Spy on Your Customers With Facebook Pixel (ok, not actually)

Posted on

One Pixel To Rule Them All

Facebook Pixel is a piece of code from Facebook that you can put in your Shopify store. It tracks what people do up to the point where they’ve made a purchase. Pixels let you see how effective your Facebook ads are, find new people who might want to buy your products, and retarget customers much more accurately.


This post goes over what a Facebook Pixel is, how to install it, and how to manage future ads using it. It’s a bit complex, but definitely doable.

Note: This post assumes you have a Facebook for Business account.

1. What is the Facebook Pixel?

You know when you visit a new site and it gives you a warning that you are being followed with cookies?

Those cookies are deposited by what’s called a pixel - or a short line of code that can track specific actions on a website. Advertisement platforms usually have pixels you can set up to help you track, measure and understand how people are using your website. Once you have this data, you can use it to retarget people who are somewhat interested but need an extra push, find new audiences who might be interested, and measure your return-on-investment for paid ads.

You set up a pixel with Facebook Ads Manager, then install that code onto your Shopify website (we’ll show you how). Once that’s done, you can start tracking standard events (single actions), and get a bit fancier with custom events (if they did X, then do Y).

When you create a new ad campaign with Facebook, you can use Facebook Pixel with a targeted audience - an audience that has specific characteristics about their demographics and interests you think are likely to buy. By using Pixel with a targeted audience, you’re able to actually measure if you’re right, rather than guessing.

Track standard events

Facebook allows you to set up a pixel that tracks these kinds of actions people take.

Event Name

Event Description

ViewContent

When a key page is viewed such as a product page, e.g. landing on a product detail page

Search

When a search is made, e.g. when a product search query is made

AddToCart

When a product is added to the shopping cart, e.g. click on add to cart button

AddToWishlist

When a product is added to a wishlist, e.g. click on add to wishlist button

InitiateCheckout

When a person enters the checkout flow prior to completing the checkout flow, e.g. click on checkout button

AddPaymentInfo

When a payment information is added in the checkout flow, e.g. click / LP on save billing info button

Purchase

When a purchase is made or checkout flow is completed, e.g. landing on thank you/confirmation page

Lead

When a sign up is completed, e.g. click on pricing, signup for trial

CompleteRegistration

When a registration form is completed, e.g. complete subscription/signup for a service

One important event is conversion tracking, which means seeing the actions people took to get to your just-purchased page. You can install the Facebook Pixel on your “thanks for shopping with us” webpage, and see information about the people who went all the way from your advertisement through to a purchase. Facebook tracks conversions that happen within 1, 7 and 28 days of someone clicking on an ad.

Remarketing and automatic bidding for new people

You can set up custom events, too, that let you take info from standard events and use it toward two purposes.

1. Find new people with “lookalike audiences”

You can use Facebook Pixel to guess who else on Facebook might be interested in your store. Once you have at least 100 conversions from Facebook ads, you can use Pixel to automatically “optimise” ads - meaning you can automatically bid to advertise in front of people that are very similar to the ones who are buying. .

2. Give your existing viewers an extra push

This concept is called “remarketing”, where someone who’s clicked on an ad or shown some form of interest gets extra attention from that company. Perhaps it’s seeing a different version of the ad that might work better, or even rerunning the ad on a different device or at a later date. Pixel lets you identify those people directly, who have taken some form of action indicating that they like you, and then automatically put the same or another ad in front of them.

2. Installing Facebook Pixel

Creating a pixel and integrating it with Shopify takes a few steps - but it really shouldn’t take more than a few minutes. You can follow along with these videos if you need some more visuals.

Step One: Set up a Pixel

  1. Go to your Facebook Pixel tab in Ads Manager.
  2. Click Create a Pixel.
  3. Enter a name for your pixel. You can have only one pixel per ad account, so choose a name that represents your business.
  4. Note: You can change the name of the pixel later from the Facebook Pixel tab.
  5. Check the box to accept the terms.
  6. Click Create Pixel
  7. On the top right, you should see your 15-digit Pixel ID. Copy it.

Step Two: Connect the Pixel to your Shopify Store

  1. Go to your Shopify Admin and click “Settings” then “Online Store”
  2. Scroll down to Facebook Pixel and enter the code you’ve copied
  3. Click “Save”

Step Three: Check that it’s working

If you’re using Google Chrome, you can install the Facebook Pixel Helper which will check for you. Or, you can simply visit a few pages on your site from a web browser, then go to your Facebook Pixel Page using your Ads Manager. Once you check it’s active and working, you can start creating paid ads with Facebook.

3. Start making Facebook Ads and see your results

After you’ve been using Facebook Pixel for a while, it will make it easier to stop guessing with ads. Create a targeted ad as usual, starting by building an audience with Audience Insights.

  1. Go to your Facebook Business ads manager
  2. Click the drop-down menu at the top left, and go to Audience Insights

You can then use the audience insights tool to create a custom audience and save it as a “Saved Audience”, starting with demographic information, locations, interests, page likes and purchasing history. The sweet range for a narrow and targeted audience falls between about 50,000-200,000 people.

Open up the Adverts Create Tool and set up your ad. Because you have installed Pixel, you can click “increase conversions on your website” as your objective. From the drop-down box, select the name of your freshly installed pixel. This means you’re putting standard event tracking to work.

Setting up custom pixel functions for retargeting and ad optimisation is a bit more complex, and depends more on what it is your business does.

Check out your data

Using your Facebook ads manager dashboard, you can see insight from your Pixel. From your ad set, you can choose indicators to check out that directly show you how Pixel and Shopify are working together. This kind of information will tell you who is buying and what you can learn from them.

Looking for more information on using Facebook Pixel with Shopify?

Here are a couple of resources to get you started:

You can also get in touch with Elkfox for direct help in all things marketing.