How to Use Facebook Advertising Pixels to Create High Converting Ad Campaigns

In 2015 Ryan Deiss, CEO and Founder of DigitalMarketer, predicted that 2015 would be the year of the Great Pixel Land Rush.

“Soon all display advertising will be retargeted advertising and the pixel will become even more valuable than the click itself. As larger advertisers continue to buy up ad inventory (and create their own retargeting audiences) those that fail to ‘pixel’ their site visitors won’t be able to afford to advertise.”

At DigitalMarketer, we’ve already begun preparations for the “pixel land rush.” We buy traffic today just to place a pixel. Sure … we’re monitoring click costs, cost per lead and all the rest but we’re paying closer and closer attention to a new metric: CPP.”

CPP is Cost Per Pixel.

I agreed with Ryan in 2015 and almost two years later, Ryan’s words are still relevant (and even more so, now)…

Pixels allow us to follow up with people who have visited our website.

The key is that pixels allow you to make TARGETED offers to individuals based off of pages they’ve visited on your website.

For example, we run ads to promote blog posts on “blogging.”

Then, we retarget the people who read the article with a specific lead magnet for… BLOGGING. (Learn how we do this, here).

It’s much more powerful than making them a broad offer (ex. Digital Marketing)… it allows us to solve a SPECIFIC problem for them.

BUT, pixels can get confusing… especially when it comes to Facebook advertising!

I get a TON of questions about Facebook advertising pixels in DigitalMarketer Engage…

… and, since Facebook rolled out a brand new pixel last year, I’m going to clear up all of the confusion. (Before you read any further, make sure the new Facebook pixel base code is installed site wide on your URL(s)).

I’m going to explain the different uses for the Facebook pixel and how YOU can use pixels to create higher converting Facebook ad campaigns.

3 Ways to Use the Facebook Pixel

There are three very important uses for the Facebook Pixel:

• Retargeting (building audiences of people who have visited your website, retargeting throughout a sales funnel)
• Optimization (creating higher converting Facebook campaigns focused on a specific action)
• Tracking (tracking the performance of a campaign, for example… you can track how many leads or sales were generated from a particular ad)

Let’s start with…

1. Tracking

Facebook’s pixel can be used to track how many times a particular action occurs.

For example, you can track how many leads were generated from a particular Facebook campaign. Or, how many products you sold from a specific ad.

The best way to track SPECIFIC actions that occurred as a result of your Facebook ads is through the use of custom conversions.

Custom conversions are very similar to the old conversion pixels that Facebook used before the new pixel (and that we miss dearly :)).

You can find custom conversions in the business manager menu:

Unfortunately, as of now, you are only allotted 40 custom conversions per Facebook account. So, use them wisely.

Like I said earlier, you’ll want to use custom conversions to denote a success action, like generating a lead or purchasing a product.

To do this, you will want to set up a custom conversion for the URL of whatever page people will visit right after they take whatever action you’re tracking.

For example, if you want to track leads, you’ll create a custom conversion based off of whatever page the person will visit after they enter their contact information.

The only way someone could reach this page is if they opted in with their contact information.

To create the custom conversion, you’ll click the “Create Custom Conversion” button, then enter the URL of the success page.

After you enter the URL, as you can see above, Facebook will also ask you to choose a category. This doesn’t affect tracking or optimization, just select the category that makes the most sense to you. For this example, I chose “lead.”

You’ll then be prompted to name the custom conversion and to give it a value. If you’re tracking purchases, and the conversion has an actually monetary value, feel free to input that number.

Awesome, you’ve created your custom conversion!

Now, how do we actually track results back to a specific campaign, ad set, or ad?

Unlike the old conversion pixels, you don’t have to tell Facebook to track a specific custom conversion back to its source.

When creating your campaigns, make sure that you check the “track all conversion from my Facebook pixel” option at the ad level. As long as you do this, Facebook will do the tracking for you!

Now, where do you view results of the custom conversion(s) that you’re wanting to track?

You’ll want to click the “Customize Columns” button in ads manager when viewing your campaigns:

Then, select the specific custom conversions you’re wanting to track. They will appear as whatever you named them during set up:

Note that you can track the number of conversions, the cost per conversion, and the value (if you input a numerical value when setting up the custom conversion).

You can customize columns at the campaign, ad set, or ad level—this will give you visibility into what’s specific working (and, what’s not working) within your ad campaigns.

