Tag: Facebook Pixel
How to Create a Facebook Sales Funnel for Your Website
With the insane level of targeting and reporting that advertisers can access on Facebook, it would be shortsighted to not take advantage of everything available. I’m going to give a quick breakdown of an easy and effective way to create a Sales Funnel from your Facebook ad campaigns, so you can track how users are interacting with your site, what’s drawing them in and what’s driving them to convert.
We’re going to utilize the Facebook pixel and the various Standard Events in the code to measure people coming through the funnel all the way to shopping cart abandonment and ultimately a purchase.
So the 10 Standard Events in the Facebook Pixel allow us to identify and tag users based on what pages they’re visiting, how they’re using the site, as well as if they are bouncing out at a certain point or (hopefully) making a purchase on your site. These Standard Events are listed below:
Be sure to include the Standard Event line of code in your pixel for the corresponding landing page. If you want to double check or have any questions on how to edit and place the code you can refer to the Facebook Pixel Implementation Guide. The Facebook Pixel Helper is also a great Chrome extension that helps identify if your pixels are live and placed correctly on a page. Additional Pixel Troubleshooting from the Facebook developers.
- View Content: This is most useful if there is a specific page on your site that you identify as a key page view such as the product page, the additional info page, a landing page with more details that could lead to a purchase etc.
- Search: This will help identify if users are getting to your site and performing searches in your search bar. If they are, but you’re still not seeing sales you may need to revisit your targeting as users may not be finding the relevant content/product that they thought they would.
- Add to Cart: Key step to track how many people are starting the checkout process vs finishing an order. Drop offs are useful for measuring shopping cart abandonment and retargeting, but can also point out red flags in user experience if people are not converting after adding to cart.
- Add to Wish List: A great way to track extremely interested users who maybe weren’t ready to pull the trigger yet.
- Initiate Checkout: The strongest indicator of purchase intent and one of the main steps to measure the path to purchase.
- Add Payment Info: Again measuring drop offs here will be key.
- Purchase: The name of the game; tracking conversions and using that data to optimize your ads further. You can also identify the value of a sale if you have different Thank You pages for different products
- Lead: This is useful if you are having users fill out a form, redeem a free trial etc. rather than making a purchase.
- Complete Registration: Useful for identifying users that sign up for a service or a subscription through a registration form.
- Other: Use this to track any other key actions on your website that aren’t listed above.
Using these Standard Events as qualifiers, what you want to do is place the corresponding code on each page all the way from a Page View down to a Conversion. So you would have the standard pixel on the landing page, Add to Cart on the first step in the cart page, Initiate Checkout page gets its own pixel code, same for Add Payment Info and Purchase. Now if you have other relevant pages on the site then you’ll want to add the additional codes to those such as View Content for a key page view and the like.
In the end this will help you identify how many people came into the funnel at the top, how many came out the bottom with a purchase and exactly how many dropped off and at what part of the process so you can re-engage or tweak your campaigns.
Use the Amount of Time a User Spends on Your Site to Create a Custom Facebook Audience!
Facebook is now offering a brand new method of creating a Custom Audience and it should excite you if you’re using landing page content to generate leads. Time Spent on Your Website is the newest method Facebook has unveiled to craft a Custom Audience! This could be huge for businesses that are driving customers to a specific landing page to learn/read/view more.
*Note, that this option isn’t available to all advertisers yet as Facebook usually slowly rolls new features out before they’re widely available.
Businesses can drive users to their website and flag them for remarketing, but what good is one giant audience if it doesn’t take into account how engaged that customer actually was? Of course everyone knows this, but if your landing page is educational content that a customer may read/watch and they don’t make any additional actions on your website then you’re kind of up the creek when it comes to segmentation.
Using this new Custom Audience segmentation though you can easily identify who actually spent the most time on your website reading/watching your content. Don’t waste any time, money or effort reengaging with users on Facebook who hit your page and bounced out or maybe stayed for a few seconds and decided they weren’t interested. Now you can actually identify the top percentiles of users based on Time Spent on Website, similar to how you can already do that with Facebook Video and percentage of a video viewed.
It opens doors for people producing one sheeters, white pages or any other tactic of capturing customers’ attention on a specific landing page to learn more. People may be interested, but not necessarily engaged. So identify who has devoted the most time to the content you produced and reengage. This is just the latest example of how you can narrow the funnel and sell on social.
Facebook Bidding Strategies: Engagement vs CPM vs CPC
As Facebook continues to develop new ad types, selecting the right bidding strategy for each becomes even more critical. This slight adjustment in bidding strategy, whether bidding for Engagement, CPM, CPC etc. will have a huge impact on ad performance. So instead of defaulting to running a Promoted Post simply because it reaches a large number of people, it’s important to identify what the goals of an ad campaign are and act accordingly.
A lot of times people will run Promoted Posts for sale offers and simply bid on Post Engagement (it’s the default option), which will optimize ad delivery for people most likely to engage with the post. The only problem is that this doesn’t necessarily correlate with sales as it will optimize to display ads to users most likely to comment, like, share etc. Facebook reps describe these as “clicky” users, who are more likely to comment, like or share, but not necessarily hit your website and make a purchase.
Below are a few quick tips for your Facebook ad campaigns, depending on the goal of the ad:
Goal: Reach a large number of users and drive Impressions
Ad Type: Promoted Post
Bid Strategy: CPM or Daily Unique Reach/Reach & Frequency (if you’re concerned with delivery/frequency) to blast the ad out
Goal: Clicks to a Website
Ad Type: Website Clicks
Bid Strategy: CPC optimized for Link Clicks
*Note: If the audience size isn’t that large you can bid on CPC and optimize for Impressions, but Link Clicks will be the most effective way of driving results if applicable.
”Engagement doesn’t necessarily correlate to sales anymore.”
- As with most things, take this with a grain of salt, but the underlying point here is that bidding on Post Engagement may not be the most effective way to drive sales. Think of it this way, if bidding on engagement you’re telling Facebook to bid on users most likely to like, comment and share where in the end what you ultimately want is people to go to the website and convert/make a purchase instead. So a Website Clicks campaign makes more sense for specific sales/offers.
Using the Best Bid Strategy w/ Each Ad Objective - A Promoted Post bidding on Post Engagement would be more effective bidding for CPM if your goal is brand awareness/getting the ad in front of as many people as possible, not necessarily bidding for users who will engage on the post itself.
- Promoted posts probably should not be used if the campaign goal is to get people to click through to the website, unless you are altering the bid strategy on that campaign to CPC (specifically Link Clicks)
- “90% of offline sales come from people who don’t interact with the ads (likes, comments etc.)”
- *Note: If you’re still using the old Facebook conversion tracking code, the best practice is to place the new Facebook pixel on the client website and give it 30 days to build data before switching from the old code to the new pixel.
Reporting Facebook Conversions (Accurately)
Confused by your conversion data on Facebook? Seeing data trickle in or maybe conversions are missing from your insights? Facebook reports all conversions as a “Conversion,” whether it’s a View Through Conversion or a Direct Conversion; Facebook does not differentiate like Google does. So that’s why it’s important to set the “Attribution Window” appropriately and leave yourself the right amount of time if trying to match up conversions with Google Analytics or a client’s CRM data.
How Facebook Defines Conversions:
Facebook bundles everything into the one “Conversion” metric. The default attribution model is this:
– User Viewed Ad and Converted Within 1 Day
– User Clicked Ad and Converted Within 28 Days
To adjust this, go to your Ads Manager, click on “Columns” and select “Customize Columns.”
In the bottom right hand side of this menu you will see what the Attribution Window is currently set to with the option to adjust it.
Set your Attribution Window appropriately, give the campaigns the same amount of time to sync up with your Analytics or client back-end system and your reporting headaches should be gone!
Understanding the Facebook Pixel
The Facebook Pixel has helped bridge the gap in attribution for any business running certain ad types on Facebook. Taking advantage of the Pixel will allow you to track conversions, create remarketing campaigns and track how various audiences are interacting with your site. It’s important to install the Facebook Pixel sooner than later as the old Facebook conversion tracking codes will be getting deactivated by Facebook in the second half of 2016 so it’s necessary to have all clients over to the new Facebook pixel by the summer of 2016.
The Basics
- The “Standard Objectives” that can be set in the pixel (Lead, Complete Registration etc.) are the 9 most requested actions.
- Pixel improves cross-device tracking based on the user’s Facebook identity across desktop and mobile
- 99% of people who saw a Facebook ad and purchased in-store never clicked on an ad at all.
Difference in Conversion Tracking Options
- Standard Events: These are best when you want to pass back data (which action was performed on the site), when utilizing dynamic product ads and dynamic values for products, and ideal when access to the website’s back-end code is available.
- Standard Events tracking is a stronger method of tracking conversions than Custom Conversion, so use this before Custom Conversions when possible.
- In Page Event Tracking — Used when a person submits a form but a new page URL doesn’t load. “Standard events are going to be the best way to track that event if there is no specific URL you can use to create a rule.”
- Standard Events tracking is a stronger method of tracking conversions than Custom Conversion, so use this before Custom Conversions when possible.
- Custom Conversions: The best advantage of Custom Conversions are that they don’t need to have additional code added to the client’s website (other than the standard Facebook pixel), and allows for tracking of up to 20 separate conversions. This is great for when access to the client’s website back-end is unavailable. Custom Conversions can also be used to track users through the conversion funnel using the specific landing page URLs.
- For example if you have your Facebook pixel placed on a client’s website and then in the future need to change conversion parameters or add new conversions, this allows you to track this by creating Custom Conversions which use the main Facebook Pixel and track based on the URL or a piece of the URL (i.e. Thank You page) as well as the category (ie. “purchase”). “It is a simple way to define new types of conversions.”
Examples of Uses for the Pixel
- A college website wants to drive leads for people that wanted more info specifically on getting a Master’s Degree. Create a parameter that is a “Content Type” for the Master’s option, so that will say to Facebook this is a specific event (Master’s Degree) and allow Facebook to segment out this info specifically rather than tracking all leads as one conversion.
- Add Standard Event tracking to a specific button on the website, which is great for a form fill or a client that doesn’t have a Thank You page to support conversion tracking. This involves a bit of a workaround, which is broken down in the Facebook Developers How To.
How to Make Sure the Facebook Pixel is Live
- To double check if a Facebook Pixel is working, there is a tool called the Facebook Pixel Helper that is a Google Chrome widget, which can be used to check to see if there are any pixels on a specific page and if it is working. This is a widget I use all the time to check in on code installations quickly and easily, definitely recommend it.
Cross Device Conversions
- A great experiment to run is to explore running mobile specific campaigns aimed at getting people to your website/driving brand awareness and running desktop specific campaigns aimed at driving people to pages for adding payment info and completing conversions.
- Go into cross-device reports to see how much traffic and how many conversions are coming from which devices and go from there.
Taking Advantage of the Purchase Funnel (when available)
- Move Optimization Event Up the Funnel — Rather than giving Facebook, say 200 pieces of data from final conversions to optimize a campaign, try moving the Optimization Event up to the initial checkout page where Facebook will now have, say 2,000 pieces of data to optimize for.
Segment Audiences Based on Site Usage
- Segment Audiences based on how users interact with a website using 2 main options:
- How Interested Are They and How Long Ago Did They Visit?
- Someone who visited the website 1 day ago and did a search but did not add anything to their cart; try setting up a basic remarketing campaign, but if that audience doesn’t convert in another week or so they may not be worth it.
- Someone who visited the website 7 days ago and made a high value purchase; create a Lookalike Audience of these users while also remarketing with additional complimentary products/items.
- Someone who visited 30 days ago and is a member but has not returned, hit them with a re-engagement message (specific offer, promotion etc.), but they may be more likely to lapse as a customer.
- How Interested Are They and How Long Ago Did They Visit?
Graphics and stats courtesy of Facebook. For a deeper dive, you can watch the Facebook Pixel Webinar here.
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