Facebook Retargeting Pixel

What is the Facebook Retargeting Pixel?

Imagine you went to a store, saw a pair of athletic shoes, and put it in your basket. However, you later discovered that you didn’t have enough money to pay for it. So you keep it back, leave the store, and think that nobody saw you.

What if the store had a hidden camera that records what happens all over? And probably had a way of contacting you? That store will probably come for you – phone calls, emails, texts all reminding you about your incomplete purchase will flood your phone.

That’s exactly how the Facebook retargeting pixel works- it monitors and records what happens in an online store. After which it goes after visitors that left off without converting.

Here’s how a typical pixel code looks like on the backend of a website:

The Facebook pixel is a Javascript code that you or your web developer puts at the backend of your website to track the activities of your visitors.

It’s an analytic tool and helps you report data from your website to Facebook for your retargeting campaigns. In most cases, you can simply copy it from your Facebook ad manager and paste it into your website if you have access to your website’s code. Want to know how? I’ll show you shortly.

But first, it’s important that you get a fair idea of why the Facebook retargeting pixel is paramount to the success of your ad campaigns.

This piece of code monitors quite a number of “events” on your website and stores them back to your Facebook ad manager account. Events are actions visitors take while on your website. They could be any of the following:

• Views your content
• Makes a search
• Adds to Cart
• Adds to Wishlist
• Initiates Checkout
• Adds Payment Info
• Makes a purchase
• Signs up to your form
• Completes a registration, e.g., register for a webinar

Now that you’ve understood how the Facebook Pixels works, hopefully, it’s about time I showed you how to use it. Buckle up!

1. For Retargeting Your Website Visitors

Building an audience for Facebook ads usually involves defining several criteria: age, gender, location, population size, etc. However, with the help of the Facebook pixel, you can simply target web visitors who visited a particular page or took a desired action on your website.

This way, you can directly target people who have shown interest in your business without wasting time creating a random list of Facebook users.

2. Building Lookalike Audiences

What if you wanted people who have never visited your website before to see your ads on Facebook? The retargeting pixel can help, too. It can help you find potential audience who share the same interest and characteristics as those who have previously visited your website.

But you need to first set up what Facebook calls a Lookalike Audience.

To help you better grasp what a lookalike audience is about, let me make an illustration.

Let’s assume that you just put out an ad for a webinar. At the end of the day, you got 100 people to sign up.

If they were mostly male web developers between ages 18 to 32 and live in Germany, this would be your ideal audience. So, it makes sense that other people with similar profiles to these people are likely to sign up for your webinar, isn’t it?

When you generate a lookalike audience, what simply happens is your pixel reports these data to Facebook. Facebook then finds users with similar traits and shows your webinar ad to them.

3. Tracking and Improving Conversion

The Facebook retargeting pixel also allows you to track conversions on your web page. This means you get the chance to accurately monitor your campaign’s performance without needing any external tool.

To do this, you simply need to install the pixel on the page you send your visitors to right after they convert.

For example, let’s say that you have a landing page that contains an opt-in form. This is the page that visitors get directed to after clicking your ad on Facebook. After filling the form, they once again get re-directed, but this time to a thank you page.

In such a scenario, the best place to install the tracking code is on the thank you page.

With the Facebook pixel installed here, you’ll be able to track how many visitors are converting and how much ROI your ad campaign is making in real-time.

Knowing how your ads are doing makes it easier to figure out how to improve your ad campaign and test different ideas to increase your conversion rate.

4. Creating Dynamic Retargeted Ads

If you run an eCommerce site with many products and lots of traffic, creating different sets of ads for different audiences will be a nightmare. The Facebook pixel, however, gives you a foundation that will allow you to create dynamic ads. It also lets you control the continuous use of these ads for various sets of Facebook users.

Dynamic ads look like this one I got in my Facebook feed after I went window shopping on Asos. It was a collection of items I might like to buy. Apparently, I got those suggestions based on the items I had viewed on their website.

Asos can’t possibly create each of these tailored ads for every visitor that views items on their site. So, how did they pull this off? They simply used dynamic retargeting ads.

If you checked the backend of their website, you would see the tracking pixel like so:

Dynamic retargeted ads, as the name suggests, are ads that allow you to automatically show relevant products or services to your audience based on their preferences, likes, intent, and actions while browsing your website.

Instead of manually creating an ad for each of the many items you have in stock, you only need to provide Facebook with a catalog of items on your website. After this, you’ll create a single continuous campaign for everything in your catalog. This way, whenever a visitor expresses interest in any item, your pixel reports this action, and Facebook automatically generates a relevant ad and shows it to them on their next visit.

That said, to run a dynamic retargeting ad, you’ll need to create a catalog and upload your product information. But if your store runs on, say, Shopify – or any of the eCommerce solution providers Facebook partners with – you won’t need to create a catalog.

Simply connect to your store and follow the directions to import your items to Facebook. Some of Facebook’s partner platforms are Shopify, BigCommerce, WooCommerce, Ced Commerce, etc.

Without further ado, let’s get started on setting up Facebook retargeting ads.