To get insights into your customer behavior, conversion tracking is a critical section to gather valuable data. Facebook is the most popular way to advertise your business. To make highly targeted ads, you will need WordPress Facebook pixel installed on your site.
Competition is high. Many are fighting to get their ads in front of huge audience this social media platform utilizes. But sometimes Facebook ads are not enough as they target random audience who might not be interested in what you are offering.
This is where installing pixel on your site can help. When you advertise on Facebook, AdWords, or any other kinds of tools, you have the option to insert a bit of HTML code for tracking and conversion. This is called pixel.
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What Is Facebook Pixel?
Before you can start selling to your audience, you need to know who your ideal customer is, where they are, and what they will buy. Using Facebook pixel, you can create high converting ad campaigns.
Pixels allow us to follow up with people who have visited our website, specific pages on the site, a sales pages, etc.
The key advantage from pixels is that they allow you to make targeted offers to individuals based on pages they’ve visited. So-called retargeting.
Retargeting, also known as remarketing is a form of online advertising that can help you keep your brand in front of bounced traffic after they leave your website.
For example: I run ads to promote blog posts via Facebook. Then, I retarget the people who read the article with a particular lead. It’s much stronger than making them a broad offer.
NOTE: Facebook used to have a custom audience pixel for retargeting website visitors, and conversion pixels for tracking website conversions such as sales.
While each advertising account had only one custom audience pixel, you could create many conversion pixels. One for each web page you wanted to track conversions. Facebook is slowly deprecating those two and introducing just one that combines both.
In 2015, Facebook took a huge step towards to simplifying this process by introducing the new Facebook Pixel. One pixel to rule them all. The new pixel is now the only pixel you need.
It has retargeting, optimization, and tracking all built in one. You can read more about the changes by visiting this link.
Old pixels will still work for the time being. Your old custom audience pixel has already been upgraded to the new pixel, but your conversion pixels will be phased out in the second half of 2016.
My recommendation is to switch everything over now rather than leaving it to the last minute. And if you’ve never used any Facebook pixels before, it’s the perfect time to start.
What Is Facebook Retargeting?
Retargeting is a cookie-based technology that uses simple Javascript code to anonymously ‘follow’ your audience all over the Web.
You place a small, unobtrusive piece of code on your website (this code is sometimes referred to as a pixel). The code, or pixel, is unnoticeable to your site visitors and won’t affect your site’s performance.
Every time a new visitor comes to your site, the code drops an anonymous browser cookie. When your cookied visitors browse the Web, the cookie will let your retargeting provider know when to serve ads, ensuring that your ads are served to only to people who have previously visited your site.
You may have noticed that right after visiting a site, you see its ads when you land on another site with ad places. And that is retargeting.
Facebook retargeting shows the ads of your website or service on Facebook to users who have visited certain sections of your site no matter if they have made purchases or not.
So if you ever wonder how Facebook knows which pages people have read, it is because those websites have some Facebook code inserted to help track the activities.
Retargeting is very effective as it focuses your advertising on people who are already familiar with your brand or have recently demonstrated interest. That’s why most marketers who use it see a higher return of investment.
Amazon does this a lot. Whenever you search for a product on Amazon, and then you go to some website which allows ads, you might see the same products that you checked on Amazon.
Facebook retargeting works same way. It shows ads of your product or service on Facebook to the users who have visited your site.
If someone visits your website after clicking on a Facebook Ad, they may not always complete an action like making a purchase or giving you their contact information.
Great way to remarket them is by using Facebook pixel. It’ll help you:
- Bring website visitors back to complete a purchase
- Find new people who are similar to your site visitors
- Get more value from new customer acquisition campaigns by excluding existing customers
Why Use Facebook Pixel In WordPress?
There are enormous benefits of using Facebook retargeting. The most significant one is that it offers another chance for you to turn a visitor into a customer or subscriber by attracting and impressing him/her with your ads.
