Juan Jaramillo, VP of Marketing, Skulpt, Says, “ Facebook enabled us to successfully launch our next-generation device by helping us define our target market and tell our story with useful tools, such as video and carousel ads.”
Well, who doesn’t want to know which ads or campaigns are working best for their company or projects? But it can often be a challenging task if not done correctly, which is why Facebook Pixel can be a great option to track your progress and help you reach your targeted audience.
What is a Facebook Pixel?
The Facebook Pixel helps you track your Facebook Ads’ accurate conversion statistics and develop a unique audience base depending on the website visits. Anyone who uses Facebook Ads should unquestionably install Facebook pixel.
The Facebook Pixel can track activities like time spent on a page, page views, purchases made, etc.
It can also be used to design retargeting campaigns and remarket the users who have completed the desired action or visited a particular page on your website.
It can help you to:
- Track your webpage
- Track how visitors interact with your websites.
- Allows you to create specialized audiences for retargeting.
- Track the ROI of your Facebook and Instagram campaigns.
How do Facebook Pixels work?
To be honest, Facebook Pixel isn’t that complicated; all you need is a little understanding and basic knowledge of how it works. So, let us understand this better.
The Facebook Pixel tracks users as they engage with your website on and off Facebook & Instagram by setting and activating cookies.
It is a web programming script designed to report specific visitor activities, such as when a visitor arrives on your website and leaves after a short period.
With Facebook Pixel on your website, there are high chances that you can retarget the customer back to your website through Facebook ads.
Furthermore, suppose someone makes a purchase on your website after clicking on your Facebook ad. In that case, you’ll know that your ad campaign is effective and going in the right direction.
6 Reasons Why You Need the Facebook Pixel
Even if you aren’t using Facebook ads, still, Pixel can be an excellent tool. You can easily install the Facebook Pixel on your website and begin collecting data for better insights on Facebook advertising.
The Facebook Pixel delivers essential data that you can use to create effective Facebook ads and target your viewers more relevantly and accurately.
Facebook pixel provides significant audience growth, tracking capabilities, and other benefits.
Still not convinced? Let me give you 6 reasons to tell you Why You Need Facebook Pixel.
- It keeps track of the number of conversions, such as email signups and purchases, as well as the cost per conversion (CPA) and conversion rate (CVR).
- It can help you in Revenue reporting. The majority of e-commerce carts may send the actual order value to Facebook, which helps you evaluate the return on ad spend (ROAS).
- Create website custom audiences (WCAs) from all website visits for retargeting purposes.
- You can also develop dynamic product advertising to retarget recent website visitors with the exact products they viewed.
- Create audiences of people who have taken the desired action (leads, purchases, etc.) that you want to exclude from retargeting. This saves you money and prevents leads and customers from becoming irritated.
- It will assist you in examining your sales funnel. In e-commerce, you can compare the number of products viewed to the number of add-to-carts, checkouts initiated, and purchases made. If the conversion rate is lower than planned, you can direct your efforts on improving the sales funnel.
What Activities can Facebook Pixel Track?
For example, when someone visits your web page after clicking on an ad, then this activity is marked as an event by your Facebook pixel. Facebook Pixel can also track 9 different types of activities:
- View content – Keep track of major page views like blogs, landing, and product pages.
- Search – Monitor product searches on your website.
- Add to cart – Keep track of items added to cart.
- Add to Wishlist – Track when any item is added to the Wishlist by a customer.
- Initiate checkout – Keep track of who enters the checkout process.
- Payment information – Track when customers provide their payment information during the checkout process.
- Make a purchase – Keep track of your purchases or checkout flow completions.
- Lead – Keep track of who can become a possible lead by form submission, signing up for trial.
- Complete registration – Keep track of when someone fills out a registration form for signing up for a service.
Now let us understand how Facebook Pixel works on iOS 14.5
Facebook Pixel and iOS 14.5
The new update in Apple’s latest operating system, iOS 14.5, limits its user’s information exchange with Facebook by restricting specific data collection and sharing.
