Facebook Pixel Tracking

Let me clarify something…generating a following, on Facebook, is different than generating leads and list building because on Facebook you need to “follow” people you like. If people “follow” you, you become part of their tribe (so to speak). This gives you a group of people you can contact and communicate with for free.

Armand Morin

We’ve all heard of Facebook and many of us are using it in one way or another. According to statistics, there are about two billion people in the world using Facebook. I think I can safely say Facebook is here to stay. In fact, I believe it will get even bigger.

From a business perspective, which is the way I use Facebook, this gives us tremendous marketing reach. It’s highly likely your customers and perspective customers are using Facebook. This means that if we can locate them, we can present our products and services to them. If fact we can do more, we can generate leads, build lists or generate a following.

Let me explain.

Facebook has two sides, picture a line drawn down the middle of a piece of paper. On one side you have the average person who uses Facebook to communicate with friends and family. I call this side the “free” Facebook.

The free Facebook is great, you can get people to follow you and may even be able to get people to purchase your products or services. On the other side of this line is the “paid” side of Facebook. The “free” side of Facebook is a whole different game than the side we are going to talk about here.

In this post I’ll mostly concentrate on the “paid” side of Facebook. This is the side where Facebook makes their money because they sell advertising that they show to their two billion users.

“So, with your Facebook advertising or any other advertising, you want to target your advertising and then sell them. You can nurture them for future sales once they’ve bought a product from you.

We can purchase advertising here and send it to highly targeted groups of people. I’m sure you’ve seen the tiny little ads in the middle of your newsfeeds and on the right side of Facebook posts. When an ad is clicked, you are taken to a website to look at a product or service to purchase or to a page where you can sign up to get more information on something.

I like to get an ad up, approved and driving traffic to my website within five minutes.

That’s all it takes if you know how to write the ad, who to target and how to target them. There are multiple strategies for this beyond just the technical ability to run an ad. It’s these strategies I will focus on here.

Facebook uses pixels to control everything. They use them to tell you how good or bad your ad is doing, how to build an audience, etc. Don’t worry if you don’t understand this now. I’ll explain everything to you.

First you need to understand one thing about any kind of advertising. It’s NOT about how much traffic you get. A lot of people are under the mistaken notion that they just want traffic…as much traffic as possible coming to their website.

There’s another advertising misconception that I call the “long” way to advertise. They promote saying you don’t want people to buy right away. I ask, “why not?” They say you need to nurture your prospects before you sell them.

I say, “that’s a pile of horse crap.” Do you think any person clicks on the link to be taken to your website, doesn’t know you are going to try to sell them something once they get there? So, why wait and push the sale down the road. I say no! Use the fast approach and ask them to buy now!

This direct approach is the fastest way to monetize your Facebook advertising.

Let me give you an example.

The website www.autonomous.ai sells standing desks, chairs etc. They have a Facebook ad that takes you directly to their website. I go there two to three times a week. They ask for the sale immediately. I haven’t bought a desk or chair from them yet, but I’m planning on it at some point.

Here’s the thing— they targeted me, and they know I’m a prime prospect. This is so important…

By targeting your prospects, you don’t waste your advertising dollar on people who are not interested.

So, with your Facebook advertising or any other advertising, you want to target your advertising and then sell them. You can nurture them for future sales once they’ve bought a product from you.

The strategy behind Facebook advertising is to drive traffic but not just any traffic, you want to drive targeted traffic and Facebook makes it easy to do this.

The technical details are really simple but to really evoke the full power, you need to understand the strategy behind targeting, building, selling and nurturing your audience. As this series progresses, we’ll look at multiple different mechanisms and ways to accomplish this.

Let’s get started with the basics by setting up pixels. Warning: this is about to get technical.

Please note: Facebook may have relabeled or moved some of the things I will talk about but with a little searching, you should be able to find everything.

To get started, go to your Facebook Ad Manager. There are a couple of different ways to do this. You can go to the upper right-hand corner in your Facebook account and click on the black dropdown arrow and you might be able to open it from here.

When you click on the arrow, you should see “Manage Ads” in the dropdown menu.

Another way you might be able to do it is to go to the left hand menu and look for it. If you don’t see it listed there, click on “See More” and more options appear. I then see it as “Ads Manager.” Another way to do it would be to log in and then go to www.facebook.com/adsmanager/manage.

If you don’t have a Facebook advertising account already, you can go to www.facebook.com/advertising to set one up.

Once you’re set up and back on the “Ads Manager” page you want to look in the upper left hand of the page. You should see the words “Ads Manager.” Click on it, and a drop down panel should open. Across the top on mine, I see five columns labeled:

• Plan
• Create & Manage
• Measure & Report
• Assets
• Settings

You may not see exactly the same thing, but it should be similar.

Look under “Manage & Report” and click on “Pixels”. You will be taken to the “Create a Facebook Pixel” page. This is where you will do the initial setup. You need to get this part right in order for all your ads to be setup correctly.

