Sep
22

Love/hate the way Ads Follow you, Ready to do it too?

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You saw a great new pair of shoes, you clicked on them to check out the details, they weren’t exactly what you were looking for so you moved on.  However, for days after that everywhere you went online you saw that same pair of shoes.  It’s not malware or even spyware and “they” can’t see everything you are doing! There is no malicious intent, they are not tracking you as an individual just the product you visited. It really is a “love/hate the way ads follow you” relationship.

But, now you’ve got to thinking, could I use that in my business or is it really complicated? You had been retargeted and that process starts with a pixel. If you have the right pieces in play (Facebook Page, website, etc) it is actually quite simple.

A pixel is what drops a cookie which is what enables retargeting.

A pixel is just a piece of code that is put on a webpage. You don’t have to know what it means or how it works, you only need to know how to copy and paste.

In Facebook’s own words, this code “is an analytics tool that allows you to measure the effectiveness of your advertising by understanding the actions people take on your website.

As the World Wide Web becomes more and more competitive it is important that you are spending your marketing and advertising dollars in a way that brings you a return on investment.  The only way to know that is if you are tracking. You may be like I used to be, mention the word tracking and your eyes roll back in your head. However, it is very important to know that you are getting bang for your buck.

Tracking, where to start

When I first started tracking anything it was simply by using bitly.com.  It worked well for me because now I knew which of my blog posts was the most popular. However, that lead to me writing more blog posts on the popular topics rather than investing my time and effort on posts no one wanted to read. And that was definitely a good thing!

From there I moved to a call to action link.  You probably have seen it ClickHereNow.co. This one was definitely a bit more techie to set up. It meant I was tracking two things, not just one.

  1. Direct readers to actually click
  2. Track the number of people who actually clicked

However, I still didn’t know where my sales came from.  That was when I moved up to the Facebook Pixel.  Back then it was not as user-friendly as it is now, Facebook has done a lot of work!

The beauty of using the pixel code is that it enables you to

  • Drive a small amount of regular traffic
  • Fine tune that traffic USING that info (from your visitors)
  • Market directly to those people you know are interested

Besides those listed above there are lots of different ways to use the pixel code but I discovered one that is pretty sweet, I’m experimenting with it right now.  But more on that in the follow-up blog post.

Set up Your Tracking Pixel in Facebook

Here are the directions from Facebook to set up your pixel;

Create a pixel in Business Manager
  1. Go to the Business Manager Settings tab in the Ads Manager. 
  2. Click Pixels under People and Assets.
  3. Click Create a Facebook Pixel.
  4. Type in a name for your pixel.
  5. Check the box to agree to the Facebook Pixel Terms.
  6. Click Next.
  7. To start installing your pixel on your website, click Set Up Now.

Next question is what are we going to do with the pixel now that it’s created?

Categories : Facebook

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