by Bryan Bren
Step three: Track events
You must select the events you want to track using the toggle buttons. You can either select from any of the present 17 events or create your own custom events. For every event you select, you must select whether to track on inline action or the page load.
Track event on page load: This helps track those actions that involve going to a different page like when the sign-up process is completed successfully or when a purchase is made.
Track event on inline action: This helps track actions taking place within a page instead of opening another page like when a user adds something to their wish list or their shopping cart on the website.
You can also set certain parameters for an event. For instance, you might want to track the purchases made over a specific dollar value. If you want to use Pixel for custom events, you must go to Facebook Events Manager, click on Custom Conversions, select Create Custom Conversions, and define the custom conversion event accordingly.
Step four: Confirm if the pixel is working
If you used the “Send Test Traffic” in the second step, then you have already check to confirm that the pixel is working properly. However, before you start to rely on the data generated by the pixel, you must check whether it is tracking the data properly or not. Open your Google Chrome browser and add the Facebook Pixel Helper extension to it. This option is only available for Google Chrome. So, if you use some other browser, you must first install Google Chrome to start using Pixel Helper.
Open the page where you have included the pixel. If the extension discovers the pixel, then the extension icon turns blue and a popup will show up displaying the pixels it finds on the given page. This popup will inform you whether the pixel is working as intended or not. If not, then an error message will show up, and you need to make the necessary changes.
Step five: Add a pixel notice to your site
If you don’t want to violate Facebook’s terms of use, then you must be sure to include a notice on your website informing the users that their data is being collected. This means that you must provide an unambiguous notice that you are using Facebook Pixel and that the users’ information is being collected via cookies or any other means. You must also inform the users they have the option to opt out of their data being collected. You must carefully go through Facebook’s Business Tool Terms about the Special Provisions Concerning the Use of Facebook Pixels and SDKs.
Facebook Pixel Cookies
Facebook changed the way it uses cookies for tracking the Facebook Pixel data in October 2018. Users now have the option to use first-party and third-party cookies. You don’t have to make any changes unless you wish to opt out of using first-party cookies. What does this mean? Essentially, it allows advertisers to continue to track data on browsers like Safari and Firefox. These two browsers have placed restrictions on using third-party cookies. Advertisers involved in fields involving comprehensive privacy legislation like finance and health sectors might need to opt out for compliance purposes.
Chapter Seven: Facebook Advertising
Using Facebook Ads Manager
Do you want to start a Facebook ad but aren’t sure where to begin? That’s a common feeling, which is why this entire chapter is dedicated to the process of creating an ad. However, before you can run an ad campaign on Facebook, you must learn about the Facebook Ads Manager. It’s a great tool that you can’t do without when growing your business.
Create an Account
The first step is to learn how to set up an account on the Ads Manager. To get started, you must log into your Facebook account, open the drop-down menu present on the upper right corner of your account, and click on the “Create Ads” option. This will open an account for you and will help you set up and run your ad campaign on Facebook.
Explore Ads Manager
Once you open the main menu in the Ads Manager, you can see different options: Plan, Measure & Report, Assets, Create & Manage, and Settings. Once you start using Ads Manager frequently, you will notice another section, the “Frequently Used” section, where you can easily find all the tools you regularly use. Below are all the tools you will become familiar with when using the Ads Manager:
Plan
The “Plan” section includes tools to help you understand your target audience and give you ideas for running Facebook ads. The Audience Insights tool in this section will help you find all the information you need about your target audience on Facebook. It also allows you to create a custom audience based on things such as user interests, gender, age group, location as well as the pages they like. According to the parameters you select, Facebook Ads Manager will give you the necessary information you will need.
For instance, you can discover helpful advertising ideas when you ask Facebook to provide data about those users who like your Facebook page. You must first input information in Audience Insights for the information you need about the users who like your page. Based on the parameters you select, Insights will display various tabs about those users.
The first tab of information is related to demographics. The graph produced in this section will provide information about the age and gender of all the users who like your page. The demographic data also provides information about users’ professions, marital status, and qualifications. Using this information, you can create content that will appeal to them.
When you open the Page Likes option in the Insights report, you can see data that will come in handy while creating content for your target audience. For instance, within an ad campaign, you can create different ads which target the segments of your audience based on the pages that they like or follow. If you are aware of the kind of pages they like and what those pages offer, you can create ads that will appeal to your audience.
