If you’re using Facebook ads, the Facebook pixel is a huge asset.
You should be using this key tool to realize the full potential of your social ad budget. With a little learning under your belt, you can use the pixel to gain major advantages for your results.
Facebook Pixel refers to code on a website that measures an advertising campaign’s effectiveness by interpreting the actions visitors take on the website.
In other words, the Facebook Pixel is an analytics tool that helps you track the conversion rate generated from Facebook ads and builds the target audience for future ads. Businesses can use it to ensure that their ads go to the right people.
It sounds a little weird, right? We train horses, dogs, sometimes dragons…
But a snippet of code is a whole other animal.
Training your pixel means that you don’t run a campaign with the purpose of getting a huge profit but rather to find the right audience. When you find the right audience, conversions should naturally follow.
The only conversion that you can optimize for without a pixel is link clicks. On the other hand, a pixel makes it possible for you to optimize a variety of conversion types in close alignment with the goals and aims of the business.
The Facebook pixel allows you to gain insight into how people interact with your website and allows you to track customers across the various devices. To put it simply, it can track whether the customers saw your ads on mobile and turned to the desktop before making a purchase, or the other way around.
It’s the real brains of your Facebook advertising operation.
To sum up, training your pixel is essential because it creates a customized audience that will most likely convert and turn into a lead by learning about your audience.
This brings us to the next point.
The Facebook ads delivery system uses machine learning to optimize for results. The delivery system collects more insights about the right target audience each time one of your Facebook ads is displayed (or as ad pros say, “served”).
You’ll know that your ad is in the learning phase because the Delivery column in your ads manager will indicate the ad set is “Learning.”
The learning phase is a critical time for Facebook’s machine learning to kick in and collect helpful information that will help you optimize your campaign. Thanks to the learning phase, you can get information that can take your ads from running on your assumptions to running on a data-backed hypothesis.
The learning phase is typically defined by 50 conversions that need to occur per ad set within one week’s time. Sometimes this number might be more, sometimes less, depending on your particular niche. We like to say 50 is a good rule of thumb, but not a magic number.
Now this part is important. It might go against your instincts to tweak and optimize, but during the learning phase you should avoid changing any of the following:
You can’t touch these!
Because if you do, Facebook will start the whoooole thing over again. Basically, by trying to tweak with variables during the learning phase you’re not allowing Facebook the chance to properly learn.
It would be like introducing a new topic in math class every day and expecting a student to master the information on the fly. Not fair.