What is a Facebook Pixel?

Hey, everybody. It’s Adam Arklfed with ParaCore, and today we are talking about the Facebook pixel because what the heck is a Facebook pixel? Now, if you don’t know what a Facebook pixel is, you don’t know what anyone’s talking about when they’re talking about the Facebook pixel.

That’s what we’re gonna talk about, is the Facebook Pixel. So, I’m in ParaCore’s staging account. We don’t do anything in this account except for mess around with stuff, so there’s nothing in here, but this is an ads, this is part of the ads manager that you’re probably familiar with. So, what we’re gonna do is we’re gonna head up here to this hamburger drop-down menu. It’s called a hamburger, in case you didn’t know that. It’s kind of a weird name. And then, we’re gonna head over to pixels. Alright, now, the pixel for Facebook, really, the entire purpose of it is that you can install this code onto your website, and then, anytime somebody visits that website, that pixel, in the background, fires and it notifies Facebook that this person visited your website.

Now, in many cases, that person is logged in to their Facebook account, because basically, everyone has a Facebook account. So, I’m logged into my Facebook account, I go to a website, and the website says hey, this person visited the website, and it’s this Facebook user. Now, it associates you with your Facebook account. It doesn’t mean that the advertisers, or you, if you are an advertiser, can see the exact people that are hitting your website. That’s not the point. The point is that a Facebook account is associated with a notification of Facebook, then when that person goes back to Facebook, their activity is tracked throughout the web. And so, the most common-use case of that is someone’s on Facebook, or logged in to their Facebook account. They go to a website, that website notifies Facebook that a user came. It’s flagged to that user anonymously. Now, when that user goes back to Facebook, they might see an ad from the website, which is called a re-targeting ad, okay?

So the idea of the pixel, that’s like, the basic, that’s like, the basic-use case for a pixel is that you’re using it for re-targeting, and seeing how many people are visiting your website. It also shows just how many people in general, but you really want it for the use case of Facebook. So, we’re headed over here. It says Data Sources, and I’ve not finished setting up our pixel. We don’t have any website to install this on, so this is great. So, if I hit View Setup Instructions, you can use Integration or a Tag Manager, so this has Google Tag Manger, Magento, Segment, Shopify, BigCommerce. All of these, a lot of them have their own integration. That makes it a little bit easier. But, we’re gonna hit Manually Install the Code Yourself.

And there are really two pieces to this. The first one is, if you know anything about development, you have the head section of your code. Now, if you don’t know anything about development, don’t worry about it, but if you do, there’s the head, and then there’s the body, and those are like, the main pieces, the main sections of your code. Now, the head block, you put a lot of scripts in there. You put different, um, you put header tags in there. You put all sorts of things. And the head block basically allows you to like, load scripts and call in, you know, information from other websites. So, you put the Facebook pixel in the head block if you know anything about it, and if you don’t, don’t worry about it. And then, here’s the pixel code right here. So, this is, um, what you do is you take this code. You don’t mess with it, but all these codes have unique ID, right? So, here’s the ID, 192182628. This piece right here is unique, and it’s also right here. It’s unique to your account. So, everybody has the same code but that ID is different. And, remember what I said just a second ago that when someone visits your page, it notifies Facebook that someone saw the page? That’s what you’re seeing right here with this page view. So, it’s saying, Facebook, um, initialize Facebook, and then it’s saying track a page view. And there are other things you can put in here that I’ll talk about in a second. But, so you have your unique ID code, and then you have your page view.

So, basically, if you put this on your website, someone goes to the website, and Facebook says, hey, someone visited this website. What website is it? Here’s the ID code for the website, great. And then it says, what did they do? They visit the page, great. And then, that’s it. Then you’re building an audience, okay? You also have the option to do automatic advanced matching, where you can click different customer data. This is a different thing. You have a privacy policy for this, and you have to update your privacy policy for this and you have to be careful, but you can choose specific data, and then you can test it down here by putting in your website.

I’m also gonna create a separate video that shows you how to look on your own and determine if a website is tracking, if the Facebook pixels start correctly, and what data it’s tracking. We’re gonna do that in a separate video. So, those are, that’s just the basics behind it.

