What the Hell is Facebook Pixel? – DSP 192

Welcome back to Social Media Week!

A Pixel is a tool used when creating an ad account that allows you to create target audiences for your ads. How you use it and what to use it on are more complicated answers though.

Fortunately, Graham and Ashkahn have Derek to use as a resource and they have him break down how best to utilize target audiences and how to get the best bang for your buck.

Get Familiar with the Facebook Pixel

Be sure to meet up with Derek at the Marketing Forum this year at The Float Conference Friday Activities. 

If you want to see his handiwork in action,

check out Float Tank Solutions on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

Or check out Float On on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. 

Listen to Just the Audio

Transcription of this episode… (in case you prefer reading)

Graham: Hey, everyone.

Ashkahn: Welcome to Daily Solutions.

Graham: I’m Graham.

Ashkahn: And I’m Ashkahn.

Graham: And we have a guest. I was waiting for him to speak up. We have a guest here today, he’s been with us for the last few days. This is the man behind the man, he runs our social media for Float On-

Derek: I am Daily Solutions.

Graham: This is Derek Wyatt over here.

Ashkahn: So we’ve had a handful of social media questions come in over time and we bundled them all together to do a little social media week here. I would recommend you listen to the previous episodes, probably in order, leading up to this.

Graham: Starting from episode one of this podcast and just kind of going through the present.

Ashkahn: Yeah, so we’ll see you in like two weeks by the time you can listen to all those.

Derek: Don’t forget episode double zero.

Ashkahn: But they do build on each other a little bit. You could listen to just this one first if you really wanted to, but it’s not our advice. And you’re here to listen to our advice so, you should listen to that too.

Graham: And today’s question for you is: “what the hell is a Facebook Pixel?” That’s it, that’s the entirety of the question.

Derek: Yeah I have that question sometimes too. A Facebook Pixel is one of those things that make you Big Brother. What it does-

Graham: So if that makes you uncomfortable-

Derek: When you have the business manager and you have an ad account, you can set up a Facebook Pixel which will allow you to create custom audiences. So what you do with this Pixel, it’s a snippet of code that you’ll put into the header of your website. It happens to be, somebody visits your website, their behaviors on your website are tracked. Whether they’re browsing from page to page or they hit the Helm even and check out through the Helm, the Facebook Pixel follows them all the way through.

What that does for you, is it can give you a couple of advantages. One, it makes advertising a little bit more relevant when, say, you’re going to do a Facebook ad and you just want to target people who’ve already been to your website. They’re already warmed-up traffic. Those people have an understanding of what floating is, hopefully, because they’ve been to your website. With that, you can actually get to the meat and potatoes of an ad and actually get closer to a sale. Sometimes with ads, you want to warm people up to the idea of floating. With the Pixel, it gives you the ability to get straight to a sale.

Ashkahn: I think it’s easy to forget on social media sometimes. There’s a lot of people that don’t think about the end purpose of this is to get more people floating in your float center. You can make posts and you see all the numbers and stuff like that. At the end of the day what you’re hoping to do is have your social media presence lead to people buying floats in your float center, and allowing that further reach of reporting to see if things like that are working or not is kind of the benefit of installing something like that on your website.

Derek: So with that Facebook Pixel, Facebook now knows, “Okay, this browser also is linked to this Facebook profile.” They know how to match these people up and then they know everything about you, which is creepy but as a marketer is kind of an advantage point in my favor. I can create what they call lookalike audiences now. That means the people who have visited the website, they all fit in this larger bucket, and I’m going to find people that have similar interests to them.

Now you’ve narrowed your audience and you can actually build people who kind of look like them, and advertise to those people. So they might also be closer to understanding and or floating themselves than somebody who has never even heard of floating or walked by your center or visited your website.

Graham: So let’s go to broad overview of what we’re talking about here. Let me try to rephrase this to see if I can summarize it really quickly. It sounds like what we’re getting at is there’s two reasons you have Pixel on your website and the Helm and booking and everything like that. One is just getting information about people’s behavior so you can even know if your ads are leading to purchases, leading people through website, stuff like that.

Derek: It’s great at tracking conversions, for sure.

Graham: And the second reason is to use the Pixel to actually find out more about your own audience and be able to hit them with ads. Or, like you said, be able to hit lookalikes to that audience with ads, the kind of people who would become your audience. So it’s both good for data collection so you can do more outreach, and it’s good for monitoring behavior. Would you say that’s kinda the two big things that you use Pixel for?

