So, what exactly is a “Facebook Pixel”? Well we all know what Facebook is (you wouldn’t be here if you didn’t know!), but what exactly is a Pixel?

A Pixel is essentially a couple of lines of code that does (no matter what other people say) only one thing: Relay information to Facebook and their multi-billion dollar AI. In layman’s terms, it’s a transmitter. In developer’s terms, it’s a cookie.

Why would you want to allow Facebook to access information (specifically, traffic information) coming into your website? Good question!

But before we answer that question, let’s establish some things.

As you may know, in our modern and digital era, data is quintessential to success. Militaries use it to counter their enemies, political parties use it to crush their opponents, and multi-billion dollar corporations utilize it to find leverage in the marketplace.

In our case, we use data, for all intents and purposes, to find the right audience to advertise our products or services to. 

“But.. but we don’t have the budget of National Militaries, Political Parties, or Multi-Billion Dollar Corporations. How are we going to get the data that we need?”

That’s exactly where the Facebook Pixel comes in.

When you advertise to people on Facebook or any other platforms, there is a chance (depending on your creatives and copywriting) that they will click your link and enter your site. If they happen to be signed into their Facebook account when they click that link (they most definitely will be if they clicked it from Facebook), the Facebook Pixel that has been written on your website will logged that data and transmit it to Facebook.

When that happens, Facebook’s incredibly power AI will be able to store and track the profiles of the people who enter your site. It will not tell you exactly who entered your site due to personal privacy laws, but it will give you a demographic aggregation of the profiles who entered your site. When this happens, you will know for certain what kind of audience you have.

Starting to see why it’s so imperative that you have a pixel on your website?

Once you understand your audience more, you can do many things, such as;

• Tailor make your copywriting and creatives (both static and video) to the audience profiles
• Find the highest converting audiences
• Create powerful lookalike audiences
  • How Facebook does this is to take the data they have collected from your site or page, and use it to find people with similar profiles or interests. This takes away a lot of the guess work, and is oftentimes the most powerful tool for finding high converting audiences.

The pixel data that Facebook receives from your website can be used to create a Custom Website Audience.

A few Examples of Custom Website Audiences:

• All visitors who have visited your website in the past 180 days. (past 30 days, 60 days, 90 days, etc.)
• People who have viewed a particular page (blog, about us page, contact us, special offers, etc.)
• People who are in the top 5%, 10% or 25% of most active visitors

These types of audiences are extremely powerful and allow you to identify who is going to see, and not see a particular ad. So, get creative and start watching our new audiences grow!

Pro Tip: You can also see a breakdown of the demographics of the people visiting your website through the Audience Insights function. This will give you information like; demographics, location, activity, household, and even purchase information!

We will doing a deep dive into the Facebook Pixel over the next few weeks, so do stay tuned!

Next week, we will be taking about standard events!