One pixel to rule them all, one pixel to find them.

If you are yet to advertise on Facebook, or you’ve just been randomly boosting posts and wondering if it would be more effective to stand in the street and burn a £20 note, then this post is for you.

Lots of advertising platforms have pixels. A pixel is effectively a cookie which tracks visitors to your website, so that you can advertise to them later on another platform. It’s known as re-targeting and it’s a powerful tool that many people overlook, dismissing it as something that’s just for big companies.

Wouldn’t you like to re-target someone who is already much more than a lukewarm lead? Why keep chasing cold traffic (although you should do that too) when you can be reaching people who are already so interested in what you have to offer, that they have visited your website.

Different objectives? Different adverts.

Firstly, a bit of strategy. Over the past year, I’ve been refining and tweaking my Facebook adverts. Instead of running just one general advert at a time and boosting the odd post without any kind of strategy, I now have three main audiences I market to and each has a different set of objectives and is shown a different advert. (You can read my post about creating custom audiences here).

1. COLD TRAFFIC
These are people who don’t know about my business. I target these people with adverts that are generic and explicitly state what we are offering. Below is my cold traffic advert. It’s simple and to the point.

2. WARM TRAFFIC
These are people who like my page and their friends. Even if their friends don’t already like my page, they are likely to have heard of me and my business through word of mouth or industry recommendations. They are probably already using one the tools I design for, like ProPhoto, Showit or Divi.

I target those people with an ad which specifically mentions those platforms and a ‘learn more’ call-to-action which takes them to a landing page which explains the difference between the products.

3. HOT TRAFFIC
These are people who not only like my page but they’ve visited my website over a certain time period. These are the ones who I re-target using my lovely Facebook pixel. I have offers for them which will remind them of something they might have seen on my website and I always target these people with a boosted post whenever I launch a new product.

ADVERTS MANAGER

Before we really get into this, I want to give you a brief overview of the Adverts Manager in Facebook. If you’ve never used it before, there is a good overview from Facebook itself here. That said, I found it a little confusing to begin with, so here’s a little screenshot to show the areas you’ll be working in most often.

CREATING YOUR CUSTOM AUDIENCE FOR A FACEBOOK PIXEL

The Facebook pixel works with Custom Audiences (remember my previous post). Once you’ve installed the pixel, it will keep track of any visitors who are also logged into Facebook and it will track which pages they visit. When you come to create a custom audience, you can choose to target everyone who has visited your site, up to 180 days previously and you can even target visitors who visit a specific page. This is particularly handy if you are driving traffic to a landing page, email sign up or offer page. If you’d really like to dive into this in detail, there is a great post I found here.

Here’s a quick snap shot of the options you have when creating your audience. You can also track specific events, like purchases.

One of my most successful adverts is the one which re-targets visitors who have added a product to their shopping cart, but not actually continued to purchase and reach my thank-you page. With the Facebook pixel, I can target them with a specific advert to tempt them to complete their purchase. Here’s what that audience set up looks like.

If your goal is to generate more enquiries, you might track visitors who have viewed your About page or Portfolio page but not visited your contact page.

INSTALLING THE FACEBOOK PIXEL

Using the Adverts Manager flyout menu, (trigger that by clicking on All Tools from the dropdown menu) choose Pixels. If you haven’t created one yet, you’ll be prompted to do so. A pixel is really just a snippet of code that Facebook will generate for you to copy and paste into your website. Copy it head over to your website.

To work properly, the Facebook Pixel needs to be installed on every page of your site. Facebook will tell you that the best place to put it is between the <head> and </head> tags of your website. If you know how to edit your site files, great. If not, don’t panic. There are plenty of easy ways to add it if you’re not familiar with editing WordPress files.

If you are using a theme like Divi or ProPhoto, they both have built-in <head> snippet areas for you to add your pixel code as shown below. Most themes will have this option in the theme settings area.

If you don’t have any options for injecting code into your head area, Facebook recommends this free pixel plugin.

Once you’ve added it to your site, you’re done. You can check that it’s working by installing the Facebook Pixel Helper for Chrome extension which you can download here. When a website has a Facebook pixel installed the </> icon will turn blue and a small badge will appear indicating the number of pixels found on the page.

FINAL THOUGHTS

The combination of custom audiences and the Facebook Pixel is a powerful one but it can feel like there is a lot to learn. If you try just one thing, start with re-targeting people who are already visiting your website. Remember, these are hot leads and they want to hear more from you. If you really feel like you need a lot of handholding, then I can highly recommend this free Facebook Adverts beginners’ course from Jon Loomer. I worked my way through all three of his free courses last year and haven’t looked back.

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PS. Join the Design Lounge Facebook group for some serious goal setting.

If you’re thinking that your business would take off, if you could just design that perfect ‘thing’, then I want to help you. I have a very active Facebook group and I’d love you to join. You can meet each other and get advice from the experts I work with on my own projects. We are getting serious about business and the tools you need to attract your ideal clients as well as grow your business. So come on over.