The Facebook Pixel
Love it or hate it as a social media outlet, Facebook undeniably has the best advertising platform in the world right now. It also has a few other great tools you might not know about. However, in order to take advantage of any of them, you first need to set up and connect a Facebook Pixel to your website.
I use Facebook Ads a lot for my business. In fact, you may have found this podcast because of a Facebook ad I created for this show that I’m currently running for $2/day. I’m not actually going to talk about Facebook ads today but I am going to dive deeper into Facebook and Facebook ads in the future. Before we get there, though, I want to make sure you’re prepared for it. In order to do so, we need to make sure Facebook is tracking the visitors to your website, and we do this by adding what’s called a Facebook Pixel.
Aren’t pixels what we use to create digital images? Is a Facebook Pixel actually an image? What is it?
Why is it Called a Facebook “Pixel?”
Let’s start with why it’s called Pixel in the first place. Whenever you request a file from a website, whether that’s a web page, a PDF file, or even an image, your computer sends information to the webserver about itself, such as your IP address, which the server needs in order to deliver the file, but it also sends information such as what browser made the request, the operating system it’s running, the dimensions of the screen you are using, whether you’re on a desktop or mobile device, and other relevant information it might use to customize what content to send to you.
For example, if you are on a desktop with a 4K monitor, the server can choose to send you very high-resolution images, but if you’re on a mobile phone with a smaller screen, the server could send you a smaller version of that image to reduce bandwidth and allow the page to load faster. This information can be very useful to developers.
Back in the early days of the world wide web, there were no real analytics for people who created websites. People could install graphic counters that added +1 every time someone visited your website, but that was about it. All that data was held by the server admin and generally not made available to web developers, if it was even stored at all.
I know all this because I built my first website way back in 1994. JavaScript didn’t make its debut until 1995 and didn’t receive widespread implementation until 1998. So, adding code to HTML headers and footers, that wasn’t displayed to the end-user, didn’t really exist.
Companies eventually realized they could take advantage of the ability for servers to capture that information when displaying an image and record it in a database. You could sign up for a service that gave you a link to display an image on your website that collected data from the visitors to your website. Early versions of these services included companies called Peppermint and Urchin. Urchin was acquired in 2005 by a relatively young company called Google and became the backbone of what we now know as Google Analytics. If you’ve ever seen UTM codes in a URL, those are called Urchin Tracking Modules and were part of the original software created by Urchin.
The data captured for a fetched image is the same no matter what size or format the image is. So, because the GIF image file format can contain transparent pixels and because the smaller an image is the less bandwidth it consumes and the faster pages load, the link you would get would be to a small GIF image. So small, in fact, that it was only one pixel by pixel in dimension. A single pixel.
So, the earliest form of web analytics was literally installing a transparent, single-pixel image onto your website to collect data about the computer collecting requesting that image. This is where Facebook takes its name for the Facebook Pixel, even though Facebook doesn’t actually use a single-pixel image to collect that data. It’s not 1996 anymore.
Why Your Photography Website Needs a Facebook Pixel
Facebook Pixel is a piece of code that collects all the info a primitive analytics pixel would collect. Except now, because Facebook’s Pixel knows exactly who is visiting your website, they can provide you with even greater analytics, such as age, gender, income, pages they like and more. You will never be able to know exactly who visited your website, and honestly, that information isn’t even useful. When this information does become useful is after a large number of people have been to your website and you can start to see trends.
Even if you never plan to use Facebook for advertising, I highly recommend using a Facebook Pixel for Analytics. A lot of people are unaware that Facebook has its own, highly detailed Analytics tool in their business manager. But in all honesty, the best marketing dollars you can spend right now are on Facebook Ads.
You could create targetted ads on Facebook without a Pixel on your website, but then Facebook can’t track who visited your website, how long they stayed, or what information they were most interested in. Facebook makes it very easy to create remarketing ads that are only seen by people who have visited your website, or have visited your website but didn’t visit the contact us page, or who visited the contact page but never clicked the submit button and contacted you. You can create separate ads targeting just these people who visited your website. These are warm leads. They’ve seen your work. They know your name. Now if they start seeing your name everywhere, on Facebook, Instagram, in the Facebook ad network, they’ll get to know your brand.
Additionally, you can create ads for what Facebook calls a lookalike audience. One way is to create a custom audience from your existing client list, upload it, and tell Facebook to target people similar to that, but an easier way to do this is to simply tell Facebook to advertise to people similar to those who have visited your website. And you can do this at the website level or just a single page. So, if you shoot weddings, but also shoot families, you have two very different audiences for your website, but two very specific audiences for certain sections of your website. For example, if you want to advertise Mother’s Day family sessions, you can target an audience that “looks like” only the people who have visited the family photography section of your website.
I could give you a bunch of examples of what you can do with Facebook Ads, but right now, I just want to make sure you have a Facebook Pixel created and installed on your website.
How to Install a Facebook Pixel
First, you need to create a new Pixel on Facebook in the Business Manager. To do this, go to Facebook’s Business Manager, then the Event Manager, select Connect Data Sources > Web > Facebook Pixel. Name your pixel and enter your URL.
In Squarespace this is really easy. Go to Marketing and then Facebook Pixel & Ads, and just paste your Pixel ID in the box and click save. If you use WordPress, you might just need the Facebook Pixel ID and enter it into your software. On other platforms, you might have to enter the complete code into a box.
If you are unsure of how to do this, just Google “How to install Facebook Pixel” and the name of your website host, such as Photo Folio, Wix, Format, or Photoshelter. I’ll also include a link to Facebook’s Pixel help page in the show notes.
Summary
That’s all I want you to do today. Write down Install Facebook Pixel on your todo list. If you already have a Pixel installed on your website, you can just write it down and then cross it off your todo list and still feel that sense of accomplishment.
I’ll dive deeper into ways you can use Facebook Ads in future episodes, but for now, just get that Pixel installed and be thankful that GIFs are now a source of fun and not just a boring workaround for collecting data about website visitors.