How to Install the Facebook Pixel in 5 Simple Steps
by Marketing Supply Co. Team | June 6th, 2019
When it comes to advertising on Facebook, the most important thing you can do to help with the success of your campaigns is to learn how to install the Facebook Pixel on your website. Not only does the pixel track everyone that visits your site, but it also allows you to see the success of your Facebook ads. Being able to see everything that is happening on your website that can be attributed to your Facebook campaigns is the best way to track and optimize your social ads campaign to drive conversions.
If you want to learn how to install the Facebook Pixel, read ahead.
What is the Facebook Pixel?
The Facebook Pixel, which was launched at the end of 2015, is a piece of JavaScript added to web pages that tracks visitors to your site, certain actions, and conversions that are performed by those users. If done properly, the pixel should be added to the header of every page on your website.
The pixel works by firing whenever a user visits any one of your website pages if they were brought to your site from a campaign they clicked or viewed on Facebook. Those actions taken by the user are then registered by Facebook and the data is passed back into your Facebook Ads Manager. Now that we know what the Facebook Pixel is and why it’s important, I’m going to break down its capabilities.
What Can You Do With the Facebook Pixel?
It’s important that the pixel is on every page and subdomain on your site. You will get more data and a better understanding of how users move through your funnel and whether or not they complete certain actions. Once you have your pixel installed on a page you can set up events. Events are actions that happen on your website.
Let’s use the example of creating a Facebook campaign where the end goal is to get users to sign up for your email newsletter. You can set up a standard or custom event on the successful submission of the form. This event will allow you to see the data from how many people have seen your ad (reach), to how many people clicked on your ad, and then how many people signed up to your newsletter (conversion).
If you have an e-commerce store, you can serve product-specific ads to visitors who have viewed that specific product or added it to their cart, but did not purchase.
For more information on how to create that ad, or how to create a pixel, check out my previous blog post.
How to Install the Facebook Pixel
If you have not created a Facebook Pixel you will need to do that first. Go to your Facebook Ads Manager and click the menu in the top left.
Navigate to All Tools > Measure & Report > Pixels. From there, click “Create A Pixel” and give your pixel a name, then complete the pixel creation. After your pixel is created you should see it on your Facebook Pixels page. Click on your pixel’s name and it will take you to the data sources for your pixel. In the top right you should see an icon that says “Set up.”
Once you click “Set up,” you have three options:
- Use an Integration or Tag Manager
- Manually Install the Code Yourself
- Email Instructions to a Developer
Facebook Integrations/Tag Managers
If you choose to install with an integration or tag manager, you will be walked through how to install your pixel through the chosen platform. Facebook partners/integrations include:
Or for a complete list, you can click here.
Manually Install the Facebook Pixel Code Yourself
If you want to install the code manually, you will have to know a bit of basic HTML—just enough to know where to find the end of the header. If you click on “Manually Install the Code Yourself” you will see a screen like this:
All you have to do from here is click on the code and it will automatically be copied to your computer’s clipboard. After that, you need to paste it just before the end of the header, which is right before the “</head>” tag in the HTML of your page.
After the pixel code is installed on all of your web pages you can add specific events to buttons or certain pages on your site, such as thank you pages. Here is a short list of some Facebook standard events:
After your pixel is installed and your events are set up, there is only one thing left to do: make sure everything is installed properly. For this, I would recommend using the Facebook Pixel Helper to ensure your pixel and events are firing properly. Here’s what it looks like:
From there, you can begin optimizing your social campaign.
Interested in advertising on Facebook? MSC can help you with that. Fill out this form to get in touch!
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Photo by Kon Karampelas on Unsplash
