I think it’s safe to say we all know Facebook is like a stalker that is obsessed with us and knows everything about us from the present, the past, and maybe even the future. They’re sitting on a goldmine of user data and all the opportunities this brings with it.
With the recent announcement of launching their Metaverse, they’ve initiated the next chapter for their company and the shape our digital future will take.
Even though everyone is growing more reluctant about their practices and more aware of their privacy, there are still a lot of opportunities for brands to reach out to their target audience with ads on Facebook and Instagram.
The Facebook Pixel might even become your best friend to reach out to unknown audiences that visited your website but left without giving you any information. Did you know that on average 97% of your website visitors remain unknown and don’t identify themselves?
You can turn this around from the moment these anonymous visitors accept the cookies on your website and therefore give you permission to track their behavior. The real opportunity for you starts when you have the Facebook pixel installed on your website, and the anonymous visitor has an account on Facebook or Instagram.
This might all sound a little complicated right now, but don’t worry. We’ll take you through the process step by step.
The Facebook what?
The Facebook Pixel is a piece of code that you install on your website. It is tucked away in websites all over the internet and watches everything we do online. It not only watches what we do, but it also remembers all of it for future advertising purposes.
It’s basically a little stalker who lives on your website and tracks visitors interacting with your web pages. The Facebook Pixel allows you to build custom audiences for retargeting purposes and enables you to track the ROI of your Facebook and Instagram advertising campaigns.
The Facebook pixel will help you get closer to unidentified website visitors once they have accepted your cookies.
How does it work?
Once you have installed the Facebook Pixel on your website, it will track all the pages someone visits and what they do on your website. Facebook calls these actions ‘events’ and currently offers 17 standard Facebook pixel events.
Furthermore, the pixel will gather insights such as demographics, what device they’re browsing from, the pages someone visited, and other relevant information.
This enables you to create a wide variety of audiences based on relevant data gathered from the Pixel. You can define your audiences by setting rules that range from basic to very complex. This is where a lot of problems lie. The Facebook Business Manager can look quite tricky and overwhelming because there are so many options to choose from, and it feels like a science of its own.
Facebook currently offers two targeting options, being custom audiences and lookalike audiences. A custom audience is created based on actions that people have taken in your app or on your website. This audience can then be retargeted with relevant ads on Facebook and Instagram. You can narrow down your custom audiences with additional rules to make your retargeting more specific. Lookalike audiences are built by Facebook, looking at common qualities of already existing customers and finding users that look like them.
The new way to use your Pixel
Using your Facebook Pixel shouldn’t be too much of a hassle. There are easy-to-use tools that have an integration with Facebook and allow you to build audiences on your website itself and then send that specific audience directly to your Facebook Business Manager for laser precision targeting. This gives you the option to implement extra filters other than the ones Facebook offers, straight from your own website data.
The data you’re sending to Facebook will still be sent through a Pixel event, you just control what exact audience the Facebook Business Manager needs to target.
Think of it as a bridge between your website and the Facebook ads manager that makes the crossover of the wild waters a lot easier. You won’t have to figure out the whole targeting in the business manager anymore but can simply send your predefined audience to Facebook and choose it in the audience tab when creating your campaign.
We’ve noticed with the current retargeting on Facebook that it very often keeps sending ads to visitors that have already converted. You’re not just wasting your money this way. You’re also unnecessarily disturbing your lead. Sending the audience from your website straight to your audience on Facebook creates a much cleaner and updated data transfer.
Even though you might not be using Facebook or Instagram ads yet, it might be worth installing the pixel for the future. By doing so, the pixel will already start collecting data, and you won’t have to start from scratch when you’re ready to create your first ad.