Engage your websites audience based on pages they visit or actions they take. Track activities such as registering, purchasing items, and so on.
These actions can be used to retarget audience, find new customers, track conversions coming from your Facebook ads, and ultimately allow Facebook to optimize your ads automatically to result in more of these actions.
Some other advantages:
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- Increases your website traffic
- Helps you know what visitors are interested in, so you can create ads that are more concentrated on their needs, which then brings better engagement, more sales, more likes, and a higher conversion rate
- It is highly usable for not only large businesses but also small sites
- Gives you another chance to attracting a lead
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It is basically a tracking code which is used by Facebook to track certain activity on your website. The pixel does not add any visible changes to your site. It just sends a browser cookie to your website visitors.
The browser cookie allows Facebook to retarget Facebook users who have visited your website.
Hot To Create Facebook Pixel?
Facebook pixel, re-launched from the Custom Audience pixel, combines retargeting, conversion optimization and conversion tracking into one code to make it easy to apply the features to your WordPress site.
To create a pixel, you have to log into your Facebook account and then go to the Ads Manager. Find the menu for Tools, click on it to expand the submenus, and then choose Pixels.
On the new screen, click on the green button saying “Create a Pixel.” Make sure that you are under the “Facebook Pixel” tab instead of the old “Conversion Tracking Pixel”.
Then on the pop-up screen, enter a name for your new pixel and agree to the Facebook terms. The name could be anything. You can name it by your website name or the name of a product. When these are done, click on “Create Pixel”.
You will see a message telling that your Facebook pixel has been created. You will also be offered the pixel ID. Now you have two choices. You can email the pixel code to others if you have someone else managing the technical parts of your WordPress site.
Or in the case that you run the site by yourself, click on “Install Pixel Now” to continue. This will lead you to the pixel code. Copy the code for later use.
How To Manually Install Facebook Pixel On WordPress Site?
Now that you have successfully created a Facebook Pixel, it is time to install it on your WordPress site. You can do that by just inserting the pixel code right before the closing </head> tag of your header.php theme file. It can a in Appearance > Editor.
On the right side of the screen select Theme Header. Look for the tag </head> and paste the code just before it. You might need to add a few lines to make room. Once you’ve pasted your code, click Update File. Your code will now run on your website.
But be noted when you update or change the theme you will lose added code, and you will need to put it again. If you prefer this manual way over plugin, then add code to your WordPress child theme.
How To Add WordPress Facebook Pixel Using Plugin?
There are plugins that help you insert analytics code, plugins that help you add the Facebook pixel, and plugins that let you do all of that.
I found one plugin that lets you do all of them in one plugin. It’s called Tracking Code Manager. The Tracking Code Manager plugin is designed to make it easy adding multiple tracking scripts to your website.
You will be able to choose the position of the code and when you want to exclude each code from running. The premium version gives you even more flexibility.
It lets you manage all of your tracking codes from one place for every different service. It doesn’t only integrate with Google and Facebook. It supports other kinds of SAAS tools.
Tracking Code Manager is a plugin that gives you the ability to manage all your tracking code and scripts in one single place. It doesn’t matter the place where you want to put your code, because with Tracking Code Manager you can put it wherever you want, with no restrictions.
Let’s say you are using Google Analytics, Facebook Retargeting, Google Remarketing, Zendesk, a Live Chat tool, eye tracking analytics, popups, affiliate tracking pixels or any other.
For every single service you use, you’ll have to put a script or a tracking pixel in the <head> or <body> tag of your WordPress site or some of its pages.
Tracking Code Manager plugin allows you to gather every code and snippet and to display them exactly where you want. It can be in the whole site or specific pages and posts.
Tracking Code Manager
Putting the tracking code directly in the theme files you risk to lose trackings or external service integrations when you update the theme. With Tracking Code Manager you can forget about this problem.
If you are going to add multiple tracking codes to your website. Tracking Code Manager for WordPress is a free plugin that lets you manage all your tracking codes and scripts.
