You may be wondering what the Facebook pixel is. That we've mentioned in our previous lessons. Well, at its core it's just a string of code that you add to your website, but that has the ability to boost your marketing efforts, helps you build better audiences through customer insights, and optimize your app performance. It's simple to set up. Even though it leverages extensive resources from Facebook, it's free to use. To set your pixel up, go to Ads Manager, go to the Events Manager, and click "Connect a Data Source". The pixel is one of the ways in which you can connect data about what goes on on your website with Facebook. There are a few other ways, but those are outside the scope of this course. We'll be connecting the data from our website, so click "Web". This initiates the pixel setup. Facebook will ask you to name your pixel, and a unique ID is created for you. That's it. Keep in mind that every ad account has one pixel to use. Now, you can take that ID and either manually add it to your website if you know how to. We can take advantage of Facebook's partnership with websites like Squarespace, WordPress, and Shopify to easily add the code to the site through that tutorial. That's all for setup. Once you add a Facebook pixel to your site, it will begin collecting data for you, and the data center Facebook, and you can build specific audiences with that data. You can then re-custom audiences to reach audiences to retarget customers who have interacted with your website or brand in some way, and create look-alike audiences to find more people who may be interested in your products. If you've ever put something in an online shopping card and left it there and then saw an ad for that product a day later, you've already seen the pixel in action. How does the pixel know that I put an item into my cart, if my pixel runs across my entire webpage? It does this through an additional piece of code that track specific actions taken on your website. These specific actions are called events. If you want to track a specific event, you need to put the code on the webpage where that event happens. For example, let's think about tracking purchases. You know that a customer's completed transaction if they hit the Payment confirmation page. So you would put the event code on the Payment confirmation page. Now, when someone lands on that page, you see it as them having completed the purchase on the back-end. There are number of different events that pixels can track, including: making a purchase, adding an item to a shopping card, doing a search, submitting a form, adding payment information, starting the checkout process, viewing a specific webpage, and more. We mentioned before that we can retarget customers who haven't completed their purchases with ads for the same product which will hopefully jog their memory, or we can retarget customers who did make purchases and show them similar products they may also like. We can also make sure that our advertising gets to someone who visited our website recently so that we can stay at the top of their mind. The Facebook pixel can also track conversions from your ad campaigns. Not just how many people click on a link that brings them to your site, but if someone who clicked on that link made a purchase. This is a great way to see if you're getting a good return on your ads spent by seeing the cost of a conversion. You can tell if you're making $100 off of every one dollar of advertising spend, or if you're spending $100 on advertising only to make one dollar. The pixel also helps you creating custom audiences, which you can use for retargeting. As it gathers data about your customers, you can easily create audiences of those who complete purchases, those who buy specific products, those who have visited your site in the past 24 hours, or those who haven't been back in a week, those who've subscribe to your newsletter, and more. Facebook will use the data it collects to match it with a user profiles on Facebook, Instagram, and Audience Network, so you can market to them. You can create look-alike audiences based on that data, or audiences who aren't your customers but who have the same characteristics as your customers to expand your marketing efforts and grow your business. Note that all the data that is collected goes through a process called hashing to keep the data anonymous at all times. We'll talk about data hashing again later. Let's take a look at what the Facebook pixel can do for Calla&Ivy. Calla&Ivy's core business is offering their subscription model for unique and handcrafted flower bouquets. Imra's created a new subscription offering: weekly or seasonal arrangements, and wants to promote this new subscription using Facebook ads. Well, we could simply set up an ad and let it run, but a better business decision would be to use the pixel to track conversions. Not only to see how many click-throughs the app receive, but how many people have clicked the ad, signed up for a subscription. When we set up the ad for Calla&Ivy, we'll click on "Conversions" in the Objectives and Ads Manager, which will track who signed up using the event's specific code on this Sign-up page on the website. Since the pixel talks about the website and Facebook, it will check the customers who clicked to the website from the Facebook ad and convert it. You can then check all the conversions in the Ads Manager. Calla&Ivy can now accurately track the success of their ad campaign, and see the result of their ad spend of as well. Encountering subscription convergence is just one of the events that Calla&Ivy can use the pixel for, and this will allow them to optimize for advertising, save money and time, and then get the right message to the right people. The Facebook pixel is a powerful tool that allows you to better target your ads, as well as measure the effectiveness of your advertising by understanding the actions people take on your website. In the next video, we'll have a closer look at Custom Audiences, and how to set them up in Ads Manager.