Check all the information displayed under various tabs apart from Demographics and Page Likes to learn more about your target audience. For instance, you can discover data related to the users’ location, level of engagement on Facebook, household income, and purchases. You can also use this to analyze your custom audience and their specific interests. For instance, if the users who like your page also like another page on Facebook and you wish to learn more about the particular page, then you can ask Audience Insights to provide you the data of that page by including it in your interests option.
Another tool in the Plan section is the Creative Hub. You can use this to create mockups of your ad and share it with others to get their feedback or any other ideas.
Frequently Used
As the name suggests, this section shows the four most frequently used tools. Think of it as a quick action LaunchPad. If you don’t see a specific tool you want to use like the Audience Insights, then you must click on the “All Tools” option, and you will be able to see a list of all the tools available.
Create and Manage
In this section, you will find the tools you need for creating and managing ad campaigns on Facebook. The Business Manager tool will come in handy if you have an advertising team or are using more than one page. If you sign up for “Business Manager” then it lends structure as well as organization to your Ads Manager account. You cannot access this tool without signing up for it. The Ads Manager tool will help run the ad campaigns and also analyze the data from those campaigns.
You can use Facebook Pixel and download the customized reports from it for further analysis.
The Power Editor is a brilliant advertising tool that helps you create ad campaigns. When creating ads, this tool offers different advanced features and options like running an ad on a schedule set according to the time zones, controlling the placement of the ad, optimizing the ads to increase engagement rate or impressions, bulk uploading, and running unpublished posts.
The Page Posts tool helps you view all the posts on your page and the way the users are interacting with the content you post. Different options like Scheduled Posts, Ads Posts, and Published Posts are available in this tool. You can also view data about the reach of
your post, the total clicks or engagement generated per post, the number of users who took action, and the date of publishing. If you want to direct the traffic to your app (provided you have one) to increase the downloads of the app, you can use the App Ads Helper.
Another interesting feature in the “Create & Manage” section is the Automated Rules. Use this option to establish certain rules for your ad campaigns. It also helps you automate alerts or perform a specific action when the rules you set are met. For instance, you can set the rule to automatically stop an ad if its CPC, or cost per conversion, exceeds $5. If according to the tool’s estimates, the CPC of your ad increases beyond $5, then the ad will stop being published until you review it.
By doing this, you can forego the need to constantly check your daily ad budgets. While creating rules, you have different parameters to adjust like the application of the rule you set, the way you want to receive notifications, the automatic action to be taken when the rule is met, and the frequency of the application of the rule, and the different conditions to be met.
Measure and Report
If you want to analyze how your ad campaign is doing, then you need to access the Measure & Report section of the Ads Manager. You can access various tools in this section like Ads Reporting, Custom Conversions, and Analytics. The Ads Reporting tool helps generate a report for an ad you are running. If you want to analyze any previous ads, you can set the date or the time frame within which the ads were run.
By analyzing the ads you run, you can create better ads in the future. If you want to compare various campaigns and analyze the different metrics of key performance, then this tool comes in handy.
For instance, if the key performance metric you want to analyze the ads on is the click-through rate or the cost per conversion, you can use this tool. Facebook Pixel automatically tracks certain key metrics related to the actions different users take on your website like viewing the content. Having a custom Facebook Pixel conversion will help you track specific actions (you can define this action) the users take.
The Custom Conversions tool, as the name suggests, helps create custom conversions, and you can also view all the custom conversions you created in the past. Custom Conversions enables marketers to track as well as to optimize for conversions without having to add anything extra to the Facebook Pixel code on the site.
You can also check when you received the pixel data and the custom conversions that are active now. You can include 40 custom conversions per ad account. To create a new custom conversion for tracking the activity on your website, you must click on the “Create Custom Conversion” option and fill in the necessary information in the popup menu. While doing this, you need to include a URL in the rule for tracking the activity. Once you create the custom conversion, you can generate a custom conversion ad and then select the custom conversions you wish to track for determining the success of the ad.
For instance, if the users who register themselves on your website are directed to a Thank You page, then place the Thank You page’s URL in the Rule tab. This will ensure that whenever a user registers themselves and is directed to the Thank You page, the pixel records the action and notifies Facebook about the genuine conversion. After you create a custom conversion, refresh the page to enable the custom conversion.
The Analytics tool will enable you to analyze the data generated from your page and Facebook Pixel. As you create ads and work with the pixel, Analytics is a rather helpful tool that will optimize your marketing efforts on Facebook.