You can choose the position of the code and when you want to exclude each code from running. The premium version gives you even more flexibility. In the free version, you have up to 6 locations to use. Unlimited if you use the premium version.
In every location, you can put as many tracking codes as you want. The best way to use this plugin is putting just one tracking code in every place. In this way, you can have a complete and ordered manager to manage them individually.
In addition to the manager, you have a Meta box in a single page and single post WordPress editor. This Meta box is useful when you need to put a tracking code while you are creating a page or a post.
Is also useful when you want to exclude a particular page from being tracked. To do that, find the Meta box in the single post editor. The Meta boxes can be deactivated in the settings.
Tracking Code Manager plugin can automatically detect your e-commerce plugin. Like WooCommerce, Easy Digital Downloads or WP eCommerce and let you put the conversion pixels every time someone completes a sale on your store.
Also, you have the ability to track a single product at a time.
As an alternative for adding a Facebook pixel to WordPress site, you can use Facebook Conversion Pixel plugin. It supports inserting Facebook Conversion Pixel codes into Posts, Pages, and all other custom post types that you may have on your site
How to Verify That a Tracking Code is Properly Working?
If you are unsure that your tracking code is properly working, here is a guide to check your tracking script.
You have three methods:
- FB Pixel Helper (for Facebook pixels and tracking codes)
- Tag Assistant by Google (for Google pixels and tracking codes)
- See the source code of your website
In the first two cases, it is very easy. You need to install the addon and have a look if everything is working correctly.
The last method is to check any other tracking code. Here the steps:
- Right mouse click on page/post you choose for tracking (or entire website if you set it like that) and select “View page source.” You will see the source code of your site.
- Click cmd +F or cmd + F on Mac to display the search box
- Type few words from tracking code and see if it appears
- Check if the code is properly showing in the source code
How to Create Custom Audience for Facebook Pixel?
Facebook has 1.71 billion monthly active users and targeting all them is a bad strategy. You need to target a particular section of users. So called custom audience.
Custom Audience is an important feature that Facebook Pixel offers. It allows you to target audience for your retargeting campaign. To create custom audience, you need to click the Custom Audience under your Pixel. When you click on the button, you’ll see this screen.
In the popup, you’ll see your Pixel ID and option to select the website traffic. Here you’ll see five options. People who visit your website, people who visit specific web pages, people who visit specific web pages but not others, people who haven’t visited your site for a certain period and custom combination.
You can select any of the options and create custom audience. Next, give a name to your audience to create your custom audience. You can create as many custom audiences as you want. Target different people to know which one works for you. It is going to be trial and error process.
To get even more from Custom Audiences check Custom Audiences Enhancer. This WordPress plugin improves your Facebook advertising. It sends you behavioral information about your visitors, information that helps you create the perfect audiences, and consequently create better ads, which lead to more conversions.
CA Enhancer pushes valuable information about your website’s visitors to your Facebook ads account. You’ll able to use that information to create more specific ads.
WordPress Facebook Pixel Summary
Facebook is an excellent platform for building your brand and targeting your audience. You can boost your Facebook posts using ads. But rather than targeting a broad audience you can use retargeting to narrow the audience for better results at less money.
Facebook Retargeting Pixel is great to remarket your website, product or service. It is much more effective than normal adverts as you’re showing it to people who have already shown some interest in your services.
Not only is Facebook Pixel a great tool for getting the most out of your Facebook ads, it’s also free and easy to use. Even if you don’t use Facebook ads now, you can use the stats and tracking to help you use it later.
If you need good WordPress plugin to automatically share WordPress posts to social networks, automatically share WordPress posts to Facebook pages and groups or to automatically post from WordPress to Instagram, then I recommend SNAP or Blog2Social plugin (check Blog2Social review).
DISCLOSURE: Posts may contain affiliate links. If you buy something through one of those links, I might get a small commission, without any extra cost to you. Read more about it here.