What Is The Meta Pixel? [ULTIMATE Beginner’s Guide 2023]

Author:

Odeh Ahwal

Published:

June 12, 2023

Updated:

June 12, 2023

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What if you could triple up your conversions, get a more engaged audience, and explode your online presence? This is the power of Meta Pixel. So, what is exactly Meta Pixel, and how can it help you boost your business?

The Meta Pixel is a few lines of code by Meta (formerly Facebook) that allows you to track people’s behaviors and actions on a particular web page. This piece of code is placed on the header section of the website and the information that it gives is powerful for building Meta ads that are relevant to your ideal customers!

You may be leveraging Meta ads or considering doing so to promote your business. Or even, you’re managing a client’s ad account.

No matter what you’re doing, not using the Meta Pixel while running Facebook ads is a risk you cannot afford to take!

This quick beginners’ guide aims to educate you more about the basics of the Facebook Pixel, what it is, what is it used for, and why should you be using it for getting the maximum out of your advertising budget and efforts!

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What Is The Meta or Facebook Pixel?

The Meta Pixel (formerly Facebook Pixel) is a couple lines of code by Meta that helps you better understand people’s behaviors and actions on your site.

This piece of code is placed on the header section of your website and allows you to exactly track every action that’s taken on the site.

The power of the Meta Pixel is essential for building relevant Meta ads for your exact audience.

Meta Pixel Helper

The Meta Pixel Helper is a Chrome extension offered by Meta and it’s actually a troubleshooting tool to make sure that you’ve successfully validated the Facebook Pixel on your site.

It is totally free tool and it takes 1-minute max to be added to your Chrome browser as an extension.

To download it, you simply head to Google, and search for “~~The Facebook Pixel Helper~~“, “The Meta Pixel Helper” and you’re good to go with the very first result.

After installing it, it should look something like this when landing a website that has a valid Facebook Pixel in its header:

Related: If you want to learn how to use the Meta Pixel Helper to find clients that desperately need Meta advertising, how to pitch your offer, and charge $1,000 a month per client, you need to check out my other article here.

How Does The Meta Pixel Work?

So, how does this thing work?

It’s important to understand first how the Meta Pixel actually works before diving into paid advertising and ending up wasting your advertising budget.

Therefore, below are the initial steps of how this Meta analytics tool actually works.

Install the Pixel: First of all, you’d need to install the Facebook Pixel in the header of your website. In a few, I’ll show you exactly where to get it from and how to place it on the site.

Receive useful Data: You’ll receive cool information and insights about your visitors on your website, such as demographic and geographic information, type of device, etc…

Analyze behaviors: By placing the Facebook Pixel on your site, you’d know who exactly has purchased from your site, completed a specific action, added to the cart, and many many other behaviors and actions.

Create audiences: The Facebook Pixel allows you to create different types of audiences that I’ll discuss later in this post. (Custom audience and lookalike audience)

Choose your bidding: One of the ways to efficiently get the most out of your budget is by choosing the lowest bid to reach people who are more likely to take an action you care about.

Review and scale: Use the information that the Facebook Pixel provides to measure your performance, kill bad campaigns, and scale well-performing ads to the maximum.

What Does The Meta Pixel Exactly Do?

Say, what it can’t do! The impact of having a valid Meta Pixel on a website is outstanding, for sure!

What the Pixel actually does is that it loads a small library of functions, and it places and triggers cookies to track the actions that were taken on the site.

In addition to that, it reports each and every single event that happens on the site, things like who has purchased, and added to the cart but didn’t complete the transaction, who has visited a particular page, the on-page time, and much more!

These data are crucial to digital marketers and business owners who are trying to get the most out of their marketing budget, efforts, and time.

Why Should You Set Up The Meta Pixel?

What’s better than reducing your advertising budget, building more relevant Facebook ads to your audience, and having more sales and conversions?

Ain’t these your goals as a digital marketer or a business owner?

In reality, the Facebook Pixel is the one, and the only thing that makes your marketing campaigns stand out and gives you the power to scale, scale to the sky!

So, unless you don’t want to build healthy impactful campaigns and bring a healthy return on investment, don’t bother about it!

Adespresso has lately talked in their recent article about the importance of the Facebook Pixel, and they said:

Simply put, if you’re sending traffic to your website, the Meta pixel is the different between success and failure.

What Are The Benefits Of Meta Pixel?

1. Using Meta Pixel for Retargeting

The power of Meta ads lies in the possibility of retargeting people who have already shown interest in your business.

By placing that couples lines of code on your site, you’d be able to retarget people who have:

Liked, shared, or engaged with your ads and brand.
Visited your website.
Stayed on your site for over a minute.
Scrolled more than 50% of your site.
Watched 50%, 70%, or 100% of your video.

Meta offers two powerful audiences which are the custom audience and lookalike audience.

The custom audience on Meta is powerful and actually easy to set up.

Assuming you run a video ad, you can create a custom audience based on the video views your ads have received.

