“I literally just looked at this website and now I am seeing ads for this thing all over the place!”

Welcome to Facebook Pixel.

At its core, it’s a analytics tool that tracks movement. The rundown of how it work is as follows:

1. Company A installs Pixel on their website

2. Consumer A visits the website

3. The pixel places cookies into the web browser history of Consumer A for behavior tracking

4. Consumer A goes on Facebook

5. Consumer A see an ad from Company A

Facebook has a brief rundown of how this works and how it can be used, but it isn’t overly lengthy or in my view, helpful. So what I’d like to do here is detail why you should use it as a company, how you should use it, and what the overall benefit of it is.

Why Should I Use Facebook Pixel?

First. At the top of all this, Facebook Pixel is free to use and there are dozens of videos and blogs online about installation. If you have a website on Wix, SquareSpace, or Wordpress, it will take less than 60 seconds to generate a code and add it to the website.

Second. It’s incredibly useful. This entire process is called retargeting and it’s basically a friendly reminder to people that have been on your website that (1) their shopping cart was left abandoned, (2) that you have great offers for them if they return to your site, or (3) it’s an opportunity to further explain the value of your product or service to them.

Third. A lot of local, small businesses are not using retargeting. So if you’re in a competitive market, it may serve as a competitive edge for your company.

People talk all the time about how “ads don’t work” and how they’re intrusive, but if you remember, Facebook started collecting information on people to show them better ads because users were complaining about the inaccuracy of the ads they were being shown.

Here’s a list via Hootsuite of all the actions you can target via Pixel:

Purchase: Someone completes a purchase on your website.

• Lead: Someone signs up for a trial or otherwise identifies themselves as a lead on your site.

• Complete registration: Someone completes a registration form on your site, such as a subscription form.

• Add payment info: Someone enters their payment information in the purchase process on your website.

• Add to cart: Someone adds a product to their shopping cart on your site.

• Add to wishlist: Someone adds a product to a wishlist on your site.

• Initiate checkout: Someone starts the checkout process to buy something from your site.

• Search: Someone uses the search function to look for something on your site.

• View content: Someone lands on a specific page on your website.

• Contact: Someone contacts your business.

• Customize product: Someone selects a specific version of product, such as choosing a certain color.

• Donate: Someone makes a donation to your cause.

• Find location: Someone searches for your business’s physical location.

• Schedule: Someone books an appointment at your business.

• Start trial: Someone signs up for a free trial of your product.

• Submit application: Someone applies for your product, service, or program, such as a credit card.

• Subscribe: Someone subscribes to a paid product or service.

How Should You Use It?

As noted above, there is quite the long list of ways you can retarget your customers. The most popular ones are “add to cart” and “view content”. They are straight forward and have a fairly wide net to retarget people that visit your site. “Add to cart” also helps with abandoned checkouts.

As an example, one of our customers had 20% of their potential sales left in their cart, following the Pixel retargeting, that number drops by over 75%—it was one more piece of valuable information that helped reduce that number—and it was all because of Pixel.

The implementation is up to you. There are many ways to use it, but if you’re unfamiliar, ask an expert or hit YouTube and Google for more perspective.

What is the Overall Benefit?

Retargeting is effective and it has no risk. The only thing I would advise people to consider is their “ad frequency” indicator. This is the number the represents how many times people have seen an ad. If the number is 1.1 that means 10% of your audience has seen the ad twice or more. If it’s 2.0, that means everyone who has viewed the ad has seen it twice now. Generally, we pull ads after they hit 1.5, change the copy and image, and push again. We don’t want people to blow up comment sections for solely repetitive ads.

We honestly think professional implementation is best as it will save time and money, but if you’re committed and a real DIY’er, then check out Hootsuite and Hubspot for helpful blogs on the topic and give it a go for yourself.

Either way, using Facebook Pixel is a must!