In the upper right hand corner there should be a little button that says, “Set Up.” A popup will appear; click on “Manually Install the Code Yourself.”

You should then see another pop-up. This one contains your FaceBook Pixel Code. The code will contain your Pixel ID. You need to copy the code and paste it into the “Header” on your website.

If you’re using “WordPress” for your website, it’s relatively easy. (If you’re not using a WordPress website, you’ll need to find a way to access your website code and add the code you just copied to the HEADER section of your website code.)

Putting the tracking code (pixel) on your website is the first step in setting up our Facebook advertising. It is very important to have this on your website before starting to place ads… because you are losing out on the potential of a lot more traffic…

With WordPress you just log into the backend of your website and go to “Plugins.” If you don’t already have the “Tracking Code Manager” plug in, search for it and once you find it, click the “install” button on it (it’s free).

Once it’s installed, click “Activate.” Then click on “Settings” (the side menu on the left of your screen) and you will see “Tracking Code Manager” listed in the pop out, click on it. You should then see a button to “Add New Tracking Code.” Click on it.

A page will come up that will allow you to name the code. I suggest naming it something simple such as, “Facebook Pixel.” You then paste the code you copied from Facebook where indicated.

Now scroll down to just below the box where you pasted the pixel code and you’ll see a box that says, “Position Inside the Code.” You have three choices. Choose, “Before </HEAD>.”

Just below that, where it says, “Show Only On Device,” choose [All].

Below that you will find some lines with “Radio Buttons”…

• “Where do you want to add this code?” Choose the “Standard code tracking in your WordPress” option.
• “In which page do you want to inset this code?” Choose the “In the whole website (pages, posts and archives)” option.

Then click the “Save” button. (Do NOT click either of the “Exclude Posts” options.)

You can now go back and click on “Settings” (left side menu) and you will see “Facebook Pixel” (or whatever you named it) listed there. What you just did is add this code to the top of every one of your website pages.

This is a “tracking code,” and it gives information to Facebook that enables them to track what is happening on your website and allows you to see the number of visitors.

Putting the tracking code (pixel) on your website is the first step in setting up our Facebook advertising. It is very important to have this on your website before starting to place ads. It’s a big mistake to run ads without it because you are losing out on the potential of a lot more traffic as you use this in other functions, that I will cover in another article.

Let’s go back to www.facebook.com/events_manager and click on “Custom Conversions” then click the “Create Custom Conversion” button and a panel will pop up.

You will see “Website Event” and then a dropdown box to the right of it. Choose “All URL Traffic” from the dropdown box.

What I want to track here is conversions. In other words, all people who have purchased from me via this website. In order to do that, I need them to go to a certain webpage after they purchase, which in almost all cases will be the Thank You page.

What I do is take that URL and put it where it says, “Rule 1.” If I have a very unique ending URL, for example, “/ product-one-thankyou” I could choose “contains,” from the drop down menu and paste this in, “/product-one-thankyou”.

Or, if you wanted, you could choose “equal” and paste the entire thank you URL into the box. So, if anyone goes to a URL that contains that information, the “conversion pixel” will count it as a sale.

Then give it a name. Use something simple such as, “Complete Sale”. Next is “Category” In most cases I’m just doing a sale, I will choose “Purchase” form the dropdown menu.

In the “Value” box, if you are just promoting one product, you can fill in the dollar amount in the “Value” box and Facebook will calculate the amount. If you offer choices at different prices just leave this box blank.

Then click the “Create” button. You don’t want to create an ad yet so there’s nothing more to do here so click “Done” and you have created what is call a “Custom Conversion”.

There is one more thing to do so go back to, www.facebook. com/events_manager and click on “Events Manager” in the upper left hand corner and the panel will spread out with all the tools.

This time click on “Audiences” and then on “Create Custom Audience” and “Create a Custom Audience” popup will display. You then click on “Website Traffic” and another “Create a Custom Audience” will pop up. This will be a smaller box.

Leave it set to “Include people who meet ANY of the following criteria.” You can leave the next dropdown at, “All website visitors” or, you can change it to read “People who visited specific web pages.” This is what I normally do.

The next box to “in the past 180 days,” then in the following box, you put the URL of the specific page.

I then choose “Exclude” (look down a couple lines on the right side) and put the URL for the pages I want to exclude. For example, I might put the URL of the thank you or confirmation page because these people have already purchased.

I then go to the “Audience Name” box, and I give it a simple name such as, “Visitors who did not buy”. Then I click the “Create Audience” button. What I just did is create an audience (list) of people who did not purchase so I can go back and market to them later.

What you have just done is set up your Tracking Pixel, your conversion and your audience. This sets you up for success before you run the first ad. This completes the first step of the process, there is nothing more to track or set up.

This may be hard to follow unless you have logged in and are doing it in your own account as I have covered it here.

The very best way to do this is log into thhe member’s area at, http://marketinguniversity.com/ go to the video and follow along and watch my screen as I do this step by step.

In the video, I am able to give examples and give more detailed explanations regarding what you see me doing.