Tracking Pixels, Explained

By Sameer Shah

Many companies run Facebook and Instagram ads or even Google AdWords campaigns without embedding a pixel. Making this mistake takes away a significant part of the value of running social media advertising, as the pixel provides a great deal of information that a marketer would love to have.

So, what is it? Simply said, an individual tracking pixel is a piece of Facebook generated code that is added to your website. Once in place, the pixel allows you to track who is visiting your site from Facebook, which pages they’re visiting, and when they’re taking specific actions like adding items to their shopping cart, updating payment methods, or making a purchase. For sites that don’t offer ecommerce but want to track leads, the pixel can track every time someone fills out a contact form. You can create conversion events, which allow you to create ads designed to get the users to take a specific action, like make a purchase or provide contact information, and then measure how much each conversion costs.

Pixel information can be used to do a variety of things, including:

• Quickly optimizing the right audience for your product or service
• Creating audiences that “look alike” the ones visiting your site, allowing you to reach a much bigger group of people who are likely to be interested in your products and services
• Re-targeting users who visit your site with follow-up content designed to get them to take another action (for example, showing an ad to someone who abandoned a shopping cart encouraging them to finish their purchase)
• Tracking which ads led to purchases or other actions and calculating ad spend per purchase (or action, like filling out a form)

Adding and managing the pixel is usually fairly straightforward, and popular website platforms like WordPress and Shopify make it very easy. That said, using it effectively and making the most of all the things you can do with it takes time and experience. But running Facebook ads without the pixel severely limits the ads’ capabilities, and in turn wastes your advertising budget.

Interested in learning more? Let’s talk about your needs and strategies.

*Tracking functionality, including pixels like the ones discussed above, is governed by the Global Data Protection Regulation which took effect in the European Union on May 25, 2018. This regulation may or may not affect an American business, but most companies today ensure that their websites are GDPR compliant, as a best practice. Any company using such tracking capabilities should ensure that they are in compliance with the regulation, as the penalties for not doing so can be onerous.