The same goes for website visits, scrolling %, and on-page time.

I’ll not go in-depth into custom and lookalike audiences in this article, as the main focus here is the Meta Pixel itself. I’ll cover them in another article soon.

The Lookalike audience on Facebook is as lucrative and interesting too!

It allows you to simply tell Meta, hey Meta, this is my ideal audience, bring me more people that share the same interests, behaviors, and characteristics.

How awesome is that?

To create a lookalike audience on Meta, you would need to create a custom audience first, which would be your source audience for the lookalike one.

After selecting your audience or data source, you would need to select the best-performing location in your previous ad that brought you the best traction.

Lookalike audience ranges from 1% to 10%. The 1% represents the people who are most similar to your lookalike source. The bigger the percentage is, the broader your audience will become.

This is more advanced stuff, if you don’t know what you’re doing you will end up losing your shirt using irrelevant ads. Luckily, with freelance marketplaces like Fiverr, you can hire pro marketers that can help you take your business to the next level!

Other benefits of the Meta Pixel are:

The possibility to segment your audience into three different categories

Have better insights about your performance

Get access to more powerful metrics

Meta Pixel Setup

Setting up Meta Pixel comes into two phases. First, you need to create a Meta Pixel, grab your Meta Pixel ID, and code, then secondly you need to install it on your desired website or webpage.

No matter what platform you’re using (it can be WordPress, Shopify, Clickfunnels, or others), each platform has a section for Meta Pixel and tracking!

For platforms like Shopify, for example, placing the Facebook Pixel is super easy. They already have done the hard work for you, you just grab your Pixel ID and place it in its section there.

If you’re not aware, Shopify is a platform that acts as an eCommerce hosting, and it has everything you need to start selling online, anywhere!

On the other hand, placing the Facebook Pixel on WordPress is easy as well and it doesn’t take much effort and time, but you should have developing and technical skills.

Alternatively, this can be manually done by placing the pixel code in the header section of your site or using a WordPress plugin that will help you achieve exactly that.

How to Create Meta Pixel?

After understanding the process of setting up the Pixel, you should start by creating it in your Meta Business Account.

In order to be able to create a Meta Pixel, you need to have a Meta Ad Manager account, formerly known as Facebook Ad Manager Account, so if you have not set up one yet, now is the time to do so.

Once that is done, you’ll need to head to the Event Manager tab section. Below is an example for your reference.

Once you do so, you’ll be taken to a page where you can create a Meta Pixel to track website activities, measure real-world results, and measure app activity and outcomes.

Since this tutorial is about the Meta Pixel, we would be going with the first option.

So, you go to Data sources – All sources – Meta Pixel. Follow the screenshots below.

At this level, after giving your Meta Pixel a name, you’re done setting up the Meta Pixel, congratulations!

The below screenshot is for you in case you’ve been wondering what the Meta Pixel ID is.

Your next step would be to install the actual pixel code into your site.

How To Install The Meta Pixel?

After hitting the Get Started button, you’ll be taken to a place where you choose how you want to install the Meta Pixel you’ve just created.

If you have a developer that works with you (or you can hire one from here), you could simply hit the third option, provide the developer’s email, send them the instructions and they’ll just know their job.

However, if you want to place the code by yourself, you’d go for the second option which is to manually add the Meta Pixel code to a website.

Again, by doing this, a new screen will pop up, containing your couple-lines of code that you need to place on the header of your website. The image below practically explains this!

Now, different platforms have different procedures for placing that Facebook Pixel code. The most commonly used ones are Shopify, WordPress, and Clickfunnels!

How to install the Facebook Pixel on WordPress

To install the Facebook Pixel on WordPress, you can go grab your JavaScipt code from your Meta Ad Manager Account, and simply place it in the header section of your site, (or let your developer handle this for you).

WordPress tends to be the best platform for bloggers. Learn more about how you can start an income-generating blog from as low as $2.75

Or you can do it in a different way if you’re not confident in your coding skills. After hitting Get Started, a pop-up will show on your screen, remember?

You’d need to go for the first option this time, “Add code using a partner integration, which is WordPress in your case”.

After doing so, by following the steps and instructions, you’d be able to successfuly install the JavaScript on your site with ease.

How to Install The Meta Pixel on Shopify?

It’s good to admit that Shopify is the leading company in the eCommerce world, and the fact is, they’ve done all the hard work for you.

That’s why 18 years old teenagers who don’t even have technical or coding skills, succeed on the platform.

Chances are you may have set up your store on Shopify or considering setting up one soon, you’ll need to be placing the Meta Pixel Code to better measure your traffic and understand the actions taken on your online store.

On the Shopify backend dashboard, you’d need to go to the Online Store section – Preferences. Follow along with the below screenshots.

Hit save, and I’m glad to tell you congrats! You’ve just installed the Meta Pixel code on your Shopify store. How easy was that?

By the way, Shopify does offer a 14-day free trial. Put your feet into it and test its water. 14 days is enough period to set up your store, import some products, and populate it with the needed pages. Here’s what happens after the trial expires.

