Pixel Perfect: Making the Most of Facebook Tracking

It won’t be a surprise to anyone who works in digital marketing to hear that one of the key aspects of effective advertising on Facebook is the pixel. In fact, Facebook advertising performance can see an average of 25% or more improvement from fine-tuning the pixel. Despite this, Facebook pixels are often implemented incorrectly or just not used to full their capability. 

What is a Facebook Pixel?

A Facebook pixel is a snippet of code placed on your site used to measure the impact of your social media campaigns. This piece of code unlocks insight into how users are behaving on your site, as well as across the web.  

You can then use this behavior as signals to curate the most relevant information to serve. Pixels can fundamentally change how we target an  audience. Considering how important the pixel is, it is often used incorrectly, or too simply, meaning that there is missed opportunity at best, and incorrect marketing information at worst. We recently unpacked some pixel best practices in our webinar “Pixel Perfect: making the most of Facebook tracking”, below is a summary.  

Unlock Social Media Advertising

Before we dive into common implementation errors, it is important to go back to basics. Below are three important reminders on the different elements of the Facebook pixel. 

1. Compulsory Parameters. These are input to get the basic level of tracking, some examples are page views and basic conversion tracking. While these are important, a lot of advertisers will ONLY use these and stop there.  This is a significant waste of pixel possibilities.  
2. Standard Events. These are not compulsory but are valuable. Examples are: add to basket, purchase, remove from basket, view content. These events help identify certain actions that can form part of remarketing strategies on users closest to converting. This also plays into being able to serve different content to users at various stages of the marketing funnel. The advert you serve to users who have never engaged significantly on your website should be different to the advert you serve to users who have added an item to their basket or downloaded an informational pdf. 
3. Custom events. These work similarly to custom dimensions from analytics. Custom events allow you to capture additional information and variables related to a user, based on the actions they have taken. An example of this is building a ‘bargain hunters audience’ – you can apply a custom event on promo code usage, this will send data to a Facebook custom event, which means you can build that bargain hunters audience and then send the most relevant advert to this audience.

All of these efforts serve to make sure you are collecting the right information about your potential customers, and using it at the right time to serve relevant  offers and information that is most likely to resonate with them. 

Facebook pixel implementation guidelines

This all sounds amazing, right? Now you need to make sure that you implement your pixels correctly.  Correct implementation can be quite tricky, so it is essential to take these points into consideration in the process:

Designing your pixels

We recommend you design your own pixels, and steer away from using standard pixels. You can customize each Facebook pixel according to your organisation’s KPIs. 

A good starting point when designing your pixel is to ask yourself – what data do I need to collect to identify and create the audience segments I need to be able to paint a picture of my users’ behavior? This will enable you to optimize your digital marketing strategy.

Common tagging mishaps 

1. A base code only needs to be loaded once on each page, duplication can cause other tags to not fire and / or cause conversion counts to be duplicated. 
2. Required object properties missing in tags
3. Must-haves such as ‘view content’ not implemented in tags
4. The wrong function calls to standard and custom tags
5. Absence of advanced matching 
6. Absence of user properties

Disparity between Facebook & analytics tools 

It is really important to focus on the partnership between your Facebook analytics and your website analytics tool. Facebook analytics is often undervalued in comparison to your other analytics tools. For high data accuracy, it is essential to make sure your Facebook analytics are integrated correctly.

In summary

If used correctly, the Facebook pixel can become your digital passport to unlock effective, efficient and relevant social media advertising. To get into more detail, view the full webinar, which includes a demonstration of an implementation process, common pixels that we recommend tracking, and more. We also have a range of training courses to help you with Facebook advertising.

Alternatively, you may want to find out more about our comprehensive Facebook Pixel audit, to discover opportunities to take your Facebook advertising performance further. Contact us for more information on our audit.