Tod Maffin shows how to set up Facebook Pixel to track ad ROI. He walks through installing the pixel code, creating a custom conversion that fires on purchase pages, and reading the results in ad reports so you can see exactly what each ad dollar earned back.
Hi, I'm Tod Maffin from EngageQ Digital. In this video, I'll walk you through Facebook's all-important pixel, the most important code you'll never see, and how you can use it to get a much stronger handle on whether your Facebook ads are making you money or costing you money. But first, quick, what was your cost of customer acquisition for that Facebook ad you ran? No idea? Well, you're not alone. Few people realize that Facebook and other social media platforms have powerful sales tracking tools built in. Tools you can use to make a quick assessment of whether your ad campaign is bringing you more money than you're spending on ads. Let's imagine you sell light bulbs. You sell each light bulb on your website for $50. To get people to your site, you've been paying for Facebook ads. And Facebook is reporting that those ads are costing you $2 per click. Should you care about this $2 per click price? No, you should not, because you don't care about clicks. You care about purchases. To put it another way, if every single person who clicks to your site then goes on to buy one of your $50 light bulbs, this is a great campaign. But what if only 1 out of 25 people who visit your site actually buys a bulb? That means you're paying $50 for each purchase. That's 25 clicks required to make a sale, since only 1 out of 25 people who visit the site actually buys a bulb, and each of those clicks is costing you $2. 25 times $2 is $50. Well, considering $50 is what that light bulb costs, you're basically running ads and not seeing any tangible ROI, other than some soft goals like brand awareness and perhaps an opt-in to a customer list. Facebook will tell you what each ad is costing you, and here's the good news: with a little bit of work on your part, Facebook will also tell you how much each click is earning you. Some simple math here will tell you your cost of customer acquisition, and it's all because of the relatively new Facebook Pixel, a bit of website code that your visitors never see. So let's understand how this works. Okay, let's look at this fictional page on my website. Here's the $50 bulb. You may have a very similar looking site. Obviously you don't sell expensive bulbs like this. And it's a product description, it's a photo of the product, you have a button here that says Buy Now. When people click it, they usually end up in a shopping cart where they come down here and they say Proceed to Checkout. It collects their information, and then there's usually a Pay with Visa or PayPal, some way to complete the transaction. Transaction has gone through, they get to what we call a success page. You've probably seen these if you order anything online before. It says "Order Received" or "Thank you for your purchase." This information up here though is what we'll need in just a moment. The actual address of the purchase success page. In this case, it's my website and then /checkout/orderreceived, and we'll get to this in just a moment. In order to track sales and conversion values, you're going to need to install the Facebook pixel. That's actually really easy to do, and you only have to do it once and then just leave it there for the rest of your website's life. To get to it, go to facebook.com/ads/manager/pixel. Now, it may look a little bit different by the time you see this video, but the way it looks currently— and it's December of 2015 as I record this— go to Actions and and View Pixel Code. This is the pixel code right here. Now don't be overwhelmed by it, it looks awfully intimidating. All you need to do is copy this and put it on every web page that you have. Now you don't have to do this manually page by page. If you have a content management system like WordPress or Drupal, you can put it in the footer file that says, I want this information to load on every single page. If you do use WordPress, I highly recommend that you use this tracking code manager by IntelliwP. It is free to use, and what it does is it puts all of your tracking codes in one place. This is what it looks like on the backend. So I have 4 tracking codes on my website at Tod Maffin dot com. I have the Facebook pixel, Google Analytics, one called 10.io, and Zopim, which is our live chat system. This is important. Because if you just put it into the main footer file or you add it manually, anytime you update WordPress or the theme that you're using on WordPress, it may very well wipe this content out and you'll lose the tracking code. By putting it into Tracking Code Manager, it stays there through any changes you make to WordPress or the theme. Okay, let's go back here. We've got the code, so how do you implement it? If you're using Tracking Code Manager, you just say add new tracking code, give it a name, paste it in, and then WordPress wants to know, well, where do you want this to be? In most cases, you want to put it before the body tag, but do check each individual tracking code that you get from other providers. Let's take a look at what Facebook wants you to do. Again, let's go here to view pixel code and see how it says it wants to be between the head and the /head. That means it's going to be in the header and not the footer. So we're going to confirm we want it to be inside the code before the final head there. And this is just standard code tracking, and we want it on the whole website. And that's it. Hit save. Now, how do you know whether or not you have the tracking code in place? I actually use a great little tool for Chrome. It's an extension and it's right up here. It's called the Facebook Pixel Helper and here's where you can get it. If you'll notice, it's showing me right there— we stop moving the mouse around— there you can see it's saying that I have one pixel on this page. Now human beings can't see it, of course, and we don't want them to, but it is registering. And if I click it, I can find out a bit more about it. I can make sure that it's the right one. I'm not having multiple codes there load, and so on. Now that the Facebook pixel is installed on your website, we need to create a conversion. We need to tell Facebook specifically that the loading of a certain page is what indicates that there's been a sale on our website. To do that, again, back on the Pixel Manager screen, click Create Conversion, and we're going to say track a custom conversion. Now remember the address before that I mentioned? That's where we're going to use that here. We're going to say the eURL is equal to, and I'm going to paste that address in there. So now I've said to Facebook, alright, listen, anytime you see this page load that comes from a Facebook ad, checkout order received 16616, that's the product code of that $50 light bulb, then consider that a sale. You can choose a category if you want. In this case, it's a purchase. This doesn't really matter in terms of anything except for optics in your report, and I'm gonna click next. So now we have to give it a name. You can call this whatever you want. If you want to add an optional description, you can. Now we're gonna set a conversion value. In other words, we're going to tell Facebook exactly how much we made when people got to that page, in other words, when people bought it. And the value is 50. Now please remember, you may have your currency set different than your country currency. A lot of people, when they set up Facebook ads, if they were in Canada, they set it in US dollars. So make sure you're putting the currency of your ad account in here. But I'm going to say 50, and that's it. We've now created the custom conversion. So now when I go to my ad reports I can track right to the dollar how much money I've made. If you need any more help with this kind of stuff, of course we'd be happy to help. We're EngageQ. We do this for a living, and we think we're pretty darn good at it. So just go to EngageQ.com and start by clicking the "Why Pick Us?" link. Thanks for watching.
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