How to Use the Two Greatest Superpowers of Facebook's Analytics Tool

The following excerpt is from Perry Marshall, Keith Krance and Thomas Meloche’s book Ultimate Guide to Facebook Advertising. Buy it now from Amazon | Barnes & Noble | iBooks | IndieBound One of the most misunderstood elements of the Facebook ads platform is the “great and powerful” Facebook Pixel, but once you pull back the curtain, it really becomes much more simple and clear. Facebook describes it as such: “The Facebook Pixel is an analytics tool that allows you to measure the effectiveness of your advertising by understanding the actions people take on your website. You can use the pixel data to:

  • Make sure your ads are being shown to the right people.
  • Build advertising audiences.
  • Unlock additional Facebook advertising tools.”

According to Facebook, with the Facebook Pixel, you can:

  • Reach the right people (Audience building)
  • Drive more sales (Optimization)
  • Measure the results of your ads (Tracking)

In a nutshell, the three main purposes of the Facebook Pixel are:

  1. Audience building
  2. Optimization
  3. Tracking and measurement

If you thought the Pixel was only used for tracking and measuring, don’t worry; you’re not alone. This is a very common misconception, so let’s dig into each super power.

Conversion tracking

This is generally the most understood and most utilized purpose of the Facebook Pixel. You simply place the pixel on any web page you want to measure your results from your advertising. You can measure such actions as number of leads or cost per lead, purchase data, shopping cart and checkout page activity, visitor engagement, visitor events (like clicking a button on your site) and other data that will help you measure the results of your advertising and make data-driven decisions to increase your overall ROI.

Facebook’s amazing algorithms do all the heavy lifting for you if you’ve set up and configured the Pixel properly, which is why this is so important to take the time to do right. Without the Pixel set for proper conversion tracking, you’re flying blind. You won’t know what’s working and what’s not.

Audience building

The most misunderstood power of the Facebook Pixel is one of our favorites and is surprisingly not utilized to its potential — that’s the audience-building capability. Every single page of your website should have the Facebook Pixel installed on it.

When anyone visits your website’s home page, blog posts or article pages, sales pages, add-to-cart pages, checkout pages and anything in between, you should be tracking…