What’s changing with the Facebook pixel?
The Facebook pixel is a piece of code that you can place on your website to report conversions, build audiences and get rich insights about how people are using your website. With the Facebook pixel, you can:
- Measure cross-device conversions: See how your customers are moving between devices before they convert.
- Optimize delivery to people likely to take action: Ensure your ads are being seen by people most likely to take the action you want them to take, like purchase or fill out a form.
- Automatically build audiences for website visitors to retarget: Create Custom Audiences for people who take specific actions on your website, like visited a product page, added to cart or purchased a product.
- Create Lookalike Audiences. Find more people who similar to your best customers.
- Run dynamic product ads. Create relevant and timely ads on Facebook based on the products people have visited on your website.
- Access Audience Insights. Get rich insights about the people who visit your website.
Pixels are common across most advertising platforms. They’re used to drop a cookie that will track visitors on your website so you can advertise to them later. This is called retargeting. Once you advertise to past website visitors, pixels can also be used to track their behaviour when they’re back on your website. This helps you measure the effectiveness of your ads.
Facebook used to have a custom audience pixel for retargeting website visitors, and conversion pixels for tracking website conversions such as sales. While each advertising account had only one custom audience pixel, you could create many conversion pixels—one for each web page you wanted to track conversions on.
To improve ads delivery, how Facebook measures the results of your ads, and in an effort to enhance the relevancy and usefulness of ads, Facebook has enhanced the Facebook pixel. The Facebook pixel will start sending more contextual information from your website to better understand and categorise the actions that people take on your site to optimise for ads delivery.
The additional information sent through pixel will include actions on your page, like “add to cart” or “purchase” clicks, and will also include information from your page’s structure to better understand context associated with these actions.
