If you’ve surfed the internet or have done any form of online advertising, you’ve probably come across the term pixel. But what is it and why are they essential for advertising? Specifically why are thy great for advertising on social media?
A pixel, or can be referred to as a tag, is a code placed within your website’s code that allows you to measure the effectiveness of your advertising. It’s unnoticeable to your visitors and won’t affect the websites performance. When a potential customer visits your site and takes an action, the pixel “fires” and collects data from the user’s behaviour and reports the action. You then can note when they have taken an action and you can reach them again through your future ads also known as re-targeting.
The one we love the most at Disruptive is the Facebook pixel, which can be implemented across many different pages of your website. When a potential customer visits a website page, the pixel fires, allowing you to then reach them via Facebook ads.
Why should I use pixels in my advertising?
Because pixels allow us to reach the right people—re-market to people who have visited a specific page of your site or who have taken a certain action on your site and find new customers similar to your target customer.
Pixels allow us to measure performance of ads and your website conversions. We can view analytics and reports on media campaign measurement, insights about the performance of advertising efforts, website performance, conversions, and how well an advert has preformed based on what happened as a direct result. Most importantly we can set up bidding to target people who are more likely to convert.
Essentially they drive more conversions. Let me say that again CONVERSIONS.
At Disruptive we are mostly interested in goals and achieving ROAS which stands for "Return on Advertising Spend" whilst metrics like engagement, followers and likes are useful its CONVERSIONS that we care about. What is the ROI and how much return on advertising spend did I make?
Pixels deliver information or behaviours to a server. Essentially they collect the data as to how your traffic behaves on your website and allows you to get really granular in how you can target that behaviour for conversions. Here is a few examples:
Use re-targeting
Re-targeting pixel data and dynamic ads allow you to show targeted ads to people who have already visited your site. You can choose to get really granular here. For example, you can show people an ad for the exact product that they abandoned in a shopping cart or added to a wish list on your website.
Create lookalike audiences
Use targeting data to help you build a lookalike audience of people who have similar likes, interests, and demographics to people who are already interacting with your website. This can help expand your potential customer base.
Optimise ads for conversions
You can use tracking pixel data to optimise your ads for specific conversion events on your website. Without a pixel, the only conversion you can optimise for is link clicks. With the pixel, you can optimise for conversions that align more closely with business goals, like purchases and sign-ups.
Optimise ads for value
The pixel collects data on who buys from your site and how much they spend, it can help optimise your ad audience based on value. That means it will automatically show your ads to the people who are most likely to make high-value purchases.
Disruptive Unicorns is an award winning Chartered Marketing Firm developing transparent ROAS campaigns. If you would like to talk to us about how you can develop the right campaigns for conversions you can book a consultation with us! Or reach out at anytime to requests@disruptiveunicorns.com