Derek: That’s fair.

Graham: Or is there more besides those two things, too?

Derek: I would say that’s a fair assumption.

Graham: Okay, great.

Ashkahn: And then what about other platforms? Do other platforms have these kind of snippets of code that you can use for tracking behavior past their platform?

Derek: So you can actually, I believe, have a LinkedIn Pixel which does a very similar thing if you’re doing business to business advertising. There’s not an Instagram Pixel but guess what, Facebook owns Instagram so you will be shown ads based on your website visitor status on Instagram. Twitter doesn’t have an advertising Pixel, to my understanding. I’ve only done like $50 of free Twitter ads and I didn’t get so sophisticated in that to understand if they had a Pixel. I’m assuming they should. It’s a great way for the advertiser to find the people who actually are closer to buying.

Graham: I’d say the next closest thing, or the other big thing that I hear about-

Derek: Google Analytics.

Graham: Yeah, Google Analytics. Which is just kind of monitoring across your booking platform and your website to see who’s buying things and at least roughly you can track who came from different social media platforms. At least immediately.

The nice thing about the Pixel is, it’ll stay out there and you can actually see someone who came to your website after clicking an ad but didn’t purchase something for 20 days. You can still track that, as opposed to if you’re just using Google Analytics with your social media you wouldn’t get that refined a view.

Ashkahn: Yeah Google Analytics seems to help a lot with seeing how people interact inside of your website. It does a pretty good job saying most people go from this page to that page, or here’s how much this has happened. Stuff like that is helpful with Google Analytics. I don’t know. There’s not too much relevant to running a float center I think, on your website outside of getting people to a few key pages like buying floats or scheduling appointments and things like that.

Graham: Again, still great for conversions. So if you’re running Google ads, it’ll do good things with referrers too. Same thing with the Facebook Pixel. Where did they enter your page from? What’s sending them over here is also a nice thing about them.

Ashkahn: Yeah, sometimes you can notice that we’ve had a specific page on our float conference page get linked to from a news article, and all of a sudden for a short period of time this one random side page of our website was getting way more traffic than our homepage. I was like, “what is going on?” And then I found that some article got written and it linked specifically to that page. There is some nice insights you can find from stuff like that.

Derek: So there’s a benefit to Facebook Pixel, I know you’re talking about Google Analytics and Google traffic and monitoring sources. But let’s say you do get a huge influx of traffic, let’s say you appeared on the news in one of those special interest segments and people got curious and visited your website. They got introduced to floating through that news piece and now they’re gonna see ads for floating and the benefits of floating, not just, “Hey this is floating,” but really pull in why you should float. It’s gonna, again, build upon the piece that happened months ago, weeks ago, earlier that morning. So you can actually have some advantages that you wouldn’t have if you didn’t have that Pixel.

If you didn’t have that Pixel, the only advertising you can really do on Facebook is just demographic and geographic targeted audiences.

Graham: So let’s talk a little bit about retargeting specifically, using your list from the website, speak a little bit about that. I’ll just let you summarize. Go!

Derek: We’ve basically been talking a little bit about retargeting, there’s some other elements to retargeting you can do.

Let’s say your email list. Everybody should be growing your email list. Even though this is social media week, email is kind of a cousin to social media. You should be building an email list, and you can upload that email list to Facebook and create a custom audience and also create lookalike audiences. Facebook will then take those emails, pair it to people who’ve already registered and created Facebook accounts with those emails, and now you have an audience that you can retarget to.

With retargeting, basically, if they are in your ecosystem of fandom, you can then take that and a message will then be displayed in front of them.

Graham: And so, I guess just to try to explain this myself or put it in Graham terms aka laymen terms, it’s just telling Facebook, “I already have this audience.” If you have the emails that match this email address, or people have gone to my website and they’re now on Facebook, only show ads to those people. Kind of like “here’s my defined audience, target these people.” That’s kind of what retargeting in.

I usually give the example too of going to Tony Robbins site and then immediately just go anywhere else on the internet and you will see Tony Robbins pop up everywhere. Or if you’ve ever gone to a mattress site, just shopping for anything online, and then you just see that thing pop up in your Facebook ads on the side or in your Google ads when you do a search. Correct me if I’m wrong, but what’s happening right there is someone else is retargeting you. They’re saying, “Hey, you visited this site, you’re looking at a mattress or Tony Robbins or whatever, we’re going to show you more of that wherever you go.”