With this update, each app has to display how they use the user’s data on their product page.
The developers must declare their privacy policies, the specific data they are collecting, and their intent to use it.
Earlier Apple device owners were automatically opted in for tracking but could opt out if they wanted to, but after the recent update, iOS users are now notified and asked if they want to be tracked or not, with the default opt-out option.
How will it affect Facebook Ads?
Facebook is trying to implement new methods to minimize the impact of iOS 14 on tracking data.
The most recent updates caused unfavorable results for Facebook Ad marketers, such as:
- Delayed reporting up to 3 days as Real-time reporting isn’t presently supported.
- Lag in Conversion modeling/statistical modeling. The SKAdNetwork API will provide results to Facebook at the campaign level.
- Fewer possibilities for data breakdown. Delivery and action breakdowns, such as age, gender, region, etc, are not presently supported for the app or web conversions.
- Reduced attribution windows. As Facebook discontinues 28-day attribution, reporting will shift to a 7-day post-click and 1-day post-view cycle.
- Gaps in prioritization of conversions. Aggregated Event Measurement restricts primary domains to eight conversion events per business that can be prioritized.
- Smaller retargeting audiences.
What actions can be taken to manage these changes?
- Action 1: Verify your domains with Facebook:
As a best practice, all businesses should verify their domain. Still, it’s vital to prioritize verifying your domains if they incorporate pixels owned by many companies or personal ad accounts. - Action 2: Choose any 8 events to track conversions:
Because of the revised limit, you’ll have to select any eight conversion events you want to track and rank them in the Events Manager accordingly. - Action 3: Compare 28-day to 7-day attribution:
As Facebook removes 28-day attribution, you will have to analyze the impact it will put on your business. Because the reporting will change to a 7-day post-click and 1-day post view, you’ll need to keep track of sales from days 8 to 28.
You can also refer to the official Facebook article for more detailed insight.
What is Conversions API?
The Conversions API connects an advertiser’s marketing data to Facebook tools that optimizes ad targeting, reduce cost per action, and track results. Direct integrations include creating a connection between an advertiser’s server and Facebook.
Server events are associated with a Facebook pixel ID and processed similarly to web events sent via pixel. This means that web server events, like browser pixel events, are used for measure, report, and optimize.
We recommend that marketers use the Conversions API with their Facebook pixel and follow these suggested actions for maximum ad effectiveness.
- Choose the best integration technique for you, review the API’s prerequisites, and understand where to start.
- Install the API and begin sending requests: Begin by sending POST requests to discover more about event transaction time, dropped events, and batch requests.
- Check your setup: Verify that Facebook has received your events and that they have been appropriately de-duplicated and matched.
Using Server-side API.
Facebook Pixel helps collect data for retargeting audiences for specific events and automatically optimizing your Facebook ads for the best results.
This is possible on the website using Javascript code and Facebook SDK for mobile applications. But how can you track events and activities outside of the website?
This is where Server-side API comes into use. The Facebook Server-side API allows you to measure offline conversions such as in-person purchases and sales done over the phone.
Facebook explicitly recommends marketers to use the Server-side API in addition to Pixel for better full-funnel tracking and more dependable data exchange.
Advertisers can collect a wider range of data to support their ad campaigns. Server-side API can collect data such as CRM data and lower funnel events.
Events like Leads, payments, locations, Phone Calls, Form submissions, Email subscriptions, etc., can be tracked using Server-side API.
You can submit offline event data straight to Facebook using the Server-side API.
What is Deduplication of events?
If you use both the pixel and the Conversions API to connect website activity, Facebook will receive the same events twice, one from the browser and another from the server.
They can keep one and discard the others if they know the events are the same and thus redundant, and this is known as deduplication.
Deduplication isn’t always necessary; it relies on how your events are set up.
You have two setup choices if you wish to send web events using both the pixel and the Conversions API:
Option 1: Share events from the browser rather than the server (deduplication isn’t required).
Option 2: Share the same events from both the browser and the server (deduplication is necessary).
For more detailed insight, refer to the Facebook article.
