What is a Pixel in Digital Marketing and why marketers use it? Well, there is not only one Pixel to consider, there are plenty of them.
A Pixel is a piece of code that is embedded to one’s website and is used for remarketing purposes.
What is remarketing?
In simpler words, remarketing is when we wish to show ads or promote products or services to the people or users who they have already visited our website and showed interest to our products and / or services.
Before we start getting deeper into Pixels, a simple example of such Pixel is one with Facebook.
What is a Pixel in Digital Marketing?
If you wish to retarget the users who have visited your website with Facebook Ads, you add the Facebook Pixel (tag) onto every page of your website. Then upon performing Facebook Ads you select or choose to show these ads only to the users who visited your website.
Similarly to the Facebook Pixel, one can implement other Pixels too such as that of Google Ads, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, Pinterest, Snapchat and many more.
Therefore, as already mentioned, Pixels are used for remarketing purposes and for a more narrowed down approach of advertisement to specific and selected audiences.
Setting up the Facebook Pixel
Let’s now get into the real setup of a Pixel, taking the example of Facebook.
In order to be able to create a Pixel and do it right, you must have a Facebook Business account so that you can use different Pixels for different websites if you have more than one website.
Alternatively, if you have only one website, you can still use you personal Facebook profile to create a Pixel, but this is not advisable as your needs and requirements may grow over time.
There are cases where marketers may use the same Pixel across a range of websites, while others having separate Pixels for every single website. Using separate Pixels is the best approach in our opinion as you can differentiate and distinguish your Pixels according to the type of audience you are targeting for each website.
For example, let’s assume that you have two websites, where one deals with sports and the other one with women clothing collections.
Will you use the same Pixel for both websites? You may do so, but would it be practically correct?
In our opinion the answer is a big NO, as you will need one Pixel to retarget only the sports audiences, and another one for retargeting women related to the women clothing collections website.
The four key topics to consider
Therefore, having said the above, let’s now see how we can set up a professional Facebook Pixel:
A. Facebook Business Account
The first step considers having a Facebook Business Account.
B. Professional Facebook Page
You must have your Facebook Page that will be fully setup and professionally shaped redirecting your audience to your website.
C. Fresh dedicated Ad Account per website (if possible)
You must create a fresh Ad Account where you will investing funds (spending) for your remarketing Ads and generally for any ads you will be undertaking for a specific website.
In this case you may use separate payment methods too or the same payment method, e.g. same Credit Card, etc.
Some marketers use different payment methods to separate each business’ spending or expenditure obligations.
D. Pixel creation or setup
This is the most important part of the process; creating your Pixel. In order to do so, you have to go to your Business Settings at https://business.facebook.com/settings/pixels/ (*kindly note that you must first create a Facebook Business account as mentioned at the beginning of this article*).
Thereafter, you scroll down, and on the right hand side menu you choose “Data Sources”, you click the “Pixels” link and the “Add” button.
A pop-up window will come up asking you to give your Pixel a name, as well as choose whether you wish to check your site for easier setup options. In this case, you simply add a name and click the “Continue” button.
Two options will appear as per the image below. You proceed with choosing the second option “Set up the Pixel Now”.
Furthermore, three more options will come up where you have to choose how to connect the Pixel. Here it is totally up to you. We are recommending to click the second option “Manually add pixel code to website” and proceed.
The Pixel’s code will now appear. This is the code that you have to add or embed to your website. At this stage you simply need to copy the code and paste it to your website. Before doing so though, there is an easy way to perform this task with a great Plugin the HFCM.
How do you feel at this stage? We are coming closer to answering the question “what is a Pixel in Digital Marketing”.
The HFCM Plugin, the Header Footer Code Manager, is a great tool for helping you adding scripts to your website easily and with no hassle. You simply have to install this Plugin to your WordPress Site. In the condition that your website is not WordPress, you will then need the support of your developer to paste the Facebook Pixel’s code onto your website.
After installing the HFCM Plugin, the next step is to click the top button “Add New Snippet” to add the Pixel code.
In order to add the Pixel code, you have to follow the process as per the image below. Kindly note that you have to give your snippet a name, a type which is HTML, choose Site Wide which means that the code will be placed on the whole website, a location that should be Header for the Pixel to work, and a status that has to be set on Active. Finally you may paste the Pixel’s code on the Snippet / Code area and click the “Save” button.
And your lovely Facebook Pixel has been successfully installed to your website via this superb Plugin.
There on, you can test that your Pixel is active by sending test traffic to your website as per the image below. You may then proceed further by clicking “Continue”.
After testing your Pixel, you can see that it is now set on “Active”. Great! You can now, even at this stage, interpret the importance of “what is a Pixel in Digital Marketing”.
As a second part of the setup which is advisable, unless you simply wish to remarket only as per the Facebook Pixel for “Page Views” optimization, you can add “Events” to also optimize for specific pages of your website too.
In order to do so, you have two options for setting up Events, either via the recommended version of Facebook the “Use Facebook’s Event Setup Tool (Recommended)” or the link slightly on the right hand side called “Manually add event code”.
In this example as per the image below, we will go through the manual approach.
Having chosen option two, we then have to allocate or rather indicate to Facebook our industry or business type so that it can present to us the correct Events to choose from.
In our case, we chose “Education”, and as you can see below various Events appeared.
Considering our entity, we have selected the Event called “Lead” because on our website, marketersground, we have a “Contact Us” page with the objective of capturing leads where prospects fill in a contact form for more information or requests that they might have.
Upon selecting the Event “Lead”, a further pop-up appears. You may select the “Track Event on Page Load”, add a value and currency that represents the importance of this event to you (not recommended at this stage), and finally grab this event’s code and paste it to the specific page (only this page) that confirms that the prospect or lead has successfully submitted his or her details. In this case it is the “Thank you” page that confirms successful contact form submissions.
Once again you can add this code too via the HFCM Plugin.
As you can see, for setting up the “Lead” Event code, the process is exactly the same as with the Facebook Pixel, but with three key differences; the Snippet Name, the Site Display (Specific Pages), and the Page List (Thank you for contacting us – this is the extra page created for confirming successful contact form submissions).
Once again, you can test the Event code and you are done.
You can now see that both the Facebook Pixel (PageView) and “Lead” Event (Lead) are successfully operating.
You can further see that your Facebook Pixel is active via the green dot.
The final step is to allocate the right people who will have access to the Pixel by clicking the “Add People” button as per the image below.
The allocation is completed by selecting the person or people you trust the most for running and looking over the Pixel with accesses such as “View Pixels” and “Manage Pixel” as shown below.
Having said the above in full detail, you are now in the position to answer the question of “what is a Pixel in Digital Marketing”.
If you have any further questions or need support with Pixels, you can always contact us or view our services online store.