Now, if you aren’t familiar with the website, you can just send this code to your developer, and you can email the instructions right here. There’s a link at the bottom. See, again, here’s the pixel ID. This is the email that’s gonna go out, here’s the pixel ID, here’s the code, and then, in the description, it tells you exactly how to do it. It says, put it in your, oh, I’m sorry. Somewhere in here it says put it in that, and the header tag’s right here, so it’s telling you where to put it. And then, you can also do event codes, okay? So, the general pixel just basically tracks if someone visited your website. You can also do custom conversions based on if they visited a landing page. So, the generic pixel that you install is really cool because it tracks every single page, then you say, you know what? If someone visit this page, which is my thank you page, the only way they can get there is if they do a purchase. And I want it to be a conversion, like a purchase conversion. And you don’t need to install anything else on the website. You already have that code on there, the pixel, and you’re basically saying, if someone visits this URL, and this pixel fires, I want it to be a conversion. And that’s what the custom conversions are, which we’re not gonna get into in this video. But, you also have event conversions, and there’s nine pre-defined event conversions.

So, I’m gonna click this. I think this is gonna tell me exactly how to do it. Yes. So, what we saw was, we saw track page view. It doesn’t show it here. I thought it might. But you do have view content. So, remember when we were back here? I’m gonna close this guide down. Start it up again manually. We saw Facebook track page view, right? Remember this? That’s saying someone viewed the page. You can add additional events, and you can add that someone did a search on your website. You can add that someone viewed a particular piece of content, that someone added a cart, added a wishlist, initiated a checkout. Mostly, these are for e-commerce. Add payment, track a lead. So, we do leads a lot when someone’s just filling out a form on a landing page and it’s not really a purchase, it’s just a lead. Or, completing a registration for like, an event. And you can see here, this is a snapshot of what it looks like. So, we have the code, this, all this other code, one and two, or, excuse me, two is your Facebook tracking code, and then three is the piece that we’re talking about right now. You can add additional pieces.

Now, this becomes interesting because as you build e-commerce funnels, you can send a bunch of traffic to your website, and then you can say, oh someone initiated checkout, but they didn’t go any further. They just hit the checkout button. And then, you can re-target them if they didn’t actually check out, or someone added payment info, but they didn’t get any further, or they added to cart. So, let’s say someone’s shopping on your e-commerce site. They’re going through the, add a product to your cart, but they don’t check out. So, you can actually re-target that person because now, you’ve fired an event and you’ve notified Facebook. This thing right here says, hey, Facebook. We’re gonna initialize this page, 1234567890. We’re gonna track them as a page view. Someone viewed a page, and then also, this person added something to the cart added this URL, this page to the cart. So, that, so you can then take that information in the ads manager and say, how many add to carts were there? And I wanna show only people that have added to the cart this ad, you know, did you forget something? Or whatever the case they may be.

So, that’s pretty much it. In most cases, the platforms that you’re using, Unbounce, the website, or lead pages or whatever, they’re gonna have a place where it says add some sort of tracking code. And you’re gonna say, add new piece of tracking code, and you wanna remember that it goes in the head part of the website, and then you’re just gonna copy and paste this code in. If you have a thank you page, you’re gonna add in maybe a track a lead. We use lead a lot. You might re-track a purchase, then add a purchase value. But, lead is the one that we use most often, unless we’re doing e-commerce, then we’re doing all the purchase stuff.

So, that’s it, that’s a Facebook pixel. The Facebook pixel is really just a snippet of code that you put on your website, and then you, um, that you put on your website, and then, it basically notifies Facebook that there’s activity happening, and you can do a lot of different things with that activity. But, I highly recommend that you just send it to a developer if you don’t know anything about coding or you don’t know anything about WordPress, and then, in another video, I’m gonna actually show you how to determine if the pixel code is installed correctly, and how you can double-check that work to make sure that it is installed correctly. So, you can stay tuned for that, but for now, that is the Facebook pixel in a nutshell. Thanks a lot.

My name’s Adam with ParaCore. If you have any questions or comments, please leave it below, or like, or like the video, or subscribe to the channel if you want more information just like this. Thanks a lot!

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