Facebook pixel - what is it?

You'll probably hear people talking about Facebook pixels. You'll probably also hear some people say "you need a Facebook pixel on your page". And there's a good reason for that.

A Facebook pixel is not actually a pixel, but a piece of code that you get from Facebook when you create a business account. You then insert this small piece of code on all pages of your website and when a user enters the page, the code will find out if it is a user that Facebook knows. If it is a user that Facebook knows, it will register that the person is on your page. It will also register the time and which pages your user is viewing. Facebook won't tell you that a certain person has now visited the page with, for example, robot vacuum cleaners. But they will save them all in a pool and then you can say "I would like to advertise to everyone who has visited the robot vacuum cleaner page in the last 180 days".

But it's actually smarter than that. Because you're not interested in advertising to people who have bought a robot vacuum cleaner (at least not yet). So you can go in and say "I want to advertise to anyone who has seen the robot vacuum cleaner page in the last 180 days but hasn't seen my order receipt". This avoids wasting ad dollars on people who are already customers.

Note, however...

Unfortunately, you can't just put a Facebook pixel on your page and start advertising right away. There needs to be a minimum number of people in the segment before you can start advertising.

So that's actually a good argument for getting a Facebook pixel on your page today, even if you don't expect to advertise anytime soon.

Also for Instagram

It almost gets even better. Because Facebook has bought Instagram, so you can also make corresponding ads on Instagram (to people who have visited your page). So even if you say "I don't want to advertise on Facebook", you may well need to have a Facebook pixel on the page.

You can do more than that

Facebook has more advanced tracking mechanisms. For example, you can advertise to people who have added a product to their basket, to people who have started checking out on your webshop or have made a search. Of course, this all requires you to have run these events, but it's relatively simple to do and can of course be done on a Shoporama online store.

The Facebook advertising engine is quite advanced and if you upload a product catalog to Facebook, you can show all your products in the ads. For example, if a user has seen a yellow dress from Tommy Hilfiger, you can show this particular dress in this user's ads. This is what we call dynamic remarketing. It also allows you to tag products in your posts on Facebook and Instagram, so the user can click directly to the product.

Today, the vast majority of online stores have to do some form of social media advertising. So you can hardly get around a Facebook pixel.

We know online marketing in Shoporama

We've been working with online marketing ourselves for decades. As the only shop system in the country, we have spoken multiple times at conferences such as Marketingcamp, SEOday, Shopcamp, Digital Marketing, E-commerce Manager, Ecommerce Day, Web Analytics Wednesday and many more.