FYI: If you’re running website conversion campaign, make sure you use the customize columns button to view the results for your campaign. Many people are misled because they assume all of the “conversions” reported are the custom conversion they’re optimizing for. Unfortunately, Facebook lumps ALL conversions that have occurred from people who interacted with that particular campaign.

For example, we optimized for the custom conversion of “Customer Avatar” in this campaign. From first glance, it appears as though we’ve generated 21,267 leads. But, because Facebook is now reporting all conversions that have occurred from the people who have interacted with this campaign, you need to dig a little to get the actual number. In this case, we’ve generated 15,476 leads.

2. Optimization

You can use also use custom conversions to tell Facebook what you WANT!

When setting up a Facebook advertising campaign Facebook asks what the objective of your campaign is:

If you’re running traffic to something that’s a simple action, like a Lead Magnet opt-in or a webinar sign up, you should almost ALWAYS use the “Increase conversions on your website” objective. (Learn how this decreased our lead cost by 5x, here).

But how does Facebook know what to optimize for? You tell them—using custom conversions!

You can optimize for one of the custom conversions you already created for tracking (or a new one).

In the case of a traditional 5-step sales funnel, we will optimize for the Lead Magnet.

So, we would use the custom conversion that’s on the page where visitors land DIRECTLY after they opt-in for your Lead Magnet.

Not only are you telling Facebook EXACTLY what you want from the campaign, you’re also collecting data.

Meaning, Facebook is optimizing your campaign for people who are most like the people who have already opted in. This is powerful as you go to scale your advertising campaigns.

3. Retargeting

Another benefit of the Facebook pixel is that it can be used to create retargeting audiences.

Facebook retargeting audiences are created under the “Audiences” tab in Business Manager.

To create an audience of people who have interacted with your Facebook pixel (any pages on your site), click create audience, custom audience, then website traffic, and you’ll find a plethora of options:

First, you can target anyone who’s visited your website as a whole. This one is self-explanatory. Keep in mind that if you have your pixel installed on multiple websites you can select those different URLs from the drop down.

Secondly, you can target people who visit specific web pages. So, if you’d like to target everyone who has visited your product page, a specific Thank You page, for example, this is the option to choose.

Thirdly, you can target people who visit specific web pages but not others. We use this method to retarget people throughout our 5-step funnels. See HERE

This option allows you to DYNAMICALLY retarget people who have visited one page but not the other. Want to target people who opted in for your Lead Magnet, but didn’t buy your next offer? This audience is for you.

Fourthly, people who haven’t visited in a certain amount of time. Use this option to retarget people who have been away from your site for a long period of time. Re-engage them with content or a special discount.

The next option is brand new and very exciting. You can retarget people based off the amount of time spent on your website.

Facebook will create audiences of people who are in the following percentile for time spent on your website:

Retarget these people with higher dollar offers as they’re some of your “hottest” and most qualified retargeting audiences.

Lastly, you can create a custom combination. Here you can get even more specific and retarget people based off of the number of times they’ve visited your site in a specific duration of time (and if it was mobile or desktop):

Whichever option you choose, these are PERFECT to create lookalike audiences from in order to scale.

You can create a lookalike audience based off of any of the custom audiences we covered above.

For the lookalike audiences, Facebook creates an audience of people who are most like the people in that custom audience.

To create a lookalike, simply check the audience you’d like to use as the source then click actions and create lookalike:

Facebook will populate the lookalike audience as a new audience under the Audience tab and you’ll be able to target this audience in a new ad set. Again, these are AWESOME to use for scale. Once you have a campaign that’s working, simply create a lookalike audience off of that success page.

That’s it! You’ve mastered the Facebook pixel (or the parts you really need to know for success, anyway :)).

As you can see, it’s almost impossible to run successful Facebook ads without using the pixel.

It’s essential for the tracking, optimization, retargeting, and scale of your Facebook campaigns.

By Molly Pittman

Article Source: http://www.digitalmarketer.com/attend-traffic-and-conversion-summit/

3 reasons why you can safely ignore your competitors’ traffic metrics

Competitive analysis can be helpful, but columnist Dianna Huff explains why it's important not to get too focused on your competitors' performance.

Website traffic is one of those metrics small business owners use to determine if their website is “working” — along with the number of inquiries, leads or sales they get from it. Traffic is also a metric that gets a lot of hype; you can find millions of articles explaining how to increase website traffic.