How to install the Facebook Pixel on Clickfunnels

Clickfunnels is a comprehensive toolkit for marketers that allows you to create outstanding and high-converting funnels and landing pages. Although it’s a bit costlier than other available options, here are 10 reasons why Clickfunnels is expensive but totally worth it!

Now, a quick explanation here, pro marketers usually take people to something that’s called a landing page that contains a lead form.

Driving people into a funnel, a step-by-step up to the final buying decision will help you better sell and have higher conversion rates.

Therefore, if you’re a marketer who is collecting leads by driving people to a particular landing page, for example, you definitely should have a Thank You page.

The way that this works is simple. After people opt-in with their personal information, they will be taken to the thank you page for segmentation purposes.

Chances are that people who have visited your landing page will bounce off. Not all people would instantly convert or buy for the first time.

Therefore, Meta makes it easy for you to segment those people who have visited your page and actually have landed on your Thank You page, and give them a tag of “Lead”.

With that being said, if you’re using Clickfunnels or considering using it soon, by heading to the tracking section, you’d be able to directly grab your couple-lines of code from Meta and simply throw it in its place, exactly like the screenshot below!

All in all, Clickfunnels is not just a page builder, it’s a whole marketing automation tool that can help you increase your bottom line! Grab your 14-day free trial if you have not done so (no credit card required).

Now, after learning to set up and install the Meta Pixel on your website, it’s time to verify whether everything is working fine or not by checking the status of your pixel with the Pixel Helper.

It should look something like this:

What is an Event Code

Overall, the Meta Pixel’s purpose is to measure and track the actions taken on your website.

So, whenever a site visitor takes an action on your site, this is called (an Event).

It’s good to mention here that there are a set of standard events metrics which you can simply copy and paste onto your webpage.

You can also create and set up custom events manually yourself.

Meta Pixel Frequently Asked Questions

What is The Meta Pixel?

The Meta Pixel code is a piece of JavaScript script that you install in the header of your website to measure people’s actions and behaviors on a webpage.

What is Meta Pixel Helper?

The Meta Pixel Helper is a Meta Pixel Chrome Extension offered by Meta for free as a troubleshooting tool to confirm that Meta has successfully validated the Pixel on your site.

What is a Meta Pixel ID?

The Meta Pixel ID is the code that consists of 15 numbers. On platforms like Shopify, placing the ID code is more than enough.

Where is my Meta Pixel?

In case you’re wondering where to find the Meta Pixel Code, after setting up a Meta Ad Manager Account, you can head to the Event Manager tab – Create Pixel.

What is Meta Pixel used for?

The Meta Pixel is used to track every action taken on your website to better understand your visitor’s behaviors and segment them into categories.

It will also help you build Meta ad campaigns that are more relevant to your audience.

This will surely skyrocket your ROI (Return on investment) and reduce your costs to the least because you’re actually targeting your ideal audience.

What can Meta Pixel track?

The Meta Pixel can literally track every single action (event) taken on your site. You could know exactly who has, clicked, engaged, or even visited your page. It’ll also allow you to know the on-page time on the site. The more people stay on the site the less your advertising costs will be.

Also, the power of the Meta Pixel will allow you to know what’s the scrolling percentage of a page, just imagine that…

For sure people who have scrolled 70% of your page are more interested than people who have just read the first 25%. You can leverage this kind of information to generate more money.

How to Setup the Meta Pixel on WordPress?

Installing the Facebook Pixel on WordPress can be completed by either:

Adding it manually in the header section of the site (this requires a bit of technical knowledge)
Using a Facebook Pixel WordPress Plugin
By emailing the instruction to a developer and they’ll know their job

How to Setup the Meta Pixel on Shopify?

Setting up the Meta Pixel on Shopify is a piece of cake! You simply grab your Pixel’s ID from the Meta Ad Manager Account, go to Shopify backend office – Online Store – Preferences, and simply drop your ID in its right place.

Conclusion

In short, if a piece of Javascript code can boost your conversions and ROI, won’t you consider placing it on your website?

knowing and understanding the actions taken on your website is key, and this is the advantage that the Meta Pixel gives you over your competitors.

The sole purpose of this article is to educate you about the best activities for building relevant Meta ads for your audience.

In this article, I’ve explained what Meta Pixel and Pixel Helper are, how to create and install the couple lines of code on your website, and answered some frequently asked questions related to it.

Meta is a great source of traffic for most marketers and businesses, but the fact is that around 62% of small businesses fail to bring any results and end up losing their budgets.

Are you struggling with scaling ad campaigns? Are you serious about leveling up your business with paid Meta advertising? Consider learning Meta advertising on platforms like Udemy, or simply outsource this skill by hiring freelance marketers from all over the world!

Thanks for going this far and reading my article all the way through! If you found this post inspiring and useful, share it with your friends, please! (Virtual high fives and hugs to all my sharers out there!)

Cheers,
Odeh Ahwal

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