When I was about eight years-old, an important man came into my life. His name was Viktor, and he was the new ballet teacher at my neighborhood dance studio.
Born and bred in the Ukraine, Viktor was a hard-ass. He worked my little ballerina-self to the bone. He whipped my dance skills into incredible shape, fixing my bad habits and helping me form new ones that strengthened me as a dancer. Viktor was a huge reason I was a (mostly) kickass ballerina.
But I can’t emphasize enough how much I hated him sometimes. I didn’t like (and don’t like now) such intense criticism, even though learning from it is so important, blah blah blah. I also have an aversion to hard work, which is pretty crucial for both the ballet and entrepreneurial worlds. I vaguely recall a screaming match in the middle of the studio, my dance classmates inching away from me as I told Viktor to fuck off. Colorful language for a teenager, but not altogether unexpected, right?
There’s good news that’s also bad news: I’m YOUR Viktor when it comes to Facebook ads. You’re probably going to hate me for it from time to time, but basically I won’t rest until you’ve got that foundation in place.
Today that means two pieces of code you need in place right this bloody moment.
Let’s take a look at each one:
1. Your remarketing pixel (also known as WCA pixel, retargeting pixel, ads-that-stalk-you pixel, etc.).
I don’t care if you’re running ads or not – you NEED to get this one your website now. Why? So that when the time comes and you want to show ads to everyone who has visited your sales page in the last month, Facebook already has a collection of those people stored in your advertising account. (You won’t get their actual names, but you will be able to target them with awesome ads that’ll help you make more sales. AWWWW YEAH.)
How It’s Done
It’s actually really simple to create and place this pixel – click here for instructions: Create and Place Your Facebook Remarketing Pixel.
Don’t put this on your to-do list; DO IT RIGHT NOW. You can curse at me all you want, but you’ll thank me with chocolates and flowers later when you realize you’ve already got a whole slew of people you can retarget with your ads.
Why You Need to Get It Right
This pixel is the one thing that will allow you to show ads to very specific groups of people. For example, you might show everyone who saw your sales page an ad that directs them to a blog post that addresses objections to your product or service. (More on that strategy here.) But you can’t do that if you accidentally put this pixel on one specific page instead of your entire site. It’s a common mistake; check out the video below to make sure you haven’t done that yourself.
2. Your conversion tracking pixels.
OK, technically you don’t need to have your conversion tracking pixel in place if you’re not running ads. This is the bit of code you put on your “thank you” page that sends Facebook info about who lands there. If I came to your site from a Facebook ad and eventually landed on your thank you page, Facebook knows to count me as a conversion. This helps you identify which of your ads works the best in actually getting people to sign up and/or buy, not just which one has the prettiest photo or the most click-bait-y copy.
How It’s Done
If you’ve got a site on WordPress or you’re using Leadpages for your opt-in landing page, you’re all good. The conversion tracking set-up is easy as pie.
Here comes the smackdown. If you’re using something that doesn’t allow you to set your own thank you page for your opt-in, or doesn’t let you add code to the backend of that thank you page, YOU NEED A NEW WEBSITE.
Yup, I said it.
Wix and Weebly maybe be cheap and/or easy to use, but they will not let you track your conversions. Squarespace may be crazy user-friendly, but that ends when you try to put some code on your thank you page. (Regarding Squarespace, there are a number of people in the Absolute FB Ads Support Group who use it and have managed to add conversion tracking pixels to their thank you pages. They are geniuses in my book, and hopefully they can help you too if you join us.)
Why You Need to Get It Right
This one is simple: if Facebook can’t track your conversions, it can’t optimize your campaigns for more conversions. When you choose Website Conversions as your objective, Facebook’ll show your ads to people who are most likely to take the action you’ve set in your pixel (sign up for something or buy something, for example). So you need to show Facebook that people are converting by putting this pixel in the right place!
Common mistakes are to put the conversion tracking pixel on your landing page, but viewing your landing page is not a conversion, you see? Same with putting it on the page people see after they confirm their email. I know that seems like it would make sense, but trust me when I say that every time I’ve done it, Facebook underreports conversions. You don’t want that, do you?
Frequently Asked Questions About These Pixels:
- Which page should I put my conversion tracking pixel on?
- I put my retargeting pixel on my sales page and on my thank you page – is that right?
- How do I know if my pixel is placed correctly?
- Is it cool if I have more than one pixel on one page?
- Where do I find my retargeting pixel again?
One of the great things about having a Facebook group connected to a digital product is that you get crystal clear on what people are still struggling with. I got these questions pretty often, but my initial reaction was to direct people to specific chapters inside Absolute FB Ads for them to review the instructions.
Guess what? Some people were still confused! Turns out not everything can be perfectly explained in a PDF. And that realization prompted me to act fast.