In addition to looking at your own traffic, you can use tools that tell you how much traffic your competitors are getting. When small business owners see this information, they get concerned because generally, the traffic numbers are sometimes very high — or at least higher than what they’re getting.

As one business owner said, when an agency presented competitor traffic data to him, “All I could think, when I saw the data, was, ‘They’re eating our lunch’ in terms of sales.”

As I explained to him, however, these tools don’t tell you the full story. They don’t tell you, for example, whether the traffic is the right kind of traffic or if the traffic is resulting in inquiries. And, they certainly don’t tell you if the business is meeting its sales and marketing KPIs.

Not all traffic is created equal

Back around 2003 or 2004, Nickelodeon, the TV network, created this ingenious marketing campaign for the animated show, “Jimmy Neutron Boy Genius” (which my then six-year old son watched faithfully).

The marketing campaign, which reached kids through the TV show, told them to look for special game codes on product packaging. These codes could then be used in the games featured on the show’s website. Then each week, players’ activities would be featured on the TV show.

I found this campaign, and my son’s active participation with it, so remarkable, I wrote an article about it for my newsletter and then posted the article to my website.

Although this was back in the day before social media, blogs and so on, traffic to my website skyrocketed within a couple of weeks. Why? That article was showing up in searches for “Jimmy Neutron game codes.” For a couple of months, I watched this traffic pour in — but ultimately, I made the decision to take the article down.

Why? This was back in the day before Google’s “Not Set / Not Provided,” so I could see exactly which search queries were driving traffic to my site. The search phrase “Jimmy Neutron game codes” didn’t exactly align with the keywords used by people looking for a B2B marketing consultant.

I can list lots of other examples like this, but I think you get the picture. High traffic doesn’t necessarily mean the right kind of traffic.

High traffic doesn’t always translate into inquiries

Last year, my company conducted a website and marketing audit for a small business owner concerned about the lack of inquiries. Traffic to the website was healthy — over 9,800 sessions a month — because the company was very diligent about creating content.

One of the problems, however, was that 65 percent of the traffic was due to blog posts, and of the hundreds of posts created over the years, four were responsible for 36 percent of overall traffic. While these posts were related to the service offerings of the business, they were also the type of “how to” post where a person could use the information without taking any further action with the company.

Hence, the content wasn’t helping with real inquiries — except the occasional newsletter subscription.

I’ve seen this happen over and over again with small business websites — and even with the Huff Industrial Marketing (my company) website, too. One year, for example, I wrote a blog post listing over 50 ways to drive traffic to a website. That post was picked up by numerous SEO practitioners and marketers, and over time, it became the number one traffic generator to the website — accounting for over 50 percent of traffic.

The problem, however, was it didn’t result in one inquiry, and all that non-targeted traffic was skewing the data in Analytics. We finally deleted it in early 2016, and at the same time, began creating content more in line with our client base. Yep, we took a huge hit initially, but it was the right decision. Traffic is up again — as are inquiries.

You have no idea what your competitors’ marketing strategy and business goals are

Because we provide marketing strategy for our small industrial manufacturing clients, we’re often privy to their business plans. These plans typically have a main objective: to grow the business to X number of dollars in five or seven years. To reach this objective, the plan will list various things the company will do: improve quality, enter a new market, introduce new products, replace antiquated equipment with automation and so on.

Thus, we base recommended marketing strategies on our clients’ business goals.

When you run reports using the tools available and then see your competitors and their (higher than yours) traffic numbers, what you’re viewing is data that is absolutely meaningless. Unless you have the company’s business and marketing strategy in front of you, you have no idea what the company’s KPIs or targets are, or if the traffic is meeting them or not.

And, since this data lacks context, basing your marketing strategy on it is a sure recipe for marketing disaster.

In conclusion…

Viewing metrics about your competitors’ website traffic shouldn’t be used as an indicator for deciding how to proceed with your marketing strategy. One, you have no idea if this traffic is “working” or not; two, you don’t know the reasons why the traffic might be higher than yours; and three, the traffic number itself is meaningless because it’s taken out of context.

Instead of focusing on your competitors and their traffic numbers, focus instead on your marketing. Rigorously track and measure your marketing tactics to determine what works — that is, which tactics result in inquiries that become sales — and then let go of the stuff that doesn’t work (even if everyone else is doing it). You’ll be much happier, and you’ll look really smart, too.

Dianna Huff on January 16, 2017 at 10:57 am

Article Source: http://searchengineland.com/3-reasons-can-safely-ignore-competitors-traffic-metrics-267241