5.4 Pixels

Have you ever gone to an online store, say Zara or Adidas, checked out a product and the next time you open Facebook, you suddenly begin to see ads for that exact same product and it confirms your suspicion that Facebook is spying on you and will one day take over the world?

Well, me too. 

In reality though, the way Facebook is able to send you ads of a product you just saw on another site is both legal and actually quite simple. When a brand wants to run ads, Facebook gives them a few lines of code that they then put on their website. This is what you call a pixel. So, everytime you visit their page, the pixel on their website triggers a message to Facebook that tells them you were on their webpage or that you even took some action. They then save your Facebook id so that the next time you’re on Facebook or Instagram, they can show you that specific brand's ads.

Why is this so important for you to know? Well, because pixels are what take your ad campaign to an expert level. Not everyone who goes to your landing page or website will do what you want them to do. Most of them might just enter your website and then leave. What you want is to track the people who not only enter your website but go all the way and take action.

If you tell Facebook what results you are looking for on your website, they will take notice of the kind of people going all the way and taking the action you want them to, and they will in turn turn try to send more of such people from their platform to your website. 

Today we are going to set up the pixel for Lancify Abroad. To do that, you first go to your Business Manager account.  And once you're in, go here on the top left and then to the events manager. Once you reach here, you want to hit “Continue Pixel Setup” and then click on “Install Code Manually”. Now all you have to do is hit copy code over here and email or Whatsapp this piece of code to whoever is managing your client's website. Once the developer or whoever is handling your client's website confirms that the pixel has been installed on the website, you need a way to go and check if the pixel is working or not.

Facebook has a chrome extension just for you as a marketer to be able to track if a pixel is installed on a page correctly. Go to the chrome web store, search for Facebook Pixel Helper, and you’ll get the extension. Once you go ahead and install the extension, you will have the helper icon show up on your browser. And if you want to check if a pixel is working on a landing page, you just have to go to that landing page, like this… and click the pixel icon. It will then show you if the pixel is installed and working.

Now, the next step is to tell Facebook when someone has completed the action we want them to take on the website. In this case, every time someone goes and signs up for a free session, we want Facebook to know. To do that, we have to now go back to the events manager and click on Ad events. You then hit "from Pixel" and then go to the Open Event Setup tool.

Now on this screen, you want to put in the URL that you want Facebook to track, for action. Yes, lancifyabroad.com is where you are sending the traffic, but this is not where the final action happens.

We want people to click on a button here..after which they are then taken to this page... Once they fill out this form and finally click THIS button, the action is finally completed. So let's go ahead and put THIS link in the set-up tool. Facebook will then open up the page you want to track the action on, and the pixel helper tool will automatically open here and start tracking all the buttons on this page.

Now, click on “Track New Button”, then go ahead and select this button and finally complete the steps on the tool. And there you go! You have set-up what is called a conversion. Now you’ll be using this when you create your campaigns. 

And with that we're going to wrap up this chapter!

In the next and final chapter we are going to start setting up the actual ad campaign for Lancify Abroad. So I’ll see you there!