Assets
Another option in the main menu of the Ads Manager is Assets. This option gives you quick and easy access to all the important assets you used for creating your ads, including the images you used, data from the Facebook Pixel and your target audience, and more. The different tools available in this section are Audience, Pixels, and Offline Events.
The Audience tool allows you to create a custom audience while designing the ad. This tool also comes in handy while establishing your target audience for any future ads. If you want, you can save an audience, and you can access this while creating other ads too. You can create three types of audiences according to Facebook, and they are a custom audience, lookalike audience, and saved audience.
Custom audience refers to the kind of audience you are targeting according to certain parameters of your choice. A lookalike audience refers to an audience who shares similarities with your custom audience. Once you use a specific audience for creating an ad, you can save that specific audience for future reference.
According to your ad campaign objective, you can select a specific type of audience. For instance, according to the user’s engagement on your website, Facebook page, or app, you can create a custom audience. Once you select the kind of custom audience, Facebook will guide you through all the options available. For instance, if you want to create your custom audience according to their Facebook engagement, you can select the different types of engagement you want to consider.
You can target audiences according to different parameters like those who viewed your videos, the ones who engaged with your page, or those who clicked on an ad. Once you set an engagement option, you need to select the specific interactions you wish to target. This means you can narrow down the options for your custom audience by setting specific ways in which you can define the audience you wish to target like interactions related to your page.
The custom audience option allows you to target all those users with whom you have had some interaction in the past whereas the lookalike audience option allows you to find other users who share attributes similar to the ones of your existing audience.
Once you select the lookalike audience option, click on the Source option to guide Facebook about the specific attributes you are looking for in users. After you do this, you must define two parameters, and they are the location of the audience and the audience size.
The Images option allows you to see the images you used in a recent ad or anything you might have picked up from other posts. The list of images displayed is sorted according to their recent use. The pixel option allows you to insert a Facebook Pixel or see the data obtained from any pixels you used in the past. You can use the pixel data to create better ads. For instance, if you notice that a specific post obtained a lot of views, then you can create an ad targeting those users who read the post and provide them a content upgrade if they provide their email address. It is a simple means of increasing your email list.
An Offline Event is a tool which helps you track all the activity that takes place outside Facebook. For instance, if someone who saw your ad on Facebook visits your physical store to make a purchase, this information will be included in this tool. If you want to create an offline event, you must input the customer data and compare it against all those who viewed your online ad.
The Settings tool is where all your basic account information is stored like payment information, email address, and any other particulars related to your account.
Chapter Eight: Setting up Facebook Ad Campaign
Setting up a Facebook Ad
Now that you understand the tools to use when creating a Facebook ad, it’s time to examine how to actually create the ad.
Step one: Setting goals
Before you can start churning out ads, there is one step you cannot afford to skip: determining the goals for your Facebook ads.
Why do you want to advertise? What do you want the ads to achieve?
By establishing a couple of goals before creating your ads, you give yourself a yardstick for measuring your success. For instance, if you want to increase the number of downloads for an application you created by marketing it on Facebook via ads, then your goal can be something as simple as achieving 100 downloads within four weeks.
Here are some examples of potential goals you can set for yourself:
Increasing the traffic to your website via Facebook ads
Increasing your reach
Improving the engagement
rate of your Facebook page
Increasing awareness about your brand
Increasing purchases of a certain product
Step two: Facebook Ads Manager
Any ad campaign you want to run on Facebook must be supported by Facebook Ads Manager. You can access it from your Facebook account by selecting the “Manage Ads” option from the drop-down menu. Once you enter the Ads Manager, you can go through the different tools discussed in the previous section. To start creating your ad, you need to click on the green button located on the top right-hand corner of your Ads Manager page.
Step three: Selecting your objective
Now that you have opened the Ads Manager and are ready to create a Facebook ad, you must establish your marketing objective. You will find 15 options displayed on the pop-up window on your screen. The three main categories you need to set marketing objectives for are awareness, conversion, and consideration. Go through the different options available and select those that are in sync with the marketing goals you established in the first step.
The different objectives available under the category of “Awareness” are increasing your reach, increasing brand awareness, reaching those users near your business, promoting your page, and boosting your posts. If your marketing budget is rather limited, then the best way to go about marketing is by focusing on creating ads for awareness.
The different objectives available under the category of “Consideration” are collecting leads, getting video views, increasing the number of downloads of your app, increasing the attendance for any event, and directing the traffic to a landing page.