As a Facebook ad specialist working in an agency, I always ask new clients two questions.

• Do you have an email database of your business’ prospects and customers?
• Do you already have some traffic on your website? 

From the client’s perspective, it may sound strange... Why is an agency asking me what I have when I’ve hired them for what I don’t have?

That’s a good question. 

In my opinion, Facebook's most powerful tool is not its “Audience Insights” tool, its content and ad formats or its campaign objectives; it's its Pixel.

When I ask our new clients these two questions, I want to estimate how long it will take before I’m using 100% of Facebook Ads Manager's capabilities.

Yes, I said 100%! In my opinion, creating a campaign by selecting an audience, a budget, an ad placement and visuals only represent 50% of what Facebook has to offer. 

By way of comparison, imagine for a moment that you’re going fishing with a group of friends. 

The chairs are lined up on the dock, everyone takes out their fishing rod, prepares their bait, and throws their rods a few meters away. 

You notice that one of your friends has brought a rudimentary fishing rod, made from a wooden stick and using a wine cork as a float. You find this rather amusing!

“No need for a lot of equipment, as long as there's fish”, he says with a smile.

Yes, that's true, but his chances of getting it out of the water are not as good! There’s a reason why fishing rods have a reel and some flexibility!

Think of this friend as the person who uses Facebook without a pixel: it works, but he won't be getting the best results. 

He might not have such a great experience with the platform and probably won’t benefit much from it. 

Let’s get down to business. What exactly is the Facebook Pixel? 

The Facebook pixel is a tool that allows you to :

• Find the person that visits your website on Facebook or Instagram.
• Track and count a click on your website as a specific action (and related to your campaign).

In a nutshell, it tracks visits/actions off Facebook and associates them with its users.

When you create an ad campaign in your manager, you can select a Traffic objective. It’s a fairly simple objective as you’re asking Facebook to find people that are ready to click on the link included in your ads. 

But what’s better?

• Someone who clicks
• Someone who clicks and waits until your page loads completely

With a Traffic objective, you’re solely attracting clicks, whether they’re of good or bad quality. That’s the problem. As long as there are clicks, Facebook is happy. But have you ever inadvertently clicked on an ad while scrolling on your phone? I have, and the advertiser is going to pay Facebook for that click even though I’ll close the page immediately.

The Facebook pixel offers "Landing Page View" optimization; you’ll no longer be paying for a click, but rather for someone to fully load the page and see your content.

We once audited and analyzed a new client's website in order to gain a better understanding of their monthly traffic. 

With Google Analytics, we realized that : 

• 40% of visitors had already been on their website, and were therefore “returning visitors” 
• 80% of all purchases on the website were made by these “returning visitors” 

Conclusion: the majority of sales are made to an audience that already knows you!

So, if someone visits my website or my application, it obviously means that they’re interested in my offer, right?

You used to pay for a click, a message, a “Like”... But what if you paid for a meeting request form, an add to cart or a purchase instead!

If you can create a custom audience based on a specific action, then that means that action is important to you. Facebook understands this and offers you the opportunity to optimize your campaign accordingly. 

To do so, you'll first need to create a custom conversion or set up specific events.

Now, let's move on to the best feature of the Ad Manager: the Lookalike Audience.

Select an audience that you've created and that's profitable and ask Facebook to find people similar to that audience. That's the idea of a Lookalike audience. 

You can use this tool without the Facebook pixel but, between an audience made out of Page fans and an audience of people who actually go on to your website to make a purchase, which one is the most interesting to clone?

A Lookalike audience is the best thing to do as soon as you’re done targeting an audience that was profitable for your campaign.

As Peter Parker (aka Spiderman)’s uncle said: “with great power comes great responsibility”. 

We won’t be talking so much about responsibilities, but rather elements that are required in order to be able to use this "great power"...

Indeed, the Facebook pixel needs resources, starting with a lot of user data, let me explain.

This is a technical detail, but it’s important when you’re running a campaign based on a custom conversion. 

I previously explained that you can set up a custom conversion based on your website’s URL.

Let's say you want to track a conversion for any purchase made on your website. 

Here is the URL that would displayin your navigation bar after purchase

https://www.monsiteweb.com/confirmation-achat/id_checkout=hiwe62348237632

• The green part doesn't change, it's your website’s address.
• The blue part is the one you’re interested in (it indicates that you’re viewing the order confirmation page).
• The red part is a unique identifier for each account created, each order, etc…

If you need to create a conversion from this URL do not use the red part, as your pixel will register a conversion but no other will occur.

That’s because you’re asking the pixel to track each time a visitor displays this URL but, since it is unique, that simply can't happen.

So my advice would be to track URLs that contain this part: “monsiteweb.com/confirmation-achat”.

Now that we've discussed the various features of the Facebook pixel, I'm going to show you a test that was performed on a lookalike audience. 

Here is the advertising campaign report for an agency client who wanted to sell his services.

We created a sales funnel and expected two things from the prospect:

• That he gives his email address in order to see our client’s content (“Validation formulaire 1”)
• That he fills out a meeting request form (“KPI Formulaire”)

• Audience with interests that are specific to our client ($90 budget)
• Lookalike audience based on people that consume our client’s content($90 budget)

For the same budget, using the lookalike audience lowers the cost per email address collected by 15 cents and the meeting request form by $7. 

The lookalike audience brings higher quality traffic that is willing to go further in the sales funnel without needing to be encouraged to do so. 

To summarize, here is what the pixel can bring to your business:

• A retargeting audience based on your website traffic
• An improved traffic campaign
• A campaign optimized for conversion outside of Facebook
• The creation of an audience that meets your objectives off-Facebook
• The possibility of cloning that audience to have a wider playing field

But for that to happen you’ll have to set it up as early as possible so that it can collect enough data. 

See you soon!