Derek: And this is the fine line where what we like to encounter on the internet and what actually is effective marketing get blurry. You’re gonna become the dark side here in a second because everybody hates to be followed across the internet. Everybody hates when you go to Tony Robbins website and you get shown a banner ad and then a video ad and then an interstitial ad, go look that one up. You’re like “can I ever escape this?”

There’s those rules of seven that people make up because it’s a nice, lucky number of like, “You need to be shown something seven times before you buy.” I think if those ads can vary and those ads could actually build upon the website and actually be of quality, those ads aren’t such a bad thing. Those ads can actually help people get closer to purchasing a float. We need bodies in tanks, paying ones, to keep the bills paid.

Graham: Yeah, I guess if you do get that inclination that you’re going over to the dark side of advertising or something like that, keep in mind you could be showing ads to totally random people regardless of their interest in floating. You’re almost more likely to reach an audience that cares about it much less, and it’s much less relevant for. So if you’re talking about getting people’s attention and time and interrupting them, at least saying, “Hey, I know this person already expressed some interest in floating.”

Derek: Curiosity.

Graham: You’re doing less harm in my mind, as far as advertising goes. Even though it’s creepier. Reduced harm.

Ashkahn: I mean you can push it. Nestle has done in-utero marketing before.

Derek: Yeah?

Ashkahn: Yeah, like marketed to unborn babies.

Derek: Interesting.

Ashkahn: You can look that one up also if you want to dive deep into something.

Graham: I call them early floaters.

Derek: Sometimes marketing knows more about you than you do. There’s a whole Target card scandal. Basically Target, through your Target card buying patterns, knew there was a pregnancy in the household and started sending coupons for diapers and stuff and the dad gets really pissed off and goes, “My daughter’s 16 and how dare you send-?” And then all of a sudden she has to come forward with the information that yeah, she is-

Ashkahn: Basically Target knew someone was pregnant before her own father did is the moral …

I’m just gonna say the Nestle story real fast because it’s very creepy. This was in, I forget where it was, I think they went to some actual maternity hospitals in parts of Africa. They created this candy, like coffee-flavored hard candy that they put out for free in baskets in these maternity clinics because they had done a study and found that what a pregnant mother eats, those kind of tastes can actually get transferred and become appealing tastes for the taste buds of their children. So they put those candies into these maternity clinics and then about seven or eight years later they released a candy in those same areas with that same flavor profile, and it became widely popular among a group of people that were in utero when they were putting that candy out.

Derek: So marketing with a Pixel is not so bad after all.

Ashkahn: Yeah if the perspective of how crazy this can get makes you feel better about tracking people through the internet, there you go. It can be helpful.

Graham: We’re monsters.

Derek: I was just rethinking my whole life decision now as a marketer!

Graham: Okay, what else about the Pixel do we want to impart on our lovely listeners here?

Derek: Get it on your website, get help if you don’t know how to get it on your website. It should be in the header. The header is native to every page on your site, and-

Graham: Put it on your booking software. I think it’s easy on a few of them. I know some don’t support it. It’s easy on Helm, it’s just copy/paste. That’s really what it should be for any third party platform you’re putting it on. There should be a field somewhere that’s like, “What’s your Pixel code? Paste it here.” That’s it, then it’s integrated. It should be that easy.

Derek: We can get into the weeds of what to know about it, but the greatest thing out there is Google. There’s so many great resources of little tricks you can pick up in Facebook advertising that involve the Pixel, like I mentioned: lookalike audiences. You can set up events. You can set up an audience where website visitors who purchased in the past 30 days, and then you can maybe try to bring people back in for their second or third float through ads instead of through discounting.

Graham: Cool. Alright, I feel good.

Ashkahn: I feel good too.

Graham: I feel great.

Ashkahn: I feel wonderful.

Graham: I probably feel better than you do. Let’s just leave it at that.

Derek: I feel very slimy.

Ashkahn: Alright, if you guys have some more questions for us you can send them over to floattanksolutions.com/podcast and we will be here tomorrow again with Mr. Derek W. W. Answering more social media questions.

Graham: Or D-Double-Dub, as we’ve taken to calling him in the studio.

Ashkahn: The double-dub.

Derek: D-Dub.

Ashkahn: Alright, thanks everyone.

Graham: That’s it, see yeah!

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