Pixel:

An hour or so after Jenna has thoroughly tended to Bubbles, she gets on Facebook and/or Instagram for her regular check-in on her friends, family and favorite accounts and BOOM there’s an ad featuring the very same product or service that Jenna viewed earlier on your site.  The ad features a compelling image or video, well-written copy to match and clear call to action.  Jenna thinks it’s magic (and perhaps a little spooky) – but we know it’s just the pixel at work.

Now, let’s take it one step further.  If hundreds or even thousands of people just like Jenna visit your site and you have the pixel installed, not only can you re-target all of those website visitors, but you can also create targeted custom audiences that have similar demographic profiles to those visitors – which means you can basically double your audience size without doing any legwork.

Custom + Lookalike Audiences

The pixel is the precise reason why the social media ads that you see in your feed are those that typically represent brands similar to those you already support or an interest of yours whether it be a certain clothing brand, restaurant or food delivery service.  It collects personal data from annual household income, the car you drive and the businesses you support to your daily online activities and buying behavior.  While this may be a scary truth for some consumers, it is an insanely powerful tool for advertisers and helps you better target ideal prospects.  However, what’s even more impressive is that you are able to generate massive targeted audiences of ideal prospects, re-target those prospects and then optimize your campaigns for higher conversion rates, simply based on collected pixel data.

Next Steps

If you’re active on Facebook or Instagram, but you’re not using a pixel, the next step is simple – you just need to generate and install your Facebook Pixel Code.

Once the pixel is installed, you will need to determine how you’d like to use your data and come up with a monthly ad budget based on your research.  Start by creating custom audiences based on your website traffic and page engagement, then you can get fancy as you develop your long-term campaign objectives.  It may sound daunting, but it’s not nearly as difficult as it sounds.

Need help figuring out how to install your pixel?  Just give us a call.