Your Personal Facebook Pixel Helper

Use Machine Learning for your Ads

So, Facebook Ads Suddenly Stop Working? As stated in a guide to Japan social media marketing, what is the pixel and why it’s the answer to solving all your Facebook Advertising problems?

Facebook is considered to be one of the 'underdogs' in the social media war in Japan, with Instagram, Twitter, and even Tiktok having a bigger hype over the most popular SNS app globally. Thanks to this, our digital agency in Tokyo helps keep many businesses tend to overlook Facebook Ads as part of their marketing strategies, but that is a huge mistake, as it is one of the most successful ad platforms we've personally experienced at AdVertize. One of the main contributors to this, was the effectiveness of Facebook Pixel.

Facebook pixel is an analytics tool that is implemented as a Javascript snippet on your own website. It gathers every kind of information you may need that could be used to further improve your facebook ads, such as the types of users that are entering your website.

But wait, you still don't plan to use facebook ads yet, so you think it's unnecessary?

Hold up, because that's not a good idea. Facebook pixel can even track organic users that's coming from other sources as well, be it from search engines or even other social media platforms. This means that you could begin collecting the data even before you ever think of trying Facebook ads.

How to Install the Facebook Pixel

Simple steps are:

1. Go to events manager and setup your pixel

2. Connect your website to the pixel on the events manager

3. Copy and paste the snippet code above your closing header tag of your website

4. Check if the pixel is working using the Facebook Pixel Helper on Google Chrome.

We'd love to explain more, but we think Facebook does it the best, so here's the link to their instructions.

Facebook Pixel Best Practices

1. No Pixel No Analysis

Without the pixel implemented to your website, you simply have no way to tell what happens after people click your facebook ad and go to the connected link. Did this purchase come from a user that saw our facebook ad? Which ad was the one he saw? What ad provides the best ROAS (Return on Advertising Spend)? To answer all these questions, the Facebook Pixel is a necessity.

You can set the code to all pages, whether it be the top/home page, services page, contact page, or the checkout page. The pixel will be able to gather data from all these different sources, to create detailed reports of different statistics.

2. Identify Different Types of Shoppers

There are tons of ways that consumers browse through an online shop, but you can categorize them into two large types: long and short shoppers. The long ones are those who take their time to find the perfect matching product that matches their demand, while the short ones are quick in making their final decision, with the price and reviews being their few check-boxes to decide whether to buy or not. What's fantastic about the Pixel, is that it tracks these different types of shoppers, and you can use that data to learn how to approach each customer.

For example, with long shoppers, you can suggest other items that could also catch their attention with what they were originally interested in. In the case of identifying short shoppers, you can use the information of knowing who these users are, to provide specid creatives and headlines that focus on reviews and prices, as you already know that short shoppers mainly focus on these values.

3. Retargeting to Website Visitors

This applies to both users who have visited the website through the ad, and organically. The Facebook Pixel will gather data of all users that the website engages with, which allows it to basically get 'seasoned'. It will then be able to analyze and locate the best users to retarget to, in the facebook ads platform.

Retargeting would also be crucial to approach the lost sales or those who added to cart, but did not finalize the checkout process. This shows that the consumer was heavily interested in a certain product offering, however it may have been not enough to convince the consumer by a small bit.

How can you close that small gap? Use retargeting ads that promote LTOs (Limited Time Offers) of the products, and convince the user to make their final decision. This is using the learnings of a marketing funnel, where you're moving a user from the TOFU (Top of Funnel) to BOFU (Bottom of Funnel), which we talk about in another blog.

Also, there is data that says showing a specific product numerous times to the same user (NOT the same ad*) tends to have a positive effect in the purchasing behaviour of users. So there's that :).

4. Creating Look-Alike Audiences

Before going deeper, look-alike audiences are groups of targeted individuals that the AI can deduce/collect by looking for similar users to your already existing user data. This user data could be anything from users who purchased your product, those who saw your ad, your facebook page followers, and so on.

This may be the biggest advantage of using the Facebook Pixel. For example, just look at Facebook Marketing in Japan by the Numbers - as it basically begins doing a lot of the targeting for you. Facebook's ad platform is smarter than most marketers, and it's better to plan along with them, rather than go against them and make strict targeting criterias, which unnecessarily tightens the available audience.

What's fascinating about Facebook Pixel, as I mentioned earlier, is that it's as if you are seasoning a steak. The more spices and time you spend, the better the result. In the Pixel's case, the more data it collects, the better the AI can find the right people, at a faster rate. Hence it's extremely important to implement the code at early stages of your website development, so that you could offer as much data to our now best-friend Pixel-san.

5. Optimize Your Sales Funnel

Customer journeys could vary depending on the person, but it usually has a certain pattern for every platform. In the case of e-commerce websites, it would usually be ad viewed → products page → added to cart → checkout. You could use the pixel to figure out which part of the funnel is doing great, and which areas need more improvement.

For example, by looking at the percentage of users who added to cart after viewing the product, or the percentage of those who finalized their checkout after adding to cart would be a great way to understand how to optimize every checkpoint you have for maximized performance.

We hope we were able to convince you how important having this piece of code on your website is for your marketing success. It's a huge waste not to use it, and the longer you wait to put this in, the more data that the Pixel could have gathered, but didn't due to late implementation. It's time for you to succeed using one of the best tools ever, in one of the best ad platforms to ever exist. For more on Facebook, you can read more articles here at Top Digital Marketing Agency Blogs for Japan.