Should You Use the Meta Pixel?

When it comes to social media advertising, you need to have a good overall strategy in addition to being able to customize intuitive video ads and relevant content. 

Your strategy means you need a technical understanding of how social media ads work and how to properly implement them. 

One thing that’s highly effective for a lot of businesses is retargeting, requiring the use of the Meta Pixel, which was previously known as the Facebook Pixel. 

The following is a guide to what to know about the Meta Pixel and how it functions.

An Overview

To start, what is the Meta Pixel? 

Essentially, it’s a piece of code you insert into your website’s back-end. As is the case with other tags, the Pixel can unravel KPIs that a platform generates. 

The Meta Pixel can help improve ROI for businesses that pay for advertising on the platform, and it can make your advertising campaigns more effective if you use it correctly. 

The Pixel is able to measure the activity and actions people take on your site, and you can track things like page views, time-on-page, and add-to-cart, as well as purchases and other events. 

How Does It Work?

The pixel places and then is able to trigger cookies to track users who interact with your business on and off Facebook, as well as Instagram. 

Retargeting is a powerful tool for marketers so they can remind people to come back and purchase those abandoned items or things they left in their carts. 

Remarketing is good for analytics and tracking, as well as the overall optimization of ads as well as remarketing. 

Once interactions are tracked, the data is collected and shared with Facebook. 

You can use the Pixel to ensure that your ads are getting shown to the right audiences, to drive sales, and then measure the impact of all of your ads. 

Facebook recommends that if you use the Pixel to share events with Facebook, a.k.a. Meta, you also use the Conversions API. The Conversions API works with the Pixel to improve performance and measurement. 

According to Meta’s Business Tools Terms, you can’t put pixels associated with your Business Manager or ad accounts on sites you don’t own without written permission from Meta. 

As of May 5, 2021, Facebook started verifying domain owners. 

There are seventeen standard pixel events that you can use copy-and-paste event code. 

These are:

• Purchase
• Lead
• Complete registration
• Add payment info
• Add to cart
• Add to Wishlist
• Initiate checkout
• Search
• Contact
• Customize product
• View content
• Find location
• Start trial
• Schedule an appointment
• Submit application
• Subscribe

You can also add parameters to these standard events. These let you customize your use of standard events based on things like how much a conversion is worth, currency, and the predicted long-term value. 

Because of changes made to third-party tracking in the new Apple operating system, some functionalities for Facebook pixels are being disabled for those device users. 

One of the most impactful changes is as an advertiser, you can only set up a max of eight standard events and custom conversions. You’ll have to shift how you use the Pixel with these changes, and they do represent limitations. 

Why Should You Use Facebook Pixel?

There are some pretty big reasons you might consider using the Meta/Facebook Pixel. These include:

• Perhaps the primary reason to think about using the Pixel is to increase your ROI on your Facebook and Instagram ad spending. The data from the Pixel helps to make sure your ads are being seen by the people who are most likely to take the action you want them to. Even if you’re not sure if you’re ready to start using Facebook or Instagram ads, you should install the Pixel. It’ll start gathering data that, when you do start paying for ads, will be extremely helpful. 
• You can use conversion tracking to identify how people are interacting with your brand and your site after they see your Facebook ad. There are ways to track customers across their devices too. To get optimal conversion data, you need to verify your site domain. 
• We talked about retargeting above, and it’s a huge reason to think about installing the Pixel. Retargeting data and dynamic ads mean that you can show targeted ads to people who are already warm to your brand. They’ve already visited your site, so you can spend less to get potential conversions. You can show people the same product they left in their shopping cart or added to a wish list. 
• Lookalike audiences are a way to build audiences of people with similar demographics to those individuals already interacting with your site or brand. You can expand your possible customers with a  lookalike audience, and having the pixel data is part of how these audiences are built. 
• The more data Facebook collects about who your customers are and what they’re spending, the more they can optimize your ads for value. That means that Facebook will begin, through the collection of detailed data, to start to show your ads to the people who are most likely tomake the biggest and most valuable purchases. 

The Conversions API is something we quickly mentioned. One of the reasons the Conversions API was added to the options for advertisers is to bypass some of the data loss stemming from the iOS update. 

Conversions API collects data directly from servers instead of cookies and web browsers as well as mobile browsers. Even when your Pixel might lose information as a result of the updates, when you use the Conversions API with it, you have more data access. 

Finally, if you want to start using the Meta pixel, you go to the Pixels tab in the Ads Manager. From there, you can create it quickly. To install it, you will have the person who works on the back-end of your site install it, unless this is something you can do on your own. 

The code is copied and pasted into the bottom part of your header, and then you’ll send test traffic to make sure it’s working.