A few months ago, I created a few videos on the fly to help clarify this whole pixel thing a little better. I’ve laid out most of those explanations in this post, but if you’re still not clear on where exactly your pixels should go and how they may or may not interact with each other, this video is for you:
Mentioned in this video:
Facebook Pixel Helper Chrome Extension
Instructions for Setting Up Your Remarketing Pixel
Instructions for Setting Up Your Conversion Tracking Pixel with WordPress or Leadpages
I’ve called people whose businesses were running on Weebly, Wix, and so on and BEGGED them to let me set them up with a WordPress site, even on my server for FREE just so they wouldn’t be held back on this EXACT issue.
I soon learned that begging to do things for people for free doesn’t exactly pay the bills… but it turned out to be a pretty decent tripwire service for my old web development business once I figured out how to word things properly and stop sounding like such a weirdo.
Sounds like you know better than anyone about the difficulties of getting people to actually pay for the important things in your business! But I’m so glad it worked as a tripwire for you – people need this kind of thing and I’m glad to hear they finally paid you for it. :)
What happens if you have your tracking pixel on all pages as you should, and then you create new pages? Do you have to delete the pixel from all pages, create a new one, and put the new one on all pages?
Hi Martin, the tracking pixel only goes on one page. The remarketing pixel goes in the header of your site so that any time you add new pages, it’s already there. The exception is when you create pages with Leadpages or similar services; there you have to add the retargeting pixel manually to each page.
Setting pixels is actually not that difficult with other sites like SquareSpace and Weebly. You just need to copy and paste the code FB gives you into the custom code containers those partners allow you to define code in. Might be easier on Wordpress, but it’s still very possible with other website builders. I’ve set up way more complicated tracking integrations with SquareSpace than the FB pixels and it still works just fine. The functionality exists — feel free to PM me if you need any help and want to use another tool outside of Wordpress!
I agree, Squarespace especially is super easy so long as you know where to look. Thanks for the offer of your help, Youssif!
Hi. Great explanation. Do you have an update for the FB change over to just one pixel happening next year? I also wonder if you have any experience with Shopify? Not the easiest platform to set up with these kind of things.
Best
Olly
Hey Olly, I actually don’t recommend people use the new pixel just yet. From my own and colleague’s experiments, it seems to be buggy and doesn’t accurately report conversions. No doubt they’ll improve it, and I’ll certainly post about it when it’s something I recommend people use.
As for Shopify, I don’t have direct experience myself but I found this while googling: https://ecommerce.shopify.com/c/ecommerce-design/t/how-do-i-add-a-facebook-conversion-tracking-code-into-the-head-of-one-of-my-pages-183239
Hope that helps!
Hey Claire,
thanks for the great explanation. That was really helpful.
One thing I didn’t totally understand was why it’s not a good idea to put the conversion pixel on the page people see after they confirm their email. I’m using Mailchimp and my “Thank you page” is exactly what they see after they confirm their email. So are you suggesting to have an extra page after confirmation that leads them to a “Thank you” page or am I misunderstanding sth?
Best,
Sina
Hi Sina, I recommend using your own thank you page after they opt-in and putting the pixel there, NOT on the page they see after confirming. The reason behind that is because of my own experience where I noticed the tracking numbers being very far from the numbers on my list. Hope that helps!
Hey Claire, thanks your reply. But isn’t my “Thank you” page hosted on my domain the page they are seeing after they confirm? Maybe that depends on the email service provider. In Mailchimp I send them directly to my “Thank you” page after they click confirm in the email.
So I guess I am doing it as you suggest.
Best
Sina
There’s a setting inside Mailchimp to direct people to your own Thank You page after they sign up, instead of the automated Mailchimp page.
Yes, that’s exactly what I’m using. I guess I was just confused as in your blog post you said not to put it on the page they’re seeing after they confirm as my own Thank You page IS the page they see right after they confirm. But never mind, I think I’m doing it right. Thanks for taking the time to reply.
Best,
Sina
hello-
i created a fb pixel, which was working perfectly on my squarespace account. I then accidentally created a “custom conversion,” and the pixel has seemed to stop working. I downloaded the chrome pixel helper and it’s showing the conversion pixel reading, but showing the facebook pixel not loading. I tried to delete or edit the “custom conversion” created in error and FB is not allowing this function. Any suggestions?
Hey there, sorry to hear about this problem! I don’t recommend using the FB pixel for conversion tracking at the moment – here’s more info on that: https://clairepells.com/facebook-pixel-conversion-tracking/
As for your pixel not working anymore, unfortunately I can’t troubleshoot that without a lot more info. I recommend you remove it from your SS site, save, log out, log in, put it back, save again. Hopefully it’ll start working again!
Retargetting pixel is only provided by FB? Are ttey any other traffic sites which provide these?
Are there supposed to be two separate codes? One for retargeting and one for conversion tracking? Because Facebook is only giving me one code.