One of the most common online sales mistakes is the lack of social media pixels on the site. Not everyone understands what it is for and how to use it.
An ad pixel is an analytics tool in the form of a special code that is embedded on your site that allows social media advertising systems to measure the effectiveness of advertising and determine your site visitors, which pages they viewed and which actions they took.
How to install and configure the pixel? You can find a lot of useful (and not so) information about this on the Internet. In short, the pixel code is generated in the advertising account of the social network (Vkontakte Advertising Account and Facebook Ads Manager), after which it is installed on the site, and then events are configured. But in our article, we want to focus on how and what pixels can be used for.
What is a pixel for?
- to create audiences of those who visited your site and performed a certain action on it;
- to track the effectiveness and optimization of advertising campaigns.
Retargeting
Installing a pixel allows you to set up a special type of advertising – social media retargeting. Retargeting is the process of returning visitors to your site who have already visited it or performed (or did not perform) certain targeted actions on it.
Retargeting is an important parameter of promotion in social networks. Advertising for such users has the best conversion rate, CTR and cost per click, which will help reduce promotion investments and return the user to the sales funnel.
Did the user put the product in the cart and left the site? It doesn’t matter, you can catch up with him on social networks and remind him that he wanted to make a purchase. A visitor made a purchase on your site and you want to sell them related products? Retargeting will help with that too!
Also, based on site visitors, you can create a similar audience (Look-a-like), which is also likely to bring good results in targeted advertising.
Dynamic Retargeting
If you have a large online store, then a pixel is simply a must for business. But even if you have it, then you may not know about such a tool as dynamic ads. When dealing with a large number of products, it’s unwise to create many individual ads for users who have visited a particular page on your site or taken a particular action.
Fortunately, thanks to the pixel, you can create dynamic ads. To do this, it is enough to create a feed with data once and upload the catalog to the advertising account. After that, create an ad with the desired parameters and … that’s it – the display of the desired banners to the audience will be generated automatically.
Efficiency
Analytics is an important parameter for optimizing targeted advertising. Pixels can help you with this. By installing them on the site and setting up events, you can understand how users behave on the site.
For example, you have two Instagram ads spinning for different audiences. Applications from one ad go, but not from the other. You can see all this thanks to the installed and configured pixel, therefore, disable an ineffective ad and optimize your costs.
Decided to expand and attract new customers? Use the audience gathered by the pixel to exclude those who have already been on your site from the target audience of future advertising campaigns.
Of course, you can run an advertising company and drive traffic to the site without installing a pixel, but then you will remain blind and will not be able to see what the user did after clicking on the ad. Therefore, you will not be able to track the effectiveness and optimize the advertising campaign.
Pixel: why you need it and how to set it up
What is a Facebook Pixel and what is it used for? This is Facebook*’s analytics tool for measuring ad performance. The pixel allows you to study the actions of users on your site for further use in advertising campaigns through Facebook* and Instagram.
After installing the JavaScript code on the site, the collection of information about customers will begin: age, gender, location, clicks on links, purchase of goods. The information obtained in this way is used to display targeted ads. Having detailed information about your target audience, you will increase the effectiveness of your advertising campaigns and target them to a clearly defined audience.
Retargeting.
We have already talked about retargeting and the VKontakte Pixel. In Facebook* it works in a similar way. For example, a visitor entered your online store, viewed some products, but did not buy anything.
The pixel code captures his data on the social network, and then shows him an advertisement. Since a person has already been interested in your products, it is highly likely that he will not remain indifferent to a profitable offer and still make a purchase or leave a request.
Conversion monitoring.
Facebook Pixel allows you to track the targeted actions of visitors from any device. Let’s say a person came to your site from a smartphone, flipped through the pages and closed it. After some time, he again went in, but from a computer, and placed an order.
Pixel captures all this, remembers and uses it to display targeted ads. You ask: why show something else if the customer has already made a purchase? To offer him related products. I bought a computer mouse – show an advertisement for rugs. I bought a TV – advertise a discount on a TV set-top box. Selling additional products